BAGHDAD, Iraq – The Iraqi High Tribunal abruptly delayed a scheduled resumption of Saddam Hussein’s trial Tuesday as its judges bickered over the surprise appointment of a new chief.
After a morning of closed-door exchanges among the five trial judges, the tribunal’s spokesman issued a terse announcement of the five-day delay. He cited the absence of witnesses who were to testify this week but supposedly had not yet returned from the hajj pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, which ended 10 days ago.
One of the trial judges, Hussein Moussawi, said the official explanation was “just an excuse” to give the judges time for “long discussions” needed to resolve issues surrounding a shake-up of their panel, which lost two members during the monthlong recess that was to end Tuesday.
Moussawi would not elaborate, but other court officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the trial panel was sharply divided over whether to accept the appointment Monday of Raouf Rasheed Abdel Rahman as its leader.
Defense lawyers called the turmoil a symptom of political pressure to rush the trial and convict Hussein and his seven co-defendants in the killing of more than 140 Shiite Muslims in the town of Dujail.
“There’s too much violence in the country, too much division, too much pressure on the court,” former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who is part of the defense team, told CNN. “The project ought to be abandoned. It was a creature of the United States in the first place.”
The 3-month-old trial was meant to be a landmark in Iraq’s democratic development, but it has been beset by procedural delays, unruly outbursts by the defendants and the murders of two defense lawyers.
Then, on Jan. 9, Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin quit as chief of the trial panel, complaining about Iraqi government pressure on him to rein in the defendants’ outbursts and speed up the trial.
His fellow judges chose one of their number, Said Hammashi, to take over. But Hammashi was unexpectedly removed from the panel Monday after a government commission said he had once belonged to Hussein’s Baath Party.
Rahman was named to lead the trial panel instead, moving from a different chamber of the court.
Judges who opposed the decision argued that it had been imposed from outside the tribunal and violated a procedure that replacement judges must come from the trial panel’s reserve bench, court officials said.
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