3 Jurists, 3 Faces of Iraq Converge in Hussein Trial

They are three lawyers, Shiite, Sunni Arab and Kurd, one a poor city kid, another raised on a farm, the third the scion of wealthy landlords.

Last week, they gathered in a courtroom to take part in Act 1 of Iraq’s “trials of the century”: the prosecution of Saddam Hussein and seven deputies.

Rizgar Mohammed Amin, a Kurd, was the unflappable chief judge who coolly brushed aside Hussein’s outbursts. Chief prosecutor Jaafar Mousawi, a Shiite Muslim, made the lengthy presentation against the defendants that many have criticized as shrill and overly politicized. Khamis Ubaidi, a Sunni Muslim who practices criminal law in volatile Al Anbar province, emerged as de facto leader of the large, hastily assembled defense team.

All three were born in 1957, coming of age during the tumultuous decades of Hussein’s rise and rule, finally hitting their professional peaks after a foreign invasion transformed their country.

Taken together, the three uncannily reflect the aspirations and experiences of the three major Iraqi ethnic and sectarian groups from which they hail: Amin, confident and exuding the growing sense of power of his fellow Kurds who now hold a key seat at Iraq’s political table; Mousawi, still seething along with his fellow Shiites at the oppression suffered under Hussein, but now with the ability to do something about it; and Ubaidi, seeking to portray the Hussein era in the best possible light while trying to cope with the loss of power and prestige that has led the wider Sunni community to fuel the ongoing insurgency.

The three jurists have not only served their customary roles in the initial chapter of a courtroom saga centering on atrocities carried out against Shiite villagers in the town of Dujayl, but they are also among the leading players in a national drama involving competing interests.

The Judge

Amin wears the same mysterious smile outside the courtroom as he did while presiding over the first trial session of Hussein and his co-defendants. He grew up as the privileged son of a wealthy landlord in Sulaymaniya, the Kurdish city founded several hundred years ago by his tribal ancestors, the Jaffs.

Amin excelled at his studies and was dispatched to Baghdad University to study law, graduating in 1980. His wife and their children, ages 5 to 15, remain in Sulaymaniya.

Colleagues describe him as having a nearly fanatical dedication to his political independence and to the law. As an ambitious lawyer in Baghdad, he refused to join Hussein’s Baath Party. Once back in his hometown in the early 1990s, he refused to join the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party that runs the eastern half of the semiautonomous Kurdish enclave.

Nonetheless, his legal abilities propelled him to the top of the judicial establishment in both the capital and Sulaymaniya.

In Kurdistan, he is legendary as the judge who sentenced to death both a powerful Kurdish warlord convicted of double homicide in 2000 and a German woman found guilty of murdering her Kurdish husband in 2003. Amin acted despite domestic political pressure in the case of the warlord and pressure from Berlin in the woman’s case. Neither sentence has been carried out.

Michael P. Scharf, a Case Western Reserve University legal scholar who helped train Amin in international human rights law during a weeklong workshop in London last year, called him a rarity in Iraq, having a demeanor ideally suited to overseeing what will be among the most politically charged trials in recent history.

“Most of the Iraqi judges were of this archetype that is boisterous, outgoing and aggressive,” Scharf said in a telephone interview. “He was more laid-back and reserved and had this sense of quiet confidence. He’s got this big smile that’s very disarming and infectious.”

Amin brushes aside most reporters’ questions as politely but firmly as he addressed the defendants before millions of television viewers around the world last week. Everyone in his courtroom will get a fair hearing, he promised, even someone accused of killing tens of thousands of people.

“I’m saying I won’t oppress anybody, and that is absolute,” he said during an interview.

Even defense attorneys praised the courtroom manner of Amin, who has gray, closely cropped hair, a thin salt-and-pepper mustache and a 2-inch scar under his left eye that resulted from a childhood accident.

“We had a sense of what he was from the very beginning, a person with high manners who is very capable of [overseeing] the courtroom and practicing the law,” Ubaidi said.

Last week, Amin spoke to two Los Angeles Times reporters outside the entrance to the Green Zone hotel where he is quartered during the trial. But despite a nearly 30-minute discussion, he revealed very little about himself or his views.

Hoping to keep the interview short, the judge said he preferred to stand while fielding questions. He declined to answer questions about his judicial philosophy, assess the first day of the trial or discuss the role he might someday play in the history and law books he said he liked to read.

“A judge shouldn’t talk about these things,” he said dryly.

The Prosecutor

Mousawi, a friendly and affable jurist, is far more eager to chat.

