A Disheveled Day in Iraq Court

A rumpled Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants, one in pajamas, were forced to appear in court Monday without their attorneys and face witnesses reluctant to testify against them, at a messy trial session marked by frequent shouting matches.

Amid the chaotic din of the three-hour session, the prosecution managed to present several documents suggesting that the upper echelons of Hussein’s government and security apparatus knew about and directed the persecution of villagers in Dujayl, where the then-Iraqi president had been the target of a 1982 assassination attempt.

However, a witness summoned to verify the documents, former Hussein aide Ahmad Hussein Samarayie, told the court that he couldn’t recall the provenance and circumstances surrounding the documents.

From the outset, the proceedings were punctuated by outbursts from Hussein, his half brother Barzan Ibrahim Hasan and the other defendants.

“Long live Iraq!” Hussein shouted as he entered the courtroom, wearing an ankle-length dishdasha robe, jacket and slippers rather than his signature dark tailored suit.

Lead prosecutor Jaafar Mousawi, speaking later on Al Arabiya satellite television, said Hussein had agreed to enter the courtroom only after guards threatened to pick him up and carry him in.

“This is not a court,” Hussein said as Judge Raouf Rasheed Abdel Rahman repeatedly told him and other defendants to be quiet. “This is a joke.”

After the initial outburst, the courtroom calmed down and Hussein, his normally well-coiffed hair tousled, regained his bearings. During an hourlong portion of testimony, Hasan -- wearing a long undershirt he referred to as his pajamas -- sat down on the floor, faced the back of the courtroom and dozed off.

Hussein and seven co-defendants are accused of executing more than 140 people in Dujayl and subjecting hundreds of others to a campaign of imprisonment and torture as punishment for the assassination attempt. The 12th session of the trial was scheduled to resume today.

From their rocky start last autumn, the proceedings have been clouded by shaky procedures, foggy testimony and outbursts by the defendants, who have refused to participate at times. They stormed out of the courtroom this month after Abdel Rahman took over from previous lead judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin, who resigned amid suggestions by top Iraqi officials that he was too lenient with defendants.

Abdel Rahman has barred the defense attorneys from attending the trial unless they adhere to proper court decorum, such as wearing judicial robes with green sashes.

“The lawyers can come back,” a Western official close to the trial said. “But they’d have to apologize to the court for their actions.”

The defendants have refused to acknowledge replacement lawyers appointed by the court to represent them. Human rights advocates and legal experts have noted that forcing defendants to take on the attorneys enters questionable legal territory.

“Imposing a lawyer on a defendant against the defendant’s will raises a serious risk that the trial will be unfair and violate the defendant’s rights,” says a report issued this month by Human Rights Watch, the New York-based advocacy group that helped unearth many of the crimes of which Hussein is accused.

Rather than summon witnesses to give lengthy and often inconsistent testimony from behind a curtain, prosecutor Mousawi spent an hour Monday summarizing accounts of 24 Dujayl residents who were allegedly victimized by the former regime.

Prosecutors appeared to stumble in getting former regime loyalists to repeat testimony they had given outside the courtroom, and they occasionally allowed defendants to guide the trial proceedings away from harmful testimony.

Eyeing several documents that purportedly carried Hussein’s handwriting and signature and decided the fate of two Dujayl prisoners, former aide Samarayie said he could recognize his own signature but couldn’t recall the documents or whether he had shown them to Hussein.

“You can’t remember?” demanded an exasperated Mousawi, the prosecutor.

“This matter was from 20 years ago,” replied Samarayie, who is in U.S. custody.

“Is it believable that such an important case touches your former president and you didn’t inform him about it?” Mousawi asked.

“I can’t remember if I informed him or not,” the witness replied.

The judge, an ethnic Kurd with a sometimes fiery temper, stepped in and grilled Samarayie about Hussein’s signature. The former president interrupted, likening the questioning to “terrorism.”

“When you address the court, you will stand up,” Abdel Rahman told Hussein.

“I would do it for a man of law,” Hussein replied. “As for a man who does not respect the law, I will not do it for you.”

The prosecutor asked Hassan Thaji Obeidi, a former Iraqi intelligence officer also in detention, to confirm events that took place in the Hakmiya intelligence center in Baghdad around the time of the Dujayl incident. Instead, Obeidi testified that he was merely a low-level functionary.

“I have no information whatsoever,” he told Mousawi. “Not even 1% or one part of a million.”

Times staff writer Richard Boudreaux contributed to this report.