Saddam Hussein goes on trial for the second time today, this time to face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. The case concerns Operation Anfal, the notorious 1988 campaign against the Kurds of northern Iraq led by Saddam’s cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known to Iraqis as “Chemical Ali” who is among the six co-defendants in the dock.
The first trial, on which the verdict is due next month, dealt in harrowing detail with the regime’s terrible mass retribution against a single village, Dujail, after a failed attempt on Saddam’s life. This second trial will chronicle the agonies suffered by an entire region, subjected to a scorched earth campaign of relentless ferocity. On this wider canvas the systematically brutal essence of Saddam’s reign of terror will be even more vividly exposed.
In the course of ten months, countless Kurdish villages were bombed and whole communities wiped out. Some perished of mustard gas and nerve agents, substances whose use has for decades been under an international ban. Survivors were deported to concentration camps, where most were eventually murdered and dumped in mass graves. In the course of ten months, up to 100,000 Kurds were killed or disappeared. The massacre at Halabja, in which an estimated 5,000 were gassed to death, will be the subject of a third trial, as will the ferocious crushing in 1991 of the Shia rebellion in southern Iraq; but it is this trial that will bring home to many Sunni and Shia Iraqis just how appallingly their Kurdish compatriots were treated.
Genocide is, however, notoriously difficult to prove. The crime is defined in international law as the intentional destruction of an ethnic group, in part or in whole. Prosecutors must establish not only what happened to the victims and on whose orders; they must satisfy the court that these atrocities formed part of a premeditated plan against a particular group of people. Merely to prove that non-Kurds were massacred along with Kurds could undermine the prosecution’s case. Prosecutors at The Hague have encountered such problems in dealing with genocide in former Yugoslavia. It was wise to include crimes against humanity in the indictment.
Saddam’s defence will probably deny genocidal intent, claiming that this was the militarily legitimate crushing of secessionist and otherwise rebellious Kurds, some of them suspected of colluding with the enemy, in the final months of the Iran-Iraq war.
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The argument is specious; nothing justified the cold-blooded eradication of entire families. But as the first trial has shown, Saddam revels in the specious riposte, delivered with swaggering contempt. There is method in his mockery of due process. The more he berates judges and menaces witnesses, the more bodies such as Human Rights Watch mutter piously about “serious shortcomings” in Iraqi justice.
Saddam’s aim is to subvert the course of justice. Better procedures would make tricks harder to play. Witnesses should be better prepared and protected. Propagandistic harangues should be promptly curtailed and contempt of court by the accused or their lawyers dealt with robustly. These trials may not be perfect, but observers should also recall how Slobodan Milosevic ran rings round the court at The Hague. Saddam’s crimes are for Iraqis to judge. It is in Iraq, not some farflung courtroom, that justice needs to be seen to have prevailed.