AMMAN, 25 July 2004 — Iraqi lawyers have asked to join Saddam Hussein’s legal team and are willing to work under foreign lawyers appointed by the wife of the deposed Iraqi dictator, a Jordanian attorney said yesterday.
“There are 90 lawyers who submitted requests to the Iraqi Bar Association and we expect them to join our defense team soon,” said Ziad Al-Khasawneh, one of 20 non-Iraqi lawyers appointed by Saddam’s wife, Sajidah.
Al-Khasawneh said that another 43 attorneys from Iraq’s western Anbar Province have already asked the Jordan-based team to join them.
“All the Iraqi lawyers said they are willing to work under our umbrella in the defense of the Iraqi leader, Mr. Saddam Hussein,” he told the Associated Press.
He would not disclose names of the Iraqi lawyers, citing security concerns. “We fear for their safety and their lives,” he said. “We receive death threats, so can you imagine what could happen to them?”
Members of the defense team, which also includes lawyers from Lebanon, Tunisia, the United States, Britain, France and Belgium - say they have received anonymous death threats. The lawyers also have claimed Iraqi authorities have warned them not to travel to Iraq. Iraqi officials say an Iraqi must at least lead the legal team in Saddam’s defense when the trial opens, most likely next year.
US authorities have refused to let the legal team or other lawyers see the Iraqi dictator, who was arrested in December — yanked from a hole in the ground by American forces — and is being held in a US-controlled jail until Iraqis are ready to take physical custody of him.
No lawyer was at Saddam’s side when he was arraigned July 1 in Baghdad on broad charges that included killing rival politicians over 30 years; gassing Kurds in Halabja in 1988; invading Kuwait in 1990; and suppressing Kurdish and Shiite uprisings in 1991.
Meanwhile, Syria and Iraq will form a committee to improve security along their long desert border, which Washington says anti-US insurgents use to infiltrate Iraq, the countries’ prime ministers said yesterday.
After a series of meetings in Damascus, Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said the two countries had agreed to look at how to better control the 600-km frontier, which Washington and Baghdad see as a serious source of instability in Iraq.
“We have ... formed a joint committee to look at these issues (border and security) in detail in the future, in the weeks ahead,” Allawi told a news conference. “Syria has seen terrorism in earlier days, even by the old regime in Iraq when Saddam tried to inflict a lot of damage on the Syrian people and kill a lot of Syrian civilians. Now it’s time for us to close ranks.”
US officials have repeatedly accused Syria of failing to do enough to keep anti-US militants from crossing into Iraq, though the US military acknowledges that foreign fighters account for few of the guerrilla suspects it has detained.
“We do not only say that we deny, but moreover we oppose any infiltration that takes place from Syria to Iraq as we do oppose any infiltration from Iraq to Syria,” Syrian Prime Minister Naji Otari said.
“We have affirmed during the meeting the keenness of Syria under the leadership of President Bashar al-Assad to achieve security and stability in Iraq and Syria’s support to the efforts that aim at achieving that.” Allawi’s interim government won a pledge of support on border security from Jordan on the first stage of his regional tour.
Meanwhile, Iraq, whose rivers gave rise to some of the world’s oldest agricultural societies, is struggling to revive its farms after years of neglect that undermined production and raised salt levels in the soil. Interim Agriculture Minister Sawsan Sherifi told Reuters yesterday wheat production had plunged, partly in the wake of the US-led war that left farms short of fertilizers and other essentials.
But she said other longer-term problems had undermined output. Date palms, once a major non-oil export, have been decimated by wars, while Saddam Hussein’s draining of southern marshes had contributed to rising saline water levels.
Programs are planned to boost output, such as encouraging mechanization, particularly in the poor south, and introducing crops that give better yields or which cope better with saline soil, but Sherifi said the ministry had a limited budget. “We have some budget problems because most of our offices were destroyed and looted after the war,” said Sherifi, a technocrat and one of several women in the interim Cabinet.
