Baghdad, Iraq – Saddam Hussein reluctantly returned to the courtroom Monday morning after boycotting his trial’s previous session. But after initial protests, the deposed Iraqi dictator watched with a smile as two former lieutenants called to the witness stand refused to help his prosecutors’ case.
Apart from a three-way exchange between Hussein, his half brother Barzan Tikriti and Judge Raouf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman at the outset of the proceedings, the session Monday was among the most placid since the trial of Hussein and seven co-defendants began in October. It was a marked contrast to Hussein’s last appearance, on Jan. 29, at which Tikriti was dragged out fighting with guards and Hussein and his entire legal team stormed out of the courtroom.
Hussein did not attend the court session that followed and said Monday that he had been forced to return to his trial for the killing of more than 140 Iraqis in 1982. He said he wished “shame and degradation” on the judge for ordering him to come.
During the three-hour session, prosecutors produced documents from Hussein’s reign in an attempt to link him to the executions of more than 140 Iraqis in the town of Dujayl after residents there attempted to assassinate him in 1982.
The prosecutors asked two members of Hussein’s former regime – his presidential office head, Ahmed Samarraie, and an intelligence officer, Hassan Obeidi – to discuss their role in the massacre and confirm their knowledge of the documents. But both men, the first regime officials to testify in the case, professed ignorance and said they had been forced to appear in court against their will.
“I don’t remember anything because so many memos were going up and down,” Samarraie said.
“In 1982, I was a low-ranking officer in Iraqi intelligence working in the legal department, and that had nothing to do with the Dujayl case,” Obeidi said.
Hussein smiled and occasionally snickered as the prosecutors made little headway. At the end of their testimony, he left the courtroom evidently happier than when he had entered it. The trial continues today.
As the court reckoned with the crimes of the past, ordinary Iraqis contended with the ongoing violence of the present. A bomb packed with ball bearings exploded outside a busy bank in the capital’s New Baghdad neighborhood Monday morning, killing up to 15 Iraqis and wounding about 30 more, U.S. military authorities said in a statement.
