Iraqi Trial Adjourns at Impasse

The court trying Saddam Hussein adjourned Thursday for 11 days without resolving an impasse that has left the defendants’ dock strangely empty.

Until the deposed president and other defendants walked out this week, the landmark trial was teetering on the edge of chaos. Hussein’s televised anti-American rants had raised the troubling question of whether the proceedings were giving him a platform to stoke an insurgency led in part by his Sunni Muslim Arab followers.

But since a new chief judge took over Sunday, there has been greater discipline. The court heard three days of uninterrupted testimony by 10 Iraqis about being imprisoned and tortured during Hussein’s rule.

Now the question hanging over the U.S.-supported Iraqi High Tribunal is different: Can it bring justice and be perceived as fair if Hussein and his cohorts continue to be judged in absentia and without counsel of their choice?

In calling a recess until Feb. 13, Judge Raouf Rasheed Abdel Rahman said Thursday that he was allowing time for more witnesses to travel to Baghdad. But Western officials and independent observers said they hoped the break would produce a deal that brought the defendants and their lawyers back to court.

“A trial without Saddam in the courtroom will seem like a show trial without the star attraction,” said Michael P. Scharf, a Case Western Reserve University law professor who helped train the tribunal’s magistrates.

The impasse developed Sunday, when the new judge ousted defendant Barzan Ibrahim Hasan, the former regime’s intelligence chief, and a defense lawyer from the court for yelling. The 12 remaining defense lawyers promptly walked out, followed noisily by Hussein and two other key defendants.

Four lesser-known defendants remained in court that day, and three of them showed up Wednesday when the trial resumed. But on Thursday, Abdel Rahman announced that all eight defendants were being excluded from the session for disorderly conduct.

Court officials have said the defendants may return if they petition the judge and agree to behave. So far, they show no sign of doing that.

Khalil Dulaimi, Hussein’s lawyer, said the defendants and their attorneys “have reached a dead end with this court.” They are boycotting the trial and will continue to do so, he said, unless the chief judge and two of the three prosecutors are removed for alleged bias.

One of his arguments, unanswered so far by the court, is Abdel Rahman’s past. The chief judge was imprisoned and allegedly tortured for membership in a Kurdish nationalist movement in the early 1970s, when Iraq was under a Baath Party regime but before Hussein rose to lead it. He is a native of Halabja, a Kurdish town where thousands of people died in a 1988 poison gas attack for which Hussein is expected to be tried separately.

Since the trial opened in October, the defense team has been maneuvering to force delays or move it outside Iraq. They argue that sectarian violence and heavy U.S. influence make a fair trial here impossible.

Hussein’s absence this week has polarized Iraqis, as has the trial itself. “His presence is essential because he is the reason American troops invaded Iraq,” said Mostafa Abed Ala, a 32-year-old Sunni civil servant in Kirkuk. “Kicking Saddam out of court and humiliating him will bring even more violence by the insurgents loyal to him.”

“The credibility of any trial decreases in the absence of the defendants,” conceded Adnan Ibaidi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the biggest party in the ruling Shiite Muslim coalition. “But in this case we are dealing with Saddam, a known criminal. We do not need any testimony to prove his atrocities.”

To blunt accusations of unfairness toward Hussein, the court allowed him and other defendants to watch Thursday’s session by video hookup elsewhere in the heavily guarded courthouse, a Western diplomat close to the tribunal said.

Scharf and many other war crimes experts have defended the judge’s actions to restore order, saying they have precedent in recent international tribunals and are consistent with Iraqi law.

Even so, Scharf voiced concern that the former dictator’s prolonged absence from the courtroom could cause TV viewers to tune out and “diminish the cathartic effect of the trial for victims, who desire to see Saddam confronted by his accusers.”

The law professor has urged the court to install a video camera in Hussein’s detention center and devise a split-screen format for television feeds from the courthouse so that viewers can observe the defendant’s reactions as he watches the trial.

Another contentious issue is the judge’s appointment of defense lawyers over the objections of the accused.

Richard Dicker, director of the international justice program at Human Rights Watch, faulted the defendants’ legal team for “jumping ship” rather than staying to litigate their complaints.

“On the other hand,” he said, “the court should have explored all options to find lawyers acceptable to the defendants.”

The level of preparation by the six court-appointed attorneys before they were thrown into the case Sunday is unclear. They passed up their chance to cross-examine witnesses that day and have since engaged them only briefly.

Both witnesses who took the stand Thursday said they were imprisoned and tortured in the 1982 roundup of hundreds of people from Dujayl after shots were fired at Hussein’s motorcade in the Shiite village. The defendants are being tried in the killings of more than 140 of those detained.

The day’s most vigorous cross-examination fell flat. It came after the second witness recalled a torture session in which Hasan, the intelligence chief, allegedly entered the room, asked a guard to light a cigarette and snuffed it out behind the prisoner’s ear. Hasan’s courtappointed lawyer insisted for several minutes that the witness had contradicted himself.

“Once he said, ‘He extinguished the cigarette on my head’ and another time he said, ‘He extinguished the cigarette in my ear.’ ”

“He said, ‘behind my ear,’ ” the judge said. “Any other question?”

Times staff writer Caesar Ahmed in Baghdad and special correspondent Ali Windawi in Kirkuk contributed to this report.