Hussein Sentenced to Hang for Crimes Against Iraqis - washingtonpost.com
Thousands Take to Street Despite Curfew; Bush Says Verdict Is Major Achievement for Iraq
BAGHDAD, Nov. 5 — Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was found guilty by a special tribunal Sunday of crimes against humanity for the torture and execution of more than 100 people from a small town north of Baghdad 24 years ago. He was sentenced to death by hanging.
Hussein, 69, was led into the courtroom by seven guards and immediately sat in his chair, refusing to rise for his verdict until Chief Judge Raouf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman ordered guards to force him to his feet.
“Long live the people!” Hussein shouted as the verdict was being announced. “Down with the stooges! Down with the invaders! God is great!”
Just before his appearance in court, one of Hussein’s co-defendants, Awad Hamed al-Bander, the former head of Iraq’s Revolutionary Court, repeatedly bellowed: “God is great!” as he, too, was sentenced to death. “On the tyrants, God is great!” he shouted. “On the colonizers, God is great! On the agents, God is great!”
The verdict and sentence will automatically be sent to a nine-judge appellate panel for appeal. That panel has wide latitude to review the case and call for additional testimony, and it has an unlimited time to rule. But once it does, any sentence must be carried out within 30 days.
Celebratory gunfire rang out over Baghdad as jubilant Iraqis expressed their happiness with the outcome by racing to rooftops, front yards and windows to fire into the air. National television showed smiling Iraqis dancing in the streets of cities around the country, including in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad, which technically was under an all-day curfew.
In Tikrit, Hussein’s home town, thousands of people reportedly took to the street in defiance of the curfew, many crying and screaming and firing guns into the air in anger. “With the soul and blood we sacrifice for you, Saddam!” some protesters screamed.
Protesters in Tikrit attacked the local Iraqi army base with light weapons. No casualties were reported.
Iraqi officials imposed a full curfew on the capital and four provinces, confining people to their homes, fearing today’s verdict could unleash a new outburst of sectarian bloodshed between Shiite Muslims and Sunni Arabs. There were sporadic reports of violence.
As soon as the verdict and death sentence were handed down, the Associated Press reported, Hussein supporters in a predominantly Sunni district of Baghdad battled police with machine guns. And at least seven mortar shells exploded near a Sunni shrine, the wire service reported.
Hussein was convicted of ordering the killings of 148 men and boys from the town of Dujail, about 35 miles north of Baghdad, following a failed assassination attempt against him there in 1982. Hussein’s presidential convoy was passing through the town when it was shot at. In response, he and other top Iraqi officials at the time order the round-up of hundreds of people, and the town’s buildings were razed and its orchards destroyed.
Ten of the people executed were boys ranging in ages from 11 to 17 at the time of the incident. The government held them in jail until they were 18, then hanged them.
The verdict climaxed a 12-month trial, conducted by the Iraqi High Tribunal and backed by the U.S. government, that arose from one of many atrocities Hussein is accused of committing during 24 years of brutal, one-man rule.
It was unclear whether the trial and verdict ultimately would act as a catharsis that can help bring reconciliation and peace to this embattled country, or would be a catalyst for further violence and sectarian clashes between Shiite Muslims, who make up about 60 percent of Iraq’s population, and Sunni Arabs, who account for about 20 percent.
President Bush on Sunday called the verdict “a major achievement for Iraq’s young democracy” and “a milestone in the Iraqi people’s efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law.” He spoke at the airport in Waco, Tex., before flying to Nebraska and Kansas to campaign for Republican candidates two days before the U.S. elections.
“The United States is proud to stand with the Iraqi people. We will continue to support Iraq’s unity government as it works to bring peace to its great county,” Bush said.
Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, said: “The verdict placed on the heads of the former regime does not represent a verdict for any one person. It is a verdict on a whole dark era that was unmatched in Iraq’s history,”
Sajjad Abdul Hussein Ali, a Shiite Turkoman in the northern city of Kirkuk who had three brothers executed by Hussein in the early 1980s, called the verdict “the final show, and a triumph for all the families that were victimized by the Saddam regime.”
