IRAQ: Kurds in northern Iraq say they cannot wait for Saddam to go on trial on Monday (August 21) charged with Kurdish genocide

Saddam Hussein and six former commanders will go on trial in Baghdad on Monday (August 21) on charges of killing tens of thousands of Kurdish villagers in a genocidal campaign that devastated northern Iraq 18 years ago. Also on trial is Saddam's cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali", for allegedly ordering poison gas attacks. The case has reopened old wounds in villages tucked below Kurdistan's mountains and raised hopes among ethnic Kurds that the former president will hang for what Kurds say were over 100,000 deaths in the Anfal, or Spoils of War, campaign of 1988. While the U.S.-backed court prepares its second such trial in Baghdad, merely uttering Saddam's name in villages attacked by chemicals or where scores of men, women and children were rounded up and shot in mass graves, elicits calls for revenge. "Even those that survived may be alive but they are not really living - they have lost everyone," said 52-year-old Atiya Rada in the village of Sewsenan (Pronounced: SOO-sa-nan), where Saddam's forces ordered residents to quit their homes before opening fire with chemical weapons. Sitting in her mud-and-brick house as hens pecked around in the yard, Rada can still recall the odour of mustard gas wafted over her village, south of the city of Sulaimaniya that March 22, killing wo of her sons. When it was over, she put a wet cloth over her baby son's face and ran off for the mountains with her five daughters and another son. She said 15 of her relatives were killed: "Trial or no trial, our children died. We will always live with that." Saddam and six others go on trial as judges consider their verdict in a separate case involving the killing of 148 Shi'ite Muslim men following a 1982 assassination attempt on Saddam. All are charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Anfal campaign, from February to August 1988. Saddam and Majid also face the additional graver charge of genocide. The 69-year-old former leader faces a dozen or so trials, including a separate case over the deaths of some 5,000 Kurds in a gas attack on the town of Halabja in March 1988. If convicted of crimes against humanity in the Dujail case, Saddam can appeal. Given the scheduling of other trials, that could delay any execution for years, raising the possibility that Saddam, who staged a two-week hunger strike last month, might, like Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, die in jail. Kurdish television has run special programmes showing footage from Anfal superimposed with images of Nazi gas chambers and the dropping of the U.S. atom bomb on Hiroshima. As with the Dujail case, the U.S.-sponsored High Tribunal will hear evidence from victims. But prosecutors also expect for the first time to make use of forensic data from mass graves. Saddam is likely to plead not guilty and say the deaths in Kurdistan were a legitimate state response to attack, in this case by Kurdish guerrillas allied with Iran. One defence counsel, Badia Aref, said he wanted to call Iraq's Kurdish president, former guerrilla leader Jalal Talabani, as a witness.

ITN Source | August 21, 2006

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