Empty chair as "Saddam" trial resumes

Baghdad, Jan 8: All eyes will be on the empty chair in thedock today when the genocide trial of the ousted Iraqi leadershipresumes in Baghdad. Nine days after Saddam Hussein was hanged, the former president'scousin ''Chemical Ali'' Hassan al-Majeed and six other Baath partyofficials are back in court accused of trying to wipe out Iraq's ethnicKurds in the northern mountains in 1988.

Many Kurds regret the chief suspect can no longer face justice forhis role in the Anfal campaign against them, thanks to an earlier trialfor crimes against humanity for killing Shi'ites -- but they hopeothers share his fate on the gallows.

For supporters of the US-sponsored High Tribunal, today will be aday to return the focus to sober judicial process after the undoubtedembarrassment that illicit video of Saddam's execution has brought to acourt judging Iraq's former rulers while its current government isstruggling to avert civil war.

Yet controversy over Saddam's last minutes and the sectarian taunts he faced from Shi'ite officials on the scaffold goes on.

Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government has yet tocomplete an investigation into the jeers and the video -- one courtofficer has accused a senior official of filming the event -- andMaliki has offered a robust defence of the execution.

But his government has found itself on the receiving end of one ofthe first public appeals by the new United Nations secretary general,Ban Ki-moon, whose chief of staff has written to Baghdad urging''restraint'' in the use of the death penalty.

British finance minister Gordon Brown, the likely next primeminister of Washington's main ally in occupying Iraq, called theexecution ''deplorable''. A spokeswoman for outgoing leader Tony Blairhas said he believes the way the hanging was done was ''completelywrong''.

'Logistic Delay'

Impressions Maliki rushed the hanging throughin haste ahead of the New Year, at the start of a Muslim holiday, werereinforced yesterday when lawyers and an official said two of Saddam'saides, now on death row, were meant to hang with him but were spared atthe last minute for ''logistical'' reasons.

Saddam's half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti and former judge Awadal-Bander were moved to a special wing at the US military jail and toldto write their wills at the same time as Saddam in time for anexecution at dawn on December. 30, their lawyers said.

Bizarrely, Iraqi state television read an official pronouncementin the hour after Saddam was hanged saying all three men convicted onNovember. 5 had been executed. Officials only later said that Barzanand Bander were still alive.

They are likely to hang any day now, though no date is set.

Maliki signed their death warrants at the same time as Saddam's.

Late-night negotiations with US diplomats who, Maliki's aidessaid, wanted the hangings put off for two weeks eventually produced anAmerican agreement to deliver Saddam by helicopter to the gallows innorthern Baghdad. Only this Sunday did it transpire that transportproblems may have spared his two aides.

''For logistical reasons they were postponed, because theCoalition could not provide the logistics on the same day as Saddam wasexecuted,'' Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie toldCNN, eight days after the execution.

Reuters

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