Charges Brought Against Hussein

The Iraqi Special Tribunal in charge of trying Saddam Hussein for alleged war crimes announced Sunday that it had completed its investigation into the first case to be brought against the former Iraqi leader after reviewing piles of documents and interviewing numerous witnesses.

Raid Juhi, the tribunal’s chief judge, said the panel had referred the case to court for trial. If found guilty, Hussein could be sentenced to death.

The case involves the 1982 execution of about 150 residents of the Shiite Muslim town of Dujayl, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, after a group of them fired on Hussein’s motorcade as it drove through, Juhi said.

In addition to the killings, “scores of Iraqi families and hundreds of people including women, children and elderly were unjustifiably detained ... and scores of households were demolished and thousands of acres of cultivated land and orchards were destroyed,” Juhi said in a prepared statement.

Under Iraqi law, referring the case to court starts the procedure for the trial phase. The court has 45 days to announce a trial date, but Juhi said it would be set in the next few days.

It is unlikely that the trial will begin before the middle of fall. The court must first hear motions from Hussein’s lawyers, who have had little access to their client, one of many complaints they are expected to present. Hearings and rulings on those motions could take several months.

In an interview on CNN, Giovanni di Stefano, an Italian who is on a team of international lawyers representing the former president, said they would probably file a series of motions disputing the legality of the trial and protesting its location in Iraq, which they say is so dangerous that none of Hussein’s lawyers can go there to consult with him.

Hussein’s “Iraqi attorneys are in Jordan, so there’s not a single Iraqi attorney that’s housed and based in Baghdad,” Di Stefano said from Rome. “It is extremely dangerous there. We see every day on the news, on all the news, where there are bombs.

“If there is to be a trial, it should be in a place where both the prosecution and the defense can feel safe, and that the matter can proceed in a proper way, without having to fear that either the prosecution or the defense are going to be assassinated, killed, or in danger,” he said.

Sunday’s announcement of the referral of criminal charges was similar to an indictment in the U.S. judicial system, legal experts said.

Some legal experts worried that the indictment could worsen the government’s fragile relationship with Iraq’s Sunni Muslim Arabs, who make up about 20% of the population and whose consent is crucial to adopting a new constitution. For many Sunnis, Hussein remains the model of a strong leader and the rightful ruler of Iraq.

When he seized power in 1979, Hussein gave his fellow Sunnis, and especially those from his tribe, powerful positions in the central and regional governments. The trial is likely to be humiliating for Hussein and many Sunnis, making it harder for Sunni politicians to reach compromises for fear they will lose support within their community.

“With all the killing of the children in New Baghdad [last week] and the case of [Saturday’s] bomb near Hillah, it shows no wisdom in our government to present this case against Saddam Hussein now,” Najat Zeydi, a lawyer in Baghdad, said. “It’s better to bring all the cases against him at once and ... secretly so as not to provoke people.... Let’s avoid him, let the Iraqi people forget him, let’s calm the situation.

“Let our constitution be drafted, let it be finished and completed, then let them ... present the cases,” Zeydi said.

But there has been a clamor to put the Iraqi leader on trial, mainly from Shiites and Kurds, who were oppressed under Hussein’s rule and now want to see him brought to account.

Three other defendants will stand trial with the former dictator, Juhi said: Hussein’s half brother Barzan Ibrahim Hassan Tikriti, a former intelligence chief; former Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan and Awad Hamed Bandar, former chief judge of Hussein’s Revolutionary Court.

Other atrocities for which Hussein is expected to be tried include the 1988 Anfal military campaign to drive Iraqi Kurds from wide areas of the north, in which thousands were killed; and the violent 1991 suppression of a Shiite revolt in the south after U.S.-led forces removed Iraq’s troops from Kuwait.

He is also under investigation for a 1988 chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja that killed an estimated 5,000 people and the execution of 8,000 members of the Barzani tribe, a powerful Kurdish clan to which the current Kurdistan Democratic Party leader, Massoud Barzani, belongs.

Unlike those complex cases, the Dujayl matter is relatively small.

The case is “very specific,” said Tarik Harib, a lawyer, who like many attorneys in Baghdad is closely following the proceedings against Hussein. “The witnesses are known. The victims are known. The injured parties are limited in number and geography.”