Saddam on trial for genocide

Saddam Hussein refused to plead as he and six former commanders went on trial in Baghdad yesterday for what prosecutors called a "barbarous" campaign that killed tens of thousands of ethnic Kurds in the late 1980s.

Seeking to prove the campaign amounted to genocide of Iraq's Kurdish minority, prosecutors said villages had been razed in aerial and artillery bombardments, including poison gas attacks, and villagers forced into camps and shot, tortured or raped.

"It is difficult to fathom the barbarity of such acts," Munqith al-Faroon, chief prosecutor in the trial, told the court of the seven-month operation in 1988 that was codenamed Anfal - Spoils of War - after the title of a chapter of the Koran.

"These crimes touch the conscience of all mankind," chief tribunal prosecutor Jaafar al-Moussawi told the court.

A large map of Kurdistan, the now autonomous region in northern Iraq, hung in the trial chamber in Baghdad's heavily fortified government compound. Orange dots showed villages that had been destroyed and red dots those that had been gassed.

Saddam and his co-accused are likely to argue the operation to force Kurds from areas along the border with Iran was justified because Kurdish rebels had committed treason by forming alliances with Tehran, Iraq's arch-enemy.

The start of the new trial comes as judges continue to deliberate in a separate case in which Saddam is accused of crimes against humanity for killing 148 Shi'ite Muslim men after an attempt on his life in 1982. A verdict is due in October.

The 69-year-old former leader faces the death penalty in both cases, but the scheduling of a dozen other trials could delay any execution for years, raising the possibility that like former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, he could die in jail.

Outside the court, Iraqis voiced impatience with the slow legal process, but Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, a Kurd, said Saddam was getting the justice he had denied others.

"Today is a great day for the survivors. Saddam's day of judgment has finally come," said 52-year-old Jamal Said, himself a survivor of Anfal, watching the trial on television in a cafe in the northern Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya.

Iraqi forces are accused of using mustard gas and nerve agents in a seven-month campaign that razed villages and forced thousands into detention camps, devastating the Kurdish north.

Saddam, dressed in a black suit, was in a typically combative mood after leading his fellow accused into the chamber, dismissing the US-sponsored tribunal as a "court of occupation" and refusing to state his name.

"You know my name," he told Shi'ite chief judge Abdullah Ali al-Aloosh. When asked to enter a plea, he replied: "This needs a lot of books." Chief Judge Aloosh entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.

One of Saddam's co-defendants is his cousin, Ali Hassan al- Majid, known as "Chemical Ali" for his alleged fondness for poison gas in attacks on Kurds. He also refused to enter a plea.

The defendants face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Saddam and Majid also face the charge of genocide. To prove that, the prosecution must show Saddam targeted Kurds, a non-Arab people with their own language, as a community.

The trial comes amid deepening sectarian violence between Saddam's fellow minority Sunni Arabs and Shi'ites, as well as continued friction between Arabs and Kurds in the north, that has raised fears Iraq is sliding towards all-out civil war.

Nine people were found around Baghdad yesterday with gunshot wounds to the head, a feature of sectarian tit-for-tat killings.

US President George W. Bush said he was concerned at talk of civil war but hotly rejected calls from domestic opponents for forces to withdraw: "We're not leaving," he told reporters.

Four more Americans were killed in action, the military said yesterday, taking the US death toll in Iraq to 2,610.