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Saddam sentenced to death just before 2006 elections { November 6 2006 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/06/world/middleeast/06saddam.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/06/world/middleeast/06saddam.html
November 6, 2006
Hussein Is Sentenced to Death by Hanging
By JOHN F. BURNS and KIRK SEMPLE
BAGHDAD, Nov. 5 — Three and a half years after American troops captured Baghdad and ended the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi court set up to judge the brutalities of his 24 years in power found him guilty on Sunday of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by hanging.
An automatic appeal of the death sentence will delay it, but some Iraqi judicial officials privately held out the possibility that Mr. Hussein could go to the gallows in a matter of months, perhaps before next spring. That may depend on behind-the-scenes maneuvering by Mr. Hussein’s embattled successors in Iraq’s new government, who have already shown that they are not hesitant to pressure judges in the case.
For Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the death sentence was a welcome relief from bad news on the war front and appeared to be an opportunity to score gains with his own fractured constituency of Shiite religious groups. Mr. Maliki, who has said that he favors the swift execution of Mr. Hussein, appeared on television to proclaim that the former Iraqi ruler got what he deserved.
The case that brought death sentences for Mr. Hussein and two other defendants, including one of his half-brothers, focused on the ruthless repression of a small Shiite town north of Baghdad after what was said to be an assassination attempt against Mr. Hussein in 1982. Judged against the sweep of terror under Mr. Hussein, the case was a narrow one, involving the execution of 148 men and youths from the town of Dujail, and what the court found to have been a “widespread and systematic” persecution of the town’s inhabitants in the years that followed.
The contrasting reaction to the verdicts, in the heavily fortified courthouse in Baghdad and across Iraq, was a testament to the bitter divisions sown by the toppling of Mr. Hussein in April 2003, and to the country’s spiraling descent since then into a near-anarchy of insurgency and sectarian killing. From Mr. Hussein and his unreconciled supporters among Iraq’s Sunni minority, there was an explosion of anger.
Among the newly empowered Shiite majority, there was an eruption of joy, and volleys of celebratory gunfire from pistols and automatic weapons.
As the chief judge read out the death sentence, a defiant but exhausted-looking Mr. Hussein shouted: “Long live the people! Long live the nation! Down with the occupiers! Down with the spies!” Thrusting his right forefinger into the air, then raising a heavily thumbed Koran with his left hand, he repeatedly chanted the traditional Muslim invocation, “God is Great!” As two court bailiffs moved to hold his arms down, he called one “stupid” and demanded, “Don’t twist my arm.” Then he mocked the judge, Raouf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman. “Go to hell, you and the court!” he said.
The verdicts were greeted with a similar divide in opinion outside Iraq. President Bush described the trial of Mr. Hussein before the Iraqi High Tribunal, the court set up to try the top officials of the ousted government, as “a milestone in the Iraqi people’s efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law.”
The reaction was negative from some in other Arab countries and from Western legal-monitoring and rights groups, which had been critical of procedures at the trial, saying they were loaded in favor of “victor’s justice” and that the Bush administration should have insisted that an international court hear the cases.
Before the verdicts, Mr. Maliki had imposed an around-the-clock curfew on Baghdad and other regions with heavy Sunni populations or a volatile mix of Sunnis and Shiites, including Mr. Hussein’s hometown, Tikrit. Iraqi security forces were placed on high alert and American aircraft — unpiloted reconnaissance drones flying low, and fighter jets roaring high above — crossed the capital. Around the courthouse, in the former headquarters of Mr. Hussein’s Baath Party, American troops tightened the already formidable cordon that has protected the trial, with turret gunners in dirt-brown Humvees watching all approaching traffic intently.
But the curfew was widely flouted. In Shiite areas, including Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad, residents flooded the streets, whooping and dancing and honking car horns. Abdul Razzaq Hassan, 43, a casual laborer, shouted his exuberance down a telephone line, straining to make himself heard over the throng. “This is a very great happiness! I will never forget this day!” he said.
Mr. Hassan said two of his brothers had been killed by Mr. Hussein, one in 1982 and the other in 1988. Both were members of the Islamic Dawa Party, one of the Shiite religious groups decimated in Mr. Hussein’s purges. The party was the principal target of the repression in Dujail. Now, through their election sweep in January, the Shiite groups control the government. “Because of this happiness,” Mr. Hassan said, speaking of his lost brothers, “I can let them go.”
But a grim and retributive mood settled over predominantly Sunni areas. Fighting broke out between gunmen and Iraqi soldiers in Adhamiya in northeastern Baghdad, said an Interior Ministry official, but American forces suppressed the violence. Police and military authorities reported no other outbreaks of major violence and no deaths.
But hundreds of demonstrators marched in Tikrit, carrying photographs of the former leader, firing weapons in the air, and vowing to avenge him. In nearby Samarra, protesters chanted, “The ground will be burned.” Witnesses said they were escorted — and in some cases, given rides — by officers from the American-trained police.
For Mr. Hussein, the sentencing, nearly three years after American troops pulled him from a stifling earthen bunker that had been his hiding place near Tikrit, the sentencing was rife with ironies. For all his insistence during the trial that he remained Iraq’s lawful president, he seemed a shrunken figure, nondescript in the ill-fitting charcoal suit and tieless white shirt provided by his captors.
The Baath Party building, a vast, pillared structure in the imperial style he favored for the hundreds of palaces he built across the country, is only a short drive from the Republican Palace, once the epicenter of his power beside the Tigris River, and now the base for top American military commanders and officials.
