Courtside

So right after lunch Saddam comes in for his testimony. The curtains were drawn back from the windows of our observation gallery, permitting us to look down onto Saddam’s comb-over of wispy black strands stretched across the bald spot steadily creeping away from the center of his skull. It’s a view I had for several hours, until the judge deemed the trial was not appropriate for public viewing and the curtains were pulled back in front of us. The arrival of Saddam Hussein into the courtroom was rather abrupt, I thought. Most of the morning had been spent listening to the circular argumentation of Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, chief of Saddam’s intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat. He is one of the defendants in the current case which revolves around the regime’s response to an assassination attempt in 1982. Saddam’s motorcade was visiting the village of Dujail when hit by some small arms fire coming from a nearby orchard. Saddam’s response was brutal; the orchards were leveled and hundreds of villagers were rounded up. A show trial sentenced 148 to death. All morning, Barzan argued with the judges, with the prosecutors, with himself. Every document that was presented was a forgery. He had no knowledge of any detainees being rounded up. But he knew they were treated with dignity. And when he released them, they said nice things to him. But he didn’t know anything about the events in question. And that document is a forgery. Not an expert on Iraqi court proceedings, I assumed that since the morning session had not seemed to culminate in any definitive way that Barzan would be coming back again after the short half hour lunch break. Nope. It was time for the big guy. There is an observation area for about 25 visitors; through some friends at the Embassy I was able to secure a seat for the day’s proceedings. Numerous security checkpoints scanned me and the rest of the group, which included several members of the new Iraqi Council of Representatives, a few observers from Human Rights Watch, some local Iraqis and a few State Department employees. Saddam started reading from what looked like a handwritten speech scribbled on many, many pages of a yellow legal pad. He spoke of the recent mosque bombings and said that the true, great Iraqi people did not discriminate between Sunni and Shia – they were all brothers. They should not be fighting each other- they should be fighting against the infidel occupiers. That’s about when the judge cut him off and asked if he was going to respond to the charges in question, and discuss the events in Dujail. A brief shouting match ensued, and Saddam explained that he was getting to that. Then he went right back to his prepared speech, exasperating the judge. I thought my translation device was cutting in and out – I had trouble all morning keeping the handset receiver in line-of-sight to the short range transmitter in the corner of the gallery – but then I saw a little panel with a red light and a green light. The red light was lit; apparently the lead judge could determine if what was being said was not appropriate for the public and then shut off the translator. Then the green light would come back on and I would get a snippet, like “You will live in darkness and rivers of blood…” and then the red light would go on again. A panel of five judges faced Saddam in his defendant’s pen; to his left the prosecutor’s bench and to his right his defense panel, including a bored-looking Ramsey Clark. The wearing of headphones by anyone who is not a teenager is unusual; older men wearing robes and headphones more so. It was not the only thing that evoked Nuremburg to me. The judge and Saddam argued a number of times that this was a ‘criminal’ trial and not a ‘political’ one. That he was here to face what he had done to Iraqis, not debate what was being done to him by Americans. Eventually, the judge decided to have the curtains pulled back and we were dismissed from the gallery. We spent about two hours in a waiting room; I compared notes with the Human Rights Watch observers (very upset over the sudden demise of Milosevic) and talked politics with some of the Iraqis (a member of Chalabi’s party, I found out – the super-slicked back hair, very wide pinstripe suit and hot pink tie definitely made a political statement I thought). Eventually they called us back in to the chamber for the formal wrap-up of the proceedings; Saddam was now just sitting stoically in the chair placed in the center of his pen while the lawyers went back and forth with the judge. And then it was over. A loud Arabic yell and everybody stood up; Saddam was being escorted out as the curtains were pulled back in front of our windows again.