Court hears Saddam cousin insult current President

Baghdad, Jan 24: In an audio tape presented today at his trial for genocide against ethnic Kurds in the 1980s, Saddam Hussein's cousin called former Kurdish rebel leader Jalal Talabani, now Iraq's president, ''wicked and a pimp''.

In the tape, Ali Hassan al-Majeed, known as Chemical Ali for his alleged used of chemical weapons during a military campaign in northern Iraqi in 1988, could be heard mocking Talabani.

Majeed said Talabani, head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) that had allied with Saddam's Iranian foes, had asked for a truce and expressed a willingness to turn against Iran if the military stopped deporting Kurds from villages.

''My reply is that there is no truce, no negotiations and no stopping of the deportations,'' he told his anonymous listeners in the tape.

Then, using a common insult in Iraq, he called Talabani ''wicked and a pimp because he wanted a truce ... in order to depict himself as a saviour of the Kurds''.

Majeed told the court he used strong language only for effect, in order to avert further military confrontation.

Partly driven by rivalry with the other main Kurdish faction, Talabani engaged in negotiations with Saddam in the mid-1980s, seeking guarantees of autonomy in exchange for a truce. These talks came to nothing.

Talabani's PUK is now part of the Shi'ite-led government that last month executed Saddam in a hanging that outraged the former Iraqi leader's fellow minority Sunni Arabs.

Majeed, on trial with five other former senior Baath party officials for their roles in the 1988 Anfal (Spoils of War) campaign, has already said he ordered troops to execute all Kurds who ignored troops' orders to leave their villages.

''I will leave no Kurd who speaks the Kurdish language,'' Majeed said in the audio played today.

New Trial Planned

During Anfal, thousands of villages declared ''prohibited areas'' were razed and bombed as part of a scorched-earth campaign.

Thousands of villagers were deported, many executed.

Majeed, considered the main enforcer of the campaign, faces a possible death sentence.

The defendants have said Anfal had legitimate military targets -- Kurdish guerrillas who had sided with Iran during the last stage of the Iraq-Iran war.

Saddam, who was hanged after an earlier trial for crimes against humanity, was also a defendant in the Anfal trial. The judge formally dropped genocide charges against Saddam after his December 30 execution.

A court on Thursday is due to review the life sentence imposed on one of Saddam's co-accused, former Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, in th earlier trial after an appeals court recommended that the sentence be increased, to death.

Chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Moussawi told Reuters the largest case yet involving former members of Saddam's administration was due to come to trial ''soon'' and would focus on the crushing of the Shi'ite uprisings that followed the Gulf War in 1991.

Moussawi said former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, Saddam's two surviving half-brothers, and the Iraqi leader's former private secretary would be among 102 defendants.

''Due to the large number of defendants and the difficulty of putting them all in one dock, the court has decided to divide the case into 14 parts, each of which will be given the name of the province in which it took place,'' he said.

Reuters>