Hussein deputy defends ex-president as not guilty
At trial, he blames new Iraq officials for past violence
BAGHDAD -- Former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz took the witness stand in the trial of Saddam Hussein yesterday, making his first public appearance since he was arrested by US forces in 2003 to defend the former president he served for 25 years.
One of the highest-profile figures from the Ba'ath Party era and once the most visible face of the secretive regime, Aziz, 70, stepped into the curtained witness stand looking pale and frail. He was clad in pajamas and tinted glasses, and wore what appeared to be a plastic prisoner's identification bracelet on his wrist.
``The president is not guilty, not him, not any of the officials in the government," said Aziz, who used his testimony to accuse officials of Iraq's new government of responsibility for a series of bombings and assassination attempts throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
Hussein is charged along with seven others in a variety of crimes, including murder and torture related to the 1982 crackdown against Shi'ites in the village of Dujail, just north of Baghdad, after he survived an assassination attempt while visiting the village.
Opening the first day of testimony in defense of the four most senior officials on trial, Aziz, whose job as foreign minister put him in the position of defending Hussein's actions to the international community, outlined the themes that the defense strategy will adopt in the weeks ahead.
Aziz portrayed Iraq under Hussein as a country struggling to contain the threat of violence by the underground Shi'ite Islamist Dawa Party while at the same time fighting a war with Iran.
He recounted a 1980 attempt on his own life at Mustansariyah University in Baghdad, in which he said ``tens" of students were killed or injured, and described the Dujail assassination attempt as merely ``one link in a chain of attacks" throughout the 1980s and 1990s by Dawa, the party that now leads Iraq's new government. A subsequent witness said two students were killed in the attack.
``The Dawa Party claimed responsibility and they are in the government now. They are in power," he said. ``The head of the party was the prime minister recently, and the deputy head of the party is the prime minister now. Why don't you try them?"
Aziz was referring to former transitional Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and the new prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who took office Saturday. Both men were senior figures in the outlawed Dawa Party who fled into exile in the early 1980s.
No other country would have responded differently to an attack on its head of state, he said. ``Having an assassination attempt against any president in any country would result in procedures to punish those who committed the crime and also those who supported the crime," Aziz said.
Under questioning by the prosecution, Aziz acknowledged that he had no direct involvement with the Dujail case. Rather, he portrayed himself as a member of Hussein's inner circle who would have been informed had there been any special effort by the leadership to punish the people of Dujail. The fact that he did not know about it means there was no such effort, he said, suggesting that the assassination attempt was considered a routine matter dealt with by local security services.
Speaking on behalf of Barzan Ibrahim, Hussein's half-brother who was in charge of the Mukhabarat intelligence service at the time of the crackdown and who has been accused of torturing some of those detained, Aziz said Ibrahim was a friend who would have told him if he had tortured anyone from Dujail.
``If he conducted any torture operations, he would come and tell me that he was busy torturing people," he said.
US officials close to the court say they hope this trial will be over by June, with a verdict delivered by the judges a ``couple of months" after that. 