Asked to describe a memorable case from his days as a trial lawyer, he recalled a man whose mother-in-law accused him of murdering his wife. Mousawi argued to the judge that the evidence was inconclusive, that police had failed to positively identify the badly decomposed body as that of the suspect’s wife. The suspect was acquitted, and six months later the wife was found to be living with another man in Mosul.

“He would have been sentenced to death if I didn’t get him free,” Mousawi said.

Though neither he nor his wife’s family suffered personally under the former government, he harbors the same passionate commitment to seeking punishment for Hussein as his more zealous fellow Shiites. He also describes himself as a “very humble, simple man” who rose from poverty as the oldest of nine children to study law and become a judge under Hussein’s rule.

The son of a low-level Health Ministry employee in Baghdad, he worked at his uncle’s spice shop from age 6. Excelling in his studies, he got accepted at the University of Baghdad. After studying English for three years, he switched to law, which he loved with such a passion that he hit the books 16 hours a day, he said.

It was Mousawi, as prosecutor, who outlined the government’s case against Hussein in the 1982 killings at Dujayl, a presentation that he broadened to include other alleged crimes against humanity. Defense lawyers asked that he be cut off, insisting that he stick to the case being tried.

“I did not talk about any politics in the trial,” he said. “I only talked about crimes, and I said he who has done these crimes like killing, raping and bloodshed is a criminal.”

The special court, similar to the French legal system, is made up of jurists selected by their peers; they are under U.S. supervision. It includes 12 prosecuting judges, the equivalent of prosecutors in the U.S., including Mousawi. He said he was chosen chief prosecuting judge with the votes of 10 of the 12 judges in the group.

Mousawi is married and has two sons and two daughters, all in school. The entire family recently moved into a residence in the Green Zone, the fortified government enclave in Baghdad where the trial is taking place.

“I have never thought that I would be doing this one day, for the reason that I don’t like politics a bit,” he said. “I have lived a very ordinary life.”

As he outlined the Dujayl case, Mousawi stood at a lectern a few feet from Hussein and his co-defendants. He said he was not intimidated by the close presence of the former strongman who ruled the country for 24 years.

“God is greater than Saddam,” Mousawi said. “The victims, the many victims, are greater than Saddam. Justice is bigger than me or Saddam. We look to justice, not into the face of Saddam.”

The Defense Attorney

Ubaidi, who grew up on a farm near the Sunni Arab city of Haditha, said the man he was now defending inspired him to leave his idyllic Euphrates River town and pursue law studies.

“If Hussein can come from a small town and become president, why couldn’t I become a lawyer?” he said during an interview in the library of the Baghdad bar association headquarters.

Ubaidi studied law in Cairo before returning to Iraq and working as a defense attorney. During the 1990s, he defended people charged with crimes including theft, carjacking and murder. “Law is something noble and sacred,” he said.

In Ubaidi’s legal world, honor and propriety matter as much winning or losing a case. He recalled one set of clients accused of murder and carjacking. He lost the case, and the defendants were executed.

But their families were grateful to Ubaidi nonetheless, he said. “They didn’t want the defendants to die thinking their families hadn’t tried to free them,” Ubaidi explained.

More than legal expertise or experience, he and his colleagues -- who meet at a different location once or twice a week to discuss defense strategies because of security concerns -- bring with them a fierce loyalty to the former president, whom they recall as merciful as well as powerful.

“Saddam Hussein would commute the death sentences of prisoners if they would memorize verses from the Koran,” Ubaidi said.

Ubaidi is officially representing Hussein along with fellow Sunni attorney Khalil Dulaimi. After the Oct. 20 kidnapping and killing of their colleague, Saadoun Janabi, who was representing one of Hussein’s co-defendants, Ubaidi has moved out of his home and lives largely on the run, shuttling his wife and three children to different houses around the capital.

Ubaidi and the other defense attorneys have demanded that the trial be moved to another country. Even the U.S. would do, they say. On Wednesday, they said that they would suspend further dealings with the court until their safety was guaranteed and that they sought protection from the United Nations. Last week, they rebuffed Iraqi government offers of protection.

Ubaidi is a calm man, though flashes of impatience pierce through during telephone interviews. He said he took on Hussein’s case because he believed in the justness of the cause.

“We never had a personal relationship with the former leadership,” he said. “If he had been overthrown in a revolution, I would have never taken the case. But he was overthrown in a brutal invasion.”

Ubaidi says he doesn’t think his client can get a fair trial in a court largely set up by Hussein’s international and domestic enemies, but he quotes from a poem by the Tunisian Abu Ghassem Shaabi for inspiration: “He who is afraid of climbing mountains will always live in caves.”

Times staff writer Zainab Hussein in Baghdad and special correspondent Azad Seddiq in Sulaymaniya contributed to this report.