BAGHDAD, 9 March 2004 — Saddam Hussein and up to 200 members of his toppled regime moved closer to trial yesterday as an advance team of four US lawyers was due in Baghdad to help convict the former strongman on war crimes.
The four lawyers sent from the US Justice Department are the first wave of attorneys dispatched by Washington to help Iraqi prosecutors sift through the mountains of evidence against Saddam’s police state and accelerate the process aimed at healing the country.
“They are coming here to sit with us and to work out a plan for the implementation of the tribunal statute,” Iraqi lawyer Salam Chalabi told AFP. “We will do some strategic planning,” he said, adding that the advance team would only be staying a few days, while a larger group of 50 lawyers was expected by the end of the month.
Chalabi said between 100 and 200 members of the authoritarian Baath Party regime that ruled Iraq for 34 years could be hauled before the tribunal.
“There will be many defendants ... maybe 100 or 200 it depends on the resources,” he said.
Chalabi confirmed that first in the dock could be Saddam’s cousin, Ali Hassan Majid, better known as Chemical Ali, who led the 1988 Anfal campaign against the Kurds in which thousands were killed by poison gas.
“Our case is more developed with him than anyone else,” he said in reference to the gassing of the northern town of Halabja that killed at least 5,000 people. Chalabi was referring to preliminary groundwork done in the late 1990s by a US government-funded group of Iraqi exiles and Saddam opponents called INDICT.
The conviction of Majid would make the task of convicting Saddam far smoother and defuse some risk of the former dictator, once considered a symbol of Arab nationalism, using his trial to grandstand for the sake of history.
With the arrival of the full team of US lawyers by the end of March and the appointment of judges to the war crimes tribunals, Chalabi said real strides would be made to get the trials up and running.
Iraq still needs to negotiate for the release of crucial evidence on Saddam from the Iraq Survey Group, the US government team sent to uncover the fate of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction programs, Chalabi said.
“A good part of the documentation is with the ISG,” Chalabi said, adding those negotiations should start within three-to four weeks. The US team will include about 50 prosecutors, investigators, legal and forensic experts, and were to join the so-called Regime Crimes Adviser’s Office being set up within the Coalition Provisional Authority, the US-led occupation government of Iraq, “in the next few weeks,” a US official said Sunday.
The group will comprise specialists from most key branches of the US Justice Department, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and regional prosecutors’ offices.