“Reconciliation will not succeed without executing him and putting an end to a dark, dirty period of our modern history, so that this will be a lesson to all dictators and tyrants,” he said. “Let them know that killers shall be killed, and tyrants shall be severely punished by God.”
In Tikrit, a Sunni stronghold 90 miles north of Baghdad on the banks of the Tigris River, architectural engineer Younis Mahmoud, 37, accused the government of staging a show trial for Hussein while ignoring Shiite death squads that are “killing 150 to 200 people at least everyday, and some of their leaders are working as the head of political blocs in the government.”
The trial — often punctuated by outbursts and other antics from Hussein and his seven co-defendants — was disparaged by some as a political show and victor’s vendetta and hailed by others as a historic symbol of Iraq’s fledgling democracy. The first chief judge quit, complaining of political interference in the case, and gunmen killed three defense attorneys during the trial. Many legal experts questioned the trial’s fairness, saying Iraq’s justice system was not equipped to handle such a significant case, and that it should have been held in a third country.
Sunday’s session began with the eviction of former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark, one of Hussein’s lawyers, for insulting the tribunal as “a mockery of justice” in a memo he sent to Chief Judge Abdel-Rahman, a no-nonsense jurist with a perpetual scowl who ran a tight courtroom. “This statement presented by the American lawyer Ramsey Clarke — how would I describe it? I don’t know. He presented a statement ridiculing himself, not the country. He’s a laughing stock. Get him out of the court,” the judge said.
“Out! Out!” Abdel-Rahman yelled in English when the exit seemed too slow.
Hussein’s defense attorneys warned that a guilty verdict and sentence of death would sparked renewed attacks against U.S. and other coalition forces in Iraq and lead to a wider civil war. They also accused the Bush administration and Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government of colluding to schedule the verdict so it came two days before crucial mid-term U.S. elections, hoping to give Bush’s Republican Party an electoral boost. Iraqi and U.S. officials have denied the charge.
White House spokesman Tony Snow said it was “absolutely preposterous” to think the verdict was timed to help Republicans in the election, saying anyone who believed Iraq’s judiciary was trying to time its verdict ahead of the elections must be “smoking rope,” Reuters news service reported.
Hussein and his attorneys argued that whatever actions were taken after the attempt on his life in Dujail were legitimate measures by a government to investigate the attempted assassination of a head of state and punish those responsible.
“Where is the crime?” Hussein asked during one of more than 40 court sessions in the case, acknowledging that he ordered the trials of the 148 people who were executed. “Is referring a defendant who opened fire at a head of state, no matter what his name is, a crime?”
Hussein often was combative and theatrical during the trial, which was aired on Iraqi national television. He frequently stole the show, demanding that he be referred to as the president of Iraq, jabbing his finger in the air while lecturing the prosecutors and judges, staging hunger strikes and occasionally walking out of the courtroom in protest or being ejected for impertinence.
Typically dressed in a white shirt and dark suit, sporting a salt and pepper beard that he grew while on the run and before his capture from a hole in the ground on a farm near Tikrit in December 2003, Hussein still cut a charismatic figure.
Of the seven co-defendants also on trial in the case, six were found guilty: Awad Hamed al-Bander, the former head of Hussein’s Revolutionary, and Barzan Ibrahim, Hussein’s younger half-brother and former security chief, were sentenced to death. Former Iraqi vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan was sentenced to life in prison.
Three other defendants, who were relatively low-ranking member of Hussein’s Baath Party, were sentenced to prison terms of 15 years. One defendant, Muhammad al-Azzawi, was acquitted, as requested by prosecutors, for insufficient evidence.
Hussein is currently on trial in a second case, charged with genocide and crimes against humanity for the killings of as many as 100,000 Kurds, many with poison gas, in the co-called Anfal campaign in 1987 and 1988. If the appeals panel rules against him and upholds his death sentence in the Dujail case, Hussein could be executed before the conclusion of the second trial.
