US plays down hopes of quick trial

Members of the US-appointed Iraq Governing Council said the trial would be televised in the interest of exposing Saddam’s atrocities and beginning a process of national healing. But some could not hold back from declaring the verdict a done deal.

“This man has killed hundreds of thousands of people. If he has to be killed once, I think he has to be resurrected hundreds of times and killed again,” said council member Mouwafak al-Rabii, a human rights activist who was imprisoned under Saddam.

Al-Rabii and other council members met what they described as an unrepentant Saddam on Sunday, hours after his capture by US troops. They said proceedings against the deposed dictator would begin soon in an Iraqi special tribunal written into law last week.

“Very soon. In the next few weeks,” al-Rabii said. “We passed the law. We have almost agreed on most of the judges and prosecutors. We’re almost there. I can tell you, he’s going to be the first.”

Council member Adnan Pachachi said he expected the trial would begin “some time in March”. A third council member, Kurdish judge Dara Noor al-Din, offered a more conservative estimate: “Maybe four to six months.”

But US officials were just beginning to interrogate their captive on a laundry-list of subjects, including the uprising that has killed hundreds of US troops and his alleged weapons of mass destruction, the main rationale for the US-led war. Iran, too, said it was preparing charges and expected Saddam to be tried before a “competent international court”.

US president George Bush said in Washington that details still needed to be worked out before Saddam could be handed over to the Iraqis. He offered few specifics of how Saddam would be tried – or when.

“We will work with Iraqis to develop a way to try him that will withstand international scrutiny,” he said.

But his language suggested he was more interested in the trial’s scope than in its speed.

“All the atrocities need to come out and justice needs to be delivered,” he said.

Appearing to contradict earlier U.S. statements that officials would leave it to Iraqis to work out the details of their special tribunal, US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher indicated the US government now planned to play a major role in crafting the court.

He stressed provisions in the recently passed law to use international advisers to various court officials. ”Obviously,” he said, “we will be consulting with them closely as they make the decisions as we can proceed to some sort of justice for Saddam Hussein.”

Human rights groups were outraged by the Iraqi suggestions of a quick trial.

Hanny Megally, of the International Centre for Transitional Justice in New York, said it would be hard to imagine that any trial would be ready for prosecution before the end of 2004.

“We would be very concerned to see a speedy trial within weeks or months,” he said. “The capacity of the Iraqi judiciary is clearly not up to what will be necessary for a major trial. They will need to be brought up to speed.”

Investigators who have yet to be appointed will have to sift through documents - 300 million of them at last count, according to Noor al-Din – and examine evidence including some 270 mass graves that will not even begin to be exhumed until the end of January.

The prosecution will have to draft a strategy, deciding which cases stand the best chance of convicting a man whose regime, by the most conservative estimates, killed 300,000 men, women and children during his 23 years as president.

“If they want to try someone like Saddam for all the crimes that have been committed, we could end up with a 10-year trial,” Megally said.

But members of the governing council, a 25-member body appointed in July to rule Iraq, predicted a quick trial – and a quick execution, as soon as Iraq’s occupiers, who suspended the death penalty, pass sovereignty to a new Iraqi government.

“We will get sovereignty on the 30th of June,” al-Rabii said. “I can tell you, he could be executed on the 1st of July.”