BAGHDAD, 23 August 2007 — The chief judge briefly ejected two former Saddam Hussein aides from the courtroom for unruly behavior yesterday on the second day of a trial over the brutal crushing of a 1991 rebellion by Shiites. The order came as a 76-year-old former Shiite lawmaker testified that he was falsely imprisoned for months in the aftermath of the uprising and described fellow inmates being carried back to jail in blankets after hours of torture rendered them unable to walk.
“I was later released because of the presidential pardon, but my life was already destroyed. I was dismissed from the Parliament. My cotton was destroyed by the army shelling and my house was damaged,” Kamil Kanoun Abu Al-Heil recalled.
Saddam’s cousin Ali Hassan Al-Majid, who gained the nickname “Chemical Ali” after poison gas attacks on Kurdish towns in the 1980s, and 14 others went on trial Tuesday for crimes against humanity in the case, which stems from the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, in which a US-led coalition drove Saddam’s army from Kuwait.
Iraqi Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north sought to take advantage of the defeat, launching separate uprisings and briefly seizing control of 14 of the country’s 18 provinces.
US troops created a safe haven for Kurds in three northern provinces, preventing Saddam from attacking. But Iraqi troops crushed the other uprising in the predominantly Shiite south, killing tens of thousands. Heil denied that he was part of the uprising, pointing out that he was a member of Saddam’s rubber-stamp Parliament.
In the middle of yesterday’s session, Chief Judge Mohammed Oreibi Al-Khalifa ordered former Republican Guards commander Maj. Gen. Iyad Fathi Al-Rawi — who led the 1988 offensives at the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war — to leave the courtroom “for not sticking to the rules of the court.” The judge then ordered the defendants who sat in three rows in a wooden pen not to talk to each other or sit cross-legged.
Half an hour later, he dismissed former Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmad Al-Tai for the same reason. Tai asked what he had done before leaving and the judge replied, “you know what you have done.” The defendants were allowed to return to the courtroom after a short recess.
Meanwhile, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani has rejected a French proposal for a Paris conference to promote dialogue between rival factions, Le Monde reported yesterday. Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner discussed the proposal during a three-day visit to Baghdad, hoping that France could do for Iraq what it did for Lebanon last month when it hosted a conference of politicians from all of Lebanon’s political parties.
