It’s judgment day for Saddam

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| Monday, November 06, 2006 |

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, center, said on Saturday the verdict in Saddam Hussein’s first trial would be handed down today and that he hopes the former leader will be given “what he deserves.”

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS British soldiers talk to two men on a motorcycle in Basra, Iraq, on Saturday. Iraqi authorities have ordered a 12-hour curfew in Baghdad and three surrounding provinces coinciding with today’s expected announcement of a verdict in the trial of former leader Saddam Hussein, Iraqi officials said.

Newsday

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s absolute ruler for 24 years who viewed himself as the last guardian of Arab nationalism and successor to a long line of Muslim conquerors, will stand in a prisoner’s dock today and await his fate.

Nearly three years after he was captured by U.S. forces, a panel of five Iraqi judges is expected to convict Saddam and sentence him to death after a nine-month trial that ended in July. Saddam and seven officials of his ousted regime were tried for the summary executions of 148 Shiite Muslims in the village of Dujail after a 1982 assassination attempt on the dictator.

Iraqi officials are bracing for the possibility that a death sentence from the Iraqi High Tribunal will inflame Saddam’s Sunni Arab supporters and widen sectarian killings. Still, few expect Saddam to escape the gallows. “This criminal tyrant will be executed,” Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki predicted last month.

If Saddam is convicted, and the tribunal judges sentence him to death, the case will automatically go to a nine-member appeals panel. If the death sentence is upheld after the appeals are exhausted, then it must be carried out within 30 days, even if Saddam is facing other trials at the time. The death sentence cannot be commuted by any Iraqi official, including the president. Human Rights Watch criticized that provision as “draconian.”

Saddam is currently on trial in another case, in which prosecutors allege that 180,000 Kurds were killed by the Iraqi regime during its Anfal campaign in the 1980s, including the gassing of several thousand civilians in the northern village of Halabjah.

Some Iraqis and human rights advocates have questioned the timing of the verdict in the Dujail case — two days before midterm elections in the United States — and whether it is intended to boost President Bush and his Republican allies.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Iraq, last week denied the verdict was set to coincide with U.S. elections. “That decision was made by the Iraqi judges,” he told CNN. While U.S. officials assist the tribunal with logistics and security, Khalilzad added, “we don’t determine the date for holding the meetings, or the trial, or the date for making the decision, or announcing the decision.”

From the start, the Dujail trial was marred by delays, the assassination of three defense lawyers, the resignation of its first chief judge, and courtroom outbursts by Saddam and his co-defendants. Saddam faces still more serious charges of crimes against humanity and genocide, but Dujail was the first case in which prosecutors had concluded their investigation and brought charges.

Saddam is accused of ordering his security forces to kill 148 villagers in Dujail after gunmen ambushed his convoy as it drove through the town north of Baghdad in July 1982. The assassination attempt was orchestrated by members of the Dawa Party, a militant Shiite group backed by Iran. In addition to the executions, Iraqi secret police rounded up whole families, razed the town’s palm groves, demolished houses and tortured hundreds of villagers, all allegedly on Saddam’s orders.

Since the tribunal was created in December 2003, human rights groups have urged U.S. officials and the Iraqi government to hand Saddam over to an international tribunal. Rights groups say Iraqi judges do not have experience in dealing with complicated war crimes cases. But U.S. officials have refused to accept an international trial, saying Saddam should be tried by Iraqis.

Distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service