SULAYMANIYA: It was all meant to run on tramlines, a Nuremberg-style trial to show the world that dictators could be made to face justice in the land they once terrorised. Twenty two months after being hauled from a hole in the ground, Saddam Hussein would finally answer for his crimes before a fully functioning Iraqi court.
The case seemed straightforward. The torture and execution of 148 Shia men and boys from Dujail after a failed assassination attempt against the former president in 1982 would never rank as the greatest of Saddam's crimes, but it was relatively easy to prove. A string of witnesses would appear in court, along with documents providing conclusive proof of Saddam's direct involvement.
The Bush administration hoped the hearings would expose the nature of Saddam's crimes that they had used, in part, to justify their invasion. They also expected a guilty verdict, and Saddam's resulting execution, would take the sting out of the Sunni insurgency. America spent more than $140m (£74m) preparing for the trial, fortifying the court and training Iraqi officials.
"We hoped it would set a new standard for justice, not just in Iraq but across the Middle East, showing citizens that their leaders could be held to account," a senior US legal adviser to the Iraqi tribunal said.
Saddam faced charges over the mass executions and torturing of Shia villagers, and with ordering the subsequent destruction of farmland in the area. Also charged were Taha Yassin Ramadan, a former vice president; Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam's half-brother and a former head of the Mukhabarat; Awad Ahmad al-Bander, a former chief judge of Saddam's revolutionary court; and four Ba'ath party officials from Dujail.
Such was the confidence in the case that lawyers predicted it would be over in a month. There was an air of triumphant expectancy as Saddam and the seven co-accused were called one by one by the usher into court for the first session, shortly after midday on October 19 last year in the former Ba'ath party headquarters, now inside the Green Zone.
From the moment the senior judge on the five man panel asked him to stand and identify himself, Saddam brought the proceedings to the verge of anarchy, setting the tone for most of the next nine months.
"Those who fought in God's cause will be victorious..." he declared, clutching a copy of the holy Quran. "I am at the mercy of God, the most powerful."
The judge asked him again to identify himself.
"Who are you? What does this court want?" Saddam said. "I don't answer this so-called court, with all due respect, and I reserve my constitutional right as the president of the country of Iraq. "I don't acknowledge either the entity that authorises you, nor the aggression, because everything based on falsehood is falsehood."
The judge then told Saddam to "relax" and said the court could hear his testimony later. But he still needed his name. "You know me," came the response. "You are an Iraqi and you know that I don't get tired."
Despite refusing to recognise the legitimacy of the court, Saddam would later mutter that he was "not guilty", his plea echoed by his co-defendants.
"From the moment Saddam Hussein refused to tell the judge his name and recognise the legitimacy of the court, their strategy for the trial became clear," said the US legal adviser, who attended many of the sessions.
That strategy, according to Khalil al-Dulaimi, Saddam's chief defence lawyer, was to use the proceedings to stoke the insurgency and to keep the trial going for as long as possible, so that in the end a frustrated US would do a deal with Saddam to release him in return for his help in restoring order to the country.
LIVE BROADCAST: Millions of Iraqis were glued to coverage of the trial, which was beamed live from the courtroom, albeit with a 20-minute time delay so that some of Saddam's outbursts could be censored.
And the effect of seeing the once absolute and infallible ruler of Iraq in the dock, quibbling with a judge, for a while at least held the nation in thrall -- though the Shia and the Kurds were happier than the Sunni Arabs, some of whom saw the trial as a sign
of their humiliation and
marginalisation.
Amid the clamour, the harrowing witness accounts of torture and murder in Dujail at the hands of former Ba'athist officials were all but drowned out.
More than 80 Iraqis testified over 40 court sessions. Ahmed Hassan Mohammed was the first to take the stand. He gave a graphic account of torture at the hands of the Iraqi secret police.
He described how after the assassination attempt in Dujail, north of Baghdad, when Saddam's motorcade was attacked as it was passing through, women and children were tortured.
"People who were arrested were taken to prison and most of them were killed there. The scene was frightening. Even women with babies were arrested," Mr Mohammed said. He alleged that the torture equipment included a mincing machine that was sometimes fed with living human bodies. The prosecution also produced a wealth of documents from the previous regime, which they said proved Saddam's guilt.
As the trial drew to a close Saddam appeared to acknowledge that he had signed the death warrants for the men in Dujail, but said it was his constitutional right as a president, and that he had been defending Iraq from what he called the Iranian-sponsored militants of the Dawa party who had organised the ambush on his motorcade.
"The responsibility was mine and mine alone," he told the court.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service
