BAGHDAD, Iraq – An Iraqi court on Sunday sentenced Saddam Hussein to the gallows for crimes against humanity, closing a quarter-century-old chapter of violent suppression in this land of long memories, deep grudges and sectarian slaughter.
The former Iraqi dictator and six subordinates were convicted and sentenced for the 1982 killings of 148 people in a single Shiite town after an attempt on his life there.
Shiites and Kurds, who had been tormented and killed in the tens of thousands under Hussein’s iron rule, erupted in celebration – but looked ahead fearfully for a potential backlash from the Sunni insurgency that some believe could be a final shove into all-out civil war.
Hussein trembled and shouted “God is great” when the chief judge, Raouf Abdul-Rahman, declared the former leader guilty and sentenced him to hang.
Televised, the trial was watched throughout Iraq and the Middle East as much for theater as for substance. Hussein was ejected from the courtroom repeatedly for his political harangues, and his half-brother and co-defendant, Barzan Ibrahim, once showed up in long underwear and sat with his back to the judges.
The nine-month trial had inflamed the nation, and three defense lawyers and a witness were murdered in the course of its 39 sessions.
“Long live the people and death to their enemies. Long live the glorious nation, and death to its enemies!” Hussein cried out after the verdict, before bailiffs took his arms and walked the once all-powerful leader from the courtroom. There was a hint of a smile on Hussein’s face.
With justice for Hussein’s crimes done, the U.S.-backed Shiite prime minister called for reconciliation and delivered the most eloquent speech of his five months in office.
“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,” Nouri al-Maliki said.
The White House praised the Iraqi judicial system and denied the U.S. had been “scheming” to have the historic verdict announced two days before American midterm elections, widely seen as a referendum on the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq.
President Bush called the verdict “a milestone in the Iraqi people’s efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law.”
“It’s a major achievement for Iraq’s young democracy and its constitutional government,” the president said.
“Today, the victims of this regime have received a measure of the justice which many thought would never come,” he added.
But symbolic of the split between the United States and many of its traditional allies over the Iraq war, many European nations voiced opposition to the death sentences in the case, including France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden. A leading Italian opposition figure called on the continent to press for Hussein’s sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment.
Lost in the drama of Sunday’s death sentence was any mention of the failed search for the alleged weapons of mass destruction that Bush said led the United States to invade and occupy Iraq in March 2003.
Hussein was found hiding with an unfired pistol in a hole in the ground near his home village north of Baghdad in December 2003, eight months after he fled the capital ahead of advancing American troops.
Twenty-two months later, he went on trial for ordering the torture and murder of nearly 150 Shiites from the city of Dujail. Saddam said those who were killed had been found guilty in a legitimate Iraqi court for trying to assassinate him in 1982.
Ibrahim, Hussein’s half brother and intelligence chief during the Dujail killings, was sentenced to join the former leader on the gallows, as was Awad Hamed al-Bandar, head of Iraq’s Revolutionary Court, which issued the death sentences against the Dujail residents.
Iraq’s former Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan was convicted of premeditated murder and sentenced to life in prison.
Three defendants were given up to 15 years in prison for torture and premeditated murder. Abdullah Kazim Ruwayyid and his son, Mizhar Abdullah Ruwayyid, were party officials in Dujail, along with Ali Dayih Ali. They were believed responsible for the Dujail arrests.
A local Baath Party official Mohammed Azawi Ali, was acquitted for lack of evidence.
In the streets of Dujail, a Tigris River city of 84,000, people celebrated and burned pictures of their former tormentor as the verdict was read. In Baghdad, the Shiite bastion of Sadr City exploded in jubilation.
But in Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, not far from Dujail, 1,000 people defied the curfew and carried pictures of the city’s favorite son through the streets. Some declared the court a product of the U.S. “occupation forces” and condemned the verdict. Policemen wept in the streets.
“By our souls, by our blood we sacrifice for you, Saddam,” the Tikrit crowds chanted.
A trial envisioned to heal Iraq’s deep ethnic and sectarian wounds appeared rather to have deepened the fissures.
“This government will be responsible for the consequences, with the deaths of hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands, whose blood will be shed,” Salih al-Mutlaq, a Sunni political leader, told Al-Arabiya satellite television.
The death sentences automatically go to a nine-judge appeals panel, which has unlimited time to review the case. If the verdicts and sentences are upheld, the executions must be carried out within 30 days.
A court official told The Associated Press that the appeals process was likely to take three to four weeks once the formal paperwork was submitted. If the verdicts are upheld, those sentenced to death would be hanged despite Hussein’s second, ongoing trial for allegedly murdering thousands of Iraq’s Kurdish minority.
“The problem really is that this tribunal has not shown itself to be fair and impartial – not only by international standards, but by Iraqi standards,” said Sonya Sceats, an international law expert at the Chatham House foreign affairs think tank in London.
Hussein’s Sunni supporters, the bulk of the insurgency that has killed the vast majority of American troops in Iraq, could still explode in violence once an open-ended curfew is lifted in coming days.
But the former leader’s chief lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi, told The Associated Press his client had called on Iraqis to reject violence and refrain from taking revenge on U.S. invaders.
“His message to the Iraqi people was ‘Pardon and do not take revenge on the invading nations and their people,’” al-Dulaimi said.
U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad issued a statement saying the verdicts “demonstrate the commitment of the Iraqi people to hold them accountable. … closing the book on Hussein and his regime is an opportunity to unite and build a better future.”
U.S. officials who advised the tribunal on standards of international justice said Hussein’s repeated courtroom outbursts may have played a key part in the convictions. They cited his admission in a March 1 hearing that he had ordered the trial of the 148 Shiites, insisting that was legal because they had conspired to kill him.
“Where is the crime? Where is the crime?” Hussein asked the five-judge panel then.
Later in the same session, he argued that his co-defendants must be released and that because he was in charge, he alone must be tried. His outburst came a day after the prosecution presented a presidential decree with a signature they said was Hussein’s approval for death sentences, their most direct evidence against him.
About 50 of those sentenced by the Revolutionary Court died during interrogation before they could be executed. Some of those hanged were children.
The United States has denied direct involvement in the trial, but some legal observers believe it was tainted by association with the American presence. Miranda Sissons, head of the Iraq program at the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York, said: “There will always be some doubt as to how much influence it exerted on the trial.”
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