ICTJ in the News

December 9, 2005

His Country Lost, Saddam Tries to Rule in Court

Bloomberg

By Ann Woolner

Dec. 9 (Bloomberg) -- For a man used to getting his way, someone accustomed to the fear-driven deference of millions of people, it can't be easy to sit quietly in a courtroom obeying someone else's rules, not even allowed a daily change of clothes.

Still, it usually isn't a good idea for a criminal defendant to tell the judge to go to hell, which is what Saddam Hussein told the chief judge overseeing his trial earlier this week in Baghdad.

The former Iraqi president has gotten away with his insolence, at least for now. No one ruled him in contempt of court or cut off his microphone as he railed at the first witnesses against him, testifying this week at his trial for crimes against humanity.

"Don't interrupt me,'' Hussein shouted at the presiding judge, the New York Times reported.

"It truly is a battle for control of the courtroom,'' says Marieke Wierda, senior associate at the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York.

The trial is an imperfect metaphor for the war outside, imperfect because the trial's outcome is easy to predict.

Still, what's happening in the Baghdad courtroom reflects what's happening beyond it.

Pushing Back

In both, the once-powerful are pushing back against the newly empowered, guerrilla fashion. In the courtroom, the insurgents use insults instead of explosives.

This is only a magnification of the usual shift of power that a criminal trial brings. Former tormenters are neutralized and held hostage to their victims' testimony.

When the defendant is a deposed dictator, the reversal is all the more dramatic because the power of the accused had been so vast, and the helplessness of the victims so absolute.

In Baghdad this week, it was a revolutionary event for ordinary people who had been humiliated, tortured, terrorized and bereaved by Hussein's thugs to appear in the same room with their former ruler and accuse him of crimes.

"It was an historic moment,'' Wierda says. Over time, "I presume that the impact will be fairly profound.''

"The very idea that these men could be in the dock, answerable to a judge, was unthinkable two years ago,'' says Miranda Sissons, another senior associate at the International Center for Transitional Justice, who is in Baghdad monitoring the proceedings.

Shaking His Fist

Hussein has little else to control these days except his conduct at trial, his only soapbox the defense dock. And so he uses it.

"I am Saddam Hussein,'' he said as he shook his fist in the air, according to the Times.

If anyone dared forget that, his half-brother, who is also his co-defendant and former chief of Iraqi intelligence, reminded them.

"This man has 12 million followers in Iraq alone,'' Barzan Ibrahim lectured the chief judge, indicating Hussein.

And yet, the witnesses against Hussein kept coming.

They spoke of mass arrests, infants included, in the town of Dujail after a failed assassination attempt against Hussein in 1982. People were beaten and raped, burned and tortured with electrical shocks, they said. One witness said he saw a meat grinder with human hair and blood beneath it.

A 'Nobody'

None of this mattered in the old regime, because these people didn't matter.

A man who lost seven of his 10 brothers during the reprisal at Dujail, whose elderly father was forced to witness the torture of one of them, was a mere "nobody,'' Ibrahim said.

And Hussein, apparently impatient with stories of other people's suffering, complained of his own. Why, he is forced to live in a "cage'' and wear the same underwear for three days in a row!

He said he would not be back in court the next day, and he wasn't.

It is easy to get distracted by the theatrics of the defendants. And it's easy to fault the judges for giving them too free a rein.

But what may have more lasting power among Iraqis is the fact that the fear and pain that they suffered under the Hussein regime has been given voice.

A woman testified she was stripped and beaten and shocked with electricity. A man said he saw a young boy hurled from a building.

Importance of Witnesses

"The fact that you have witnesses to particular atrocities is a very, very important development,'' says Steven Ratner, international law professor at the University of Michigan.

"We shouldn't lose sight of that,'' he said, "by focusing on whether or not Saddam Hussein is sitting in the seat or not.''

Nor should we lose sight of the benefit of giving Hussein some extra latitude. Iraqis, who have little experience with fair trial ideals, had low expectations for this one.

"Most people expected the trial would last a couple hours, and Saddam Hussein would be led off and executed,'' Sisson says.

She has seen Iraqis change their minds as they watch the trial unfold. They see it's not perfunctory. They see that both sides get their say.

"Now I understand what the court is trying to do,'' they have told her.

No trial, fair or otherwise, can dissuade insurgents or suicide bombers. And this trial is surely tainted by the involvement of Americans in setting up the tribunal. The presiding judge does, in fact, need to start exercising more control over the more unruly defendants if he wants the proceeding to have dignity.

But if in the end the tribunal and its result is given a degree of credibility by the average Iraqi, then what's a little arm-waving and fist-pounding by a deposed dictator?