Tribunal in Iraq targets Hussein

Stating that they would reinstate Iraq's death penalty after an eight-month suspension, the council members said they were prepared to try Hussein in absentia, if US forces fail to capture him.

"This tribunal will show the world the horror of the crimes committed against this people," said council member Dara Noor al-Din, a Shi'ite Muslim judge who was jailed for years in Baghdad for political activities and heads the council's legal committee. Din addressed reporters at a news conference in the tribunal's new courtroom, which until recently housed Hussein's Gift Museum of items presented to the fugitive president by heads of state.

Under the council's new law, Din said that five Iraqi judges "known for their expertise and professionalism" will oversee war-crimes trials of Hussein's top officials, most of whom are now in US custody at a detention center in Baghdad Airport. The tribunal will base its law on the principles of the Geneva Conventions, which govern international rules of war, as well as other human rights cases.

The trials could take months to begin. Defendants could include Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali," who reportedly masterminded the gassing of thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq during the 1980s. Din did not state how many people might be tried. Coalition officials are holding about 5,500 security detainees across Iraq.

Lawyers who have researched Hussein's government for years warned yesterday that Iraq's judges were unprepared to try war crimes suspects in hearings that might involve hundreds of witnesses and millions of documents. Some international law specialists said the council's plan was driven largely by the Bush administration's opposition to international courts.

The all-Iraqi panel of judges starkly contrasts with the well-financed war crimes tribunals run by the United Nations, which have spent years prosecuting government officials from Bosnia, Sierra Leone, and Rwanda.

"To think that you have an Iraqi judiciary that has the capacity to try these enormously complex trials is a strange reality," Richard Dicker, director of the international justice program Human Rights Watch, said by telephone last night from The Hague, where a UN-run tribunal is currently trying Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president.

"When I visited Iraq's criminal courts in July," Dicker said, "the longest trials that any judge could recall had lasted a day and a half."

Dicker said the new law had been drafted in "a highly secretive way," without consultation with international lawyers.

Even as Iraq grapples to craft a new democracy, many of its 26 million people are haunted by a grim past marked by mass killings, torture, and the jailing of hundreds of thousands of people.

Yesterday's announcement was geared to addressing a widespread hunger among Iraqis for legal redress from decades of violations.

Word of the new tribunal appeared to spread quickly among Iraqis, many of whose families have lost relatives in executions.

"This tribunal is a very good thing," said Zaman Mohsen, a baker from Najaf, whose father vanished after being arrested in 1984, when Mohsen was just a few months old. After nearly two decades, Mohsen yesterday finally found his father's name on a computer list in the Baghdad offices of the Free Prisoners Association, stating that he had been killed in a Najaf jail in 1986.

Scores of people have poured into the association's building since it opened last April, scouring names for lost relatives.

Clutching the handwritten paper with his father's name, Mohsen said he would rush home to tell his mother, who never remarried after his father was jailed. "She will be very sad, but relieved that there is proof at last," he said.

For relatives, yesterday's announcement offers the first chance of legal redress after years of grieving. As months have passed since Hussein's government collapsed, some Iraqis have feared that top officials might be quietly set free by the United States, who for years maintained diplomatic relations with the former regime.

"The United States was on Saddam's good side when he committed all these crimes," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish politician who sits on the Governing Council. "We care more about these issues than the Americans do. It is we who want the officials on trial."

The council's first decision after being appointed by US officials last July was to set up tribunals to try Hussein's government officials. Council members have argued for months that Iraqis would accept only death sentences against Hussein's officials -- a punishment forbidden in UN-run tribunals. Iraq's death penalty was suspended last April by the now-retired General Tommy Franks. Council members say they intend to reverse that decision.

That decision could complicate the tribunal's work, however. Several coalition partners, including Britain, have renounced capital punishment, and could block the transfer of detainees, if death sentences seem inevitable.

"Britain would require assurances that people would not face the death penalty, before it transferred custody of detainees," Ann Clwyd, Prime Minister Tony Blair's special envoy for human rights in Iraq, said by telephone from London last night. "We have raised our concerns about the application of the death penalty."

The US administrator to Iraq, L. Paul Bremer II, has told council members he will not sign the order to reinstate the death penalty, preferring to let a new Iraqi government vote on the issue, when it takes over July 1.

For many Iraqis, however, the issue is clear-cut. "All the Governing Council members are in favor of reinstating the death penalty," said Adnan al-Asadi, deputy to council member Ibrahim al-Jafari, a Shi'ite politician who recently returned from years in exile. "The old regime killed thousands of people. They should get death in punishment."

Yet even among Iraq's human-rights victims, opinions appeared to be deeply divided yesterday over how to punish those responsible for executions.

"People should be sent to jail, not killed," said Mesa Hashem, 30, a teacher, who had come to search for her grandfather's name in the Free Prisoners Association's computer. The man, a religious Shi'ite sheik, was jailed in 1991 for political activities. "The hell of God will be enough punishment for these people when they finally die in jail."

Iraq's council in recent days appeared determined to use capital punishment for the tribunal. "If Bremer insists on keeping the suspension of the death penalty in place, we will just wait to get a sovereign government in seven months' time, and then start our trials," said al-Asadi.