BAGHDAD, 8 November 2006 — Saddam Hussein, back in court two days after being sentenced to hang for crimes against humanity, urged Iraqis yesterday to seek reconciliation.

Invoking the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) and Jesus, Saddam told a court trying him for genocide against Kurds: “I call on all Iraqis, Arabs and Kurds, to forgive, reconcile and shake hands.”

Saddam responded to his death sentence in the first trial on Sunday with cries of “Allah-o-Akbar!” and “Down with the invaders!” Yesterday he was unusually subdued during a session in which he quietly listened to witnesses recount how they were detained, shot or gassed by Iraqi soldiers in the late 1980s. Saddam and six former commanders face charges of genocide for their roles in the 1988 Anfal (Spoils of War) military campaign against ethnic Kurds. Prosecutors say up to 180,000 Kurds were killed, many of them by gas attacks.

The ousted president’s fate after the earlier trial is now in the hands of an appellate chamber. No execution is likely before next year. He was found guilty of crimes against humanity for ordering hundreds of Shiites killed or tortured in the town of Dujail after an assassination attempt in 1982.

The ruling sparked condemnation among Sunni Arabs, who say the US-backed court is an instrument of political revenge for Shiites and Kurds, persecuted under Saddam’s government and now in power. The verdict has highlighted deep divisions between Iraq’s communities that threaten to push the country into civil war.

On Sunday, Saddam refused to stand up when the judge began reading his verdict. When a guard was ordered to make him get to his feet, Saddam shouted: “Don’t twist my hand, you fool!”

When he was summoned by the judge yesterday, Saddam, dressed in a black suit and tieless shirt and smiling faintly, filed into the marbled courtroom, once a palatial office of his Baath party, and made his way quietly to his seat.

At one point, the fallen strongman challenged a witness who took his shirt off to show what he said were scars suffered after being shot on Saddam’s orders.

“So these people in the cage or some of them carried out the acts directly?” Saddam politely addressed the judge. “When he says there are two officers, what do they look like? Does this bring us to the truth?”

Jordanian lawyers staged a one-hour strike yesterday to protest the Iraqi court’s sentencing of Saddam Hussein. Some 250 lawyers demonstrated outside the Palace of Justice in the Jordanian capital, shouting slogans against the death sentence.

Iran meanwhile called on Iraq to carry out the death sentence on Saddam, saying the former dictator who waged an eight-year war against Iran in the 1980s was a criminal who deserved to die.

“We hope the fair, correct and legal verdict against this criminal... is enforced,” government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham told a news conference in Tehran.

“He is a criminal dictator. No doubt about it,” Elham said of Saddam. “We hope no pressure will be applied on the government not to carry out this verdict.”