BAGHDAD: Iraq’s ousted military dictator Saddam Hussein will return to the dock on Monday to face genocide charges in a case that has revived bitter memories among the country’s Kurdish minority.

The imprisoned strongman has been exercising and eating well in preparation for his appointment with the Iraqi High Tribunal, according to US officials, but he is not alone in awaiting the day with keen anticipation.

“I am waiting patiently to see him in court so that I can quench my thirst to see him humiliated,” said Kurdish villager Abdullah Mohammed, who blames Saddam for the killing of his three daughters and his three brothers.

Saddam’s second trial will see him and six co-defendants face a raft of charges related to the 1987-1988 Anfal campaign by Iraqi forces during Iran-Iraq war, in which an estimated 100,000 Kurds were slaughtered and 3,000 villages razed.

Between 1987 and 1989 there were major attacks on the Kurds — including the gassing of the entire population of Halabja in 1988 in which 5,000 people died. Halabja will not be counted in the current case, however.

The gassing of Halabja by Iraqi forces was in retaliation for the capture of the city by Kurdish peshmergas (warriors) backed by Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and did not form part of the eight official Anfal campaigns.

The term “Anfal” comes from the eighth sura of the holy Quran and means spoils. The campaign involved the systematic bombardment, gassing and then assault of areas in the Kurdish autonomous region in 1988.

By 1986, with Saddam’s regime under severe strain because of its war with Iran, large swathes of the Kurdish region had become free of central government control.

So starting in 1987, Saddam charged his cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, who became notorious as “Chemical Ali” for ordering poison gas attacks, with bringing the area back under state control.

Ali began by declaring “prohibited” zones, much like the Vietnam war-era “free fire” zones, in which all inhabitants were considered insurgents.

Villagers were moved to defined and easily controlled settlements, while the prohibited areas were first bombarded and then invaded in classic counter-insurgency tactics.

According to the New York-based Human Rights Watch, what made these campaigns different from counter insurgency operations was a clear plan to exterminate the Kurds as a people.

“Tellingly, the killings were not in any sense concurrent with the counter-insurgency: the detainees were murdered several days or even weeks after the armed forces had secured their goals,” the organization said in its extensive report on the campaign.

“Finally, there is the question of intent, which goes to the heart of the notion of genocide,” said the report, going on to detail the documents and testimony that make this intent clear.

Central to the case will be al-Majid, and accusations that he made liberal use of poisonous gas, mass executions and prison camps to subdue the north.

Proceedings are expected to last until the end of the year, unless they are interrupted by the results of the first case against Saddam over the killing of 148 villagers from Dujail after an attempt on his life in 1982.

Judges in the Dujail case are due to announce their verdict on October 16. If Saddam is found guilty, he could be given the death penalty.

If so, he would have an automatic right of appeal, but if he loses he could face a noose before the Anfal trial is complete.

The case against Saddam’s co-defendants, former senior security officials in his regime, would continue however, as prosecutors seek to make the terrible events of 1988 at matter of legal record and heal some of Iraq’s wounds.

“The evidence will essentially consist of the testimony of the complainants, testimony of witnesses, and a documentary phase,” a US official close to the case said on condition of anonymity.

“There are a lot of documents in this case that truly connect the defendants of this case to the actions of the Anfal — very appalling evidence consisting of mass graves where people where taken out to the desert and executed.”

The chief trial judge will be an Iraqi Arab, Abdallah al-Ameri, according to officials at the tribunal’s office in Kurdistan.

Saddam and co-defendants will be defended by 12 lawyers, while a 32-strong legal team will represent Anfal victims.

Six former senior officials will be charged alongside Saddam, most significantly his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid.

Prosecutors will seek to prove that in ordering Anfal, Saddam was guilty of a genocidal bid to exterminate the Kurdish civilian population.

The defence is expected to argue that Anfal was a legitimate counter-insurgency operation against Kurdish separatist guerrillas who sympathised with the Iranian side in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.

Iraqi prosecutors and their international advisers, however, feel they have enough evidence to tie Saddam and his inner circle to a policy of setting up “prohibited zones” within which Kurdish civilians were bombed, gassed and shot.—AFP