BAGHDAD — A defiant Saddam Hussein shouted at prosecutors and refused to enter a plea yesterday at the opening of his second trial in which he faces charges of genocide and war crimes connected to his scorched-earth offensive against Kurds nearly two decades ago.
The trial opened a new legal chapter for the ousted Iraqi leader, who once again faces a possible death penalty for the deaths of tens of thousands of Kurds during the Iraqi Army’s “Operation Anfal” — Arabic for “spoils of war.”
The 1987-88 crackdown was aimed at crushing independence-minded Kurdish militias and clearing all Kurds from the northern region along the border with Iran. Saddam accused the Kurds of helping Iran in its war with Iraq.
Many villages were razed and countless young men disappeared, according to survivors. “It’s time for humanity to know... the magnitude and scale of the crimes committed against the people of Kurdistan,” the lead prosecutor for the Anfal case, Munqith Al-Faroon, said in his opening statement at the trial’s first session yesterday.
“Entire villages were razed to the ground, as if killing the people wasn’t enough... Wives waited for their husbands, families waited for their children to return — but to no avail,” he said, showing the court photos of the bodies of dead mothers and children.
The prosecution also accuses the army of using prohibited mustard gas and nerve agents in the campaign — and a map of northern Iraq in the courtroom had red stickers on locations where the weapons were allegedly used. But the trial does not deal with the most notorious gassing — the March 1988 attack on Halabja that killed an estimated 5,000 Kurds. That incident will be part of a separate investigation by the Iraqi High Tribunal.
The proceedings are taking place in the same courtroom where Saddam spent months jousting with the judges in his turbulent first trial. That case was over the killings of more than 148 Shiites from the town of Dujail in a crackdown launched after a 1982 assassination attempt on Saddam.
Verdicts for Saddam and seven co-defendants are expected in that case on Oct. 16.
Saddam became furious when prosecutors spoke of Kurdish women being raped in prison during the campaign.
“I can never accept the claim that an Iraqi woman was raped while Saddam is president,” he shouted, banging on a podium in front of him and pointing a finger at the prosecutors. “How could I walk with my head up?”
“An Iraqi woman raped while Saddam is the leader?” he bellowed over and over in a rage. He said that during the 1990 Iraqi occupation of Kuwait he heard a soldier raped an Arab woman, so he ordered him tried and then hanged “for three days at the site of the crime.”