Combative throughout the trial, Mr. Hussein seemed to be beside himself with frustration and anger as the death sentence was announced. Judge Abdel-Rahman tried briefly to calm him. “There’s no point in this,” he said as the former ruler conducted an unbroken monologue, trying to shout the judge down.
But Mr. Hussein, 69, would not be assuaged. As the judge moved rapidly through the counts of crimes against humanity on which the five-judge panel court had found him guilty — willful killing, unlawful imprisonment and forced deportation of hundreds of Dujail’s townspeople to a desert camp in southern Iraq, torture and “other inhumane acts” — the last four counts each carrying lengthy jail terms — Mr. Hussein, exhaustion showing in the strained timber of his voice and the heavy bags under his eyes, continued to fulminate.
When the judge came to the critical words — “the court has decided to sentence Saddam Hussein al-Majid to death by hanging” — Mr. Hussein offered the bitter riposte that was the coda for many of his fiery denunciations during the 10-month trial. “You don’t decide anything,” he told the judge. “You are servants of the occupiers and their lackeys! You are puppets!”
In less than five minutes, the judge ordered the former ruler forcibly led from court. “Take him out,” he said. Still, the last words belonged to Mr. Hussein. “Long live the Arabs! Long live the Kurds!” he said as he walked, bailiffs clutching his arms, to the door leading to the courtroom cells, and from there back to custody in an American detention center near Baghdad airport where he will remain, American officials said, until the appeal has been completed.
Court officials who spoke with reporters after the sentencing said a nine-judge appellate court would automatically review the death sentences imposed on Mr. Hussein; Barzan Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti, his half brother, who was head of the feared Mukhabarat intelligence agency at the time of the events at Dujail; and Awad al-Bandar, who, as chief judge of Mr. Hussein’s revolutionary court, handed down the 148 death sentences against the townspeople. A fourth defendant, Taha Yassin Ramadan al-Jizrawi, a former vice president under Mr. Hussein, was sentenced to life imprisonment, and court officials said that his case, too, would go to appeal.
The Dujail trial was originally conceived as a way of building up to the much bigger cases under preparation, involving the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis under Mr. Hussein. A second trial, involving the so-called Anfal military campaign against Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s, and what the prosecution witnesses have said were at least 180,000 deaths, is already under way, with Mr. Hussein again the principal defendant.
But as the pressures of the war here have mounted, so have demands from the country’s new leaders, both Shiites and Kurds, for an early execution of Mr. Hussein, to eliminate him as a rallying point for Sunni militants fighting to restore, if not Mr. Hussein personally, at least some form of Sunni minority rule.
A year ago, before the sharp worsening in the killings across Iraq, court officials were saying that they favored deferring Mr. Hussein’s execution, if ordered by the Dujail court, until after he had been held accountable for far more catastrophic crimes.
On Sunday, Iraqi court officials made a point of saying that nothing in Iraqi law would prevent Mr. Hussein being executed before the Anfal trial ended. Some said privately they hoped for his execution within as little as three months. The officials said the appeal would begin within 30 days, after prosecution and defense lawyers had time to prepare their submissions. Iraqi law provides that any death sentences the court upholds must be confirmed by the country’s presidential council and carried out within 30 days.
In his televised speech, Mr. Maliki compared Mr. Hussein to Hitler and Mussolini, and said “this insulting end” — meaning the death sentence — was fitting for “a man who subjected Iraq to a series of wars and murderous campaigns that ripped the social fabric of the country, wasted its resources and served only his sick dreams and illusions.”
Testimony in the Dujail trial described how no more than 10 men fired at Mr. Hussein’s motorcade, with most of the gunmen killed almost immediately. Within hours, Mr. Ibrahim, the intelligence chief, and Mr. Ramadan, then leader of a Baath militia known as the Popular Army, began a sweeping punishment.
Witnesses said hundreds of people were arrested, taken to Baghdad and tortured, with 46 of the 148 later sentenced to death dying from mistreatment before reaching Mr. Bandar’s court. Hundreds of others were sent to a desert detention camp, and tens of thousands of acres of orchards, Dujail’s main livelihood, were bulldozed. Mr. Hussein’s lawyers said that the would-be assassins were Iranian-backed Shiites, and that he was justified in ordering the crackdown because Iraq was at war with Iran.
Three local Baath Party officials from Dujail — Abdullah Kadhim Ruweid, his son Mizher Abdullah Ruweid and Ali Dayeh Ali — were also found guilty of willful killing, forcible deportation, and torture for their role in the repression at Dujail and sentenced to 15-year prison terms. Another Baath Party official, Muhammad Ali Azzawi, was found not guilty and ordered released.
A photographer with a clear view of Mr. Ibrahim, Mr. Hussein’s half-brother, said he appeared on the verge of tears when his death sentence was read. As given to tirades as Mr. Hussein was during the trial, he seemed to have at least temporarily lost his will to fight. “Congratulations, your honor, for reaching this decision,” he told the judge.
Mr. Ramadan seemed stunned, despite being spared the death sentence. He had argued that his role in the Dujail events was limited to overseeing the razing of the orchards. His head dropped as he heard the judge sentence him to life in prison. “May I say something?” he asked Judge Abdel-Rahman. “I am so surprised at this sentence. Tell me, who did I willfully kill?”
Reporting was contributed by Sabrina Tavernise, Ali Adeeb, Abdul Razzaq al-Saeidi, Khalid al-Ansary and Qais Mizher.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
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