AMMAN/BAGHDAD, 1 November 2006 — The defense team of ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has sent a letter to the US President George W. Bush warning him that Iraq will turn into “hell” if the former leader was sentenced to death, one of the lawyers disclosed yesterday.
“We have sent a letter to Bush urging him to realize that any verdict passed on the country’s legitimate president will turn Iraq into hell and play havoc with neighboring countries, where peoples will not stay idle as they see Islamic Iraq set ablaze,” Ziyad Najdawi told Arab News.
The Iraqi criminal court, which two months ago concluded the trial of Saddam and six of his co-defendants in the case of Dujail, have set Nov. 5 as a date for issuing its ruling.
But Najdawi said that he had learned that the court had deferred issuing the verdict until further notice, suggesting the message to Bush was the reason behind the deferment.
Saddam and his former aides are accused of killing 148 Iraqi Shiites in the wake of an abortive attempt on Saddam’s life in the village of Dujail in 1982. “The US administration has apparently realized that it will be pouring fuel on fire if it tries to salvage its reputation by pushing the court, appointed by Washington, to issue such verdict,” Najdawi said.
“We have not received any reply to the letter, but we do know through analysis of what is going on that the Americans are well aware of the seriousness of the situation in Iraq and if they exercise the game in a stupid way the consequences will be catastrophic for them,” he added. He said: “The Americans do know that the key player in the Iraqi arena is currently the Iraqi resistance, which inflicts heavy losses on them.”
Najdawi said that the defense lawyers pulled out Monday from the courtroom to protest the “illegal” behavior of the tribunal’s presiding judge Mohmmad Al-Oreibi in rejecting the legal demands of the defense team.
The demands, he said, included allowing Arab and non-Arab defense lawyers to assume their legal rights in defending their clients before the court. “The court has violated the universally observed rule of allowing defendants to choose their own lawyers and exclude those appointed by the tribunal,” Najdawi said.
“After consulting with the president and his colleagues, the defense lawyers decided to suspend their attendance until their demands are met,” he added.
Meanwhile, an Iraqi government delegation involved in meetings with opposition politicians in Amman has declared the postponement of a national reconciliation conference originally scheduled for Nov. 4 in Baghdad pending further negotiations.
The deferment of the meeting until mid-November came as sources close to opposition figures participating in the talks expected a dialogue to open between the US-led occupation forces with Iraqi insurgent representatives at the US Embassy in Amman within two weeks.
In Baghdad, the former Iraqi leader’s trial continued with a survivor of Saddam Hussein’s alleged genocide yesterday saying, Iraqi troops dragged prisoners to a pit cut out of the desert sands and shot them two-by-two under the lights of a waiting bulldozer.
The anonymous witness said that he had been among 35 Kurdish detainees taken into the desert near the western Iraqi city of Ramadi in April 1988, during Saddam’s “Anfal campaign.” The ousted strongman and his co-defendants sat impassively in the dock in the Iraqi High Tribunal in Baghdad as the witness added his testimony to the growing body of evidence of a mass slaughter of civilian prisoners.
— With input from agencies.
