Saddam regime war crime trials set for next week

War crimes trials against Iraq’s former Baath Party leaders will begin next week, interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said today.

He did not say whether Saddam Hussein would be among them.

Many members of Iraq’s former regime have been in jail for more than a year, and few have been able to meet lawyers. Saddam’s Jordan-based lawyers say they have not seen the former dictator, arrested a year ago.

Officials had given conflicting accounts about when the trials would begin. They have also said that Saddam might not be the first to be tried.

“I can now tell you clearly and precisely that, God willing, next week the trials of the symbols of the former regime will start, one by one so that justice can take its path in Iraq,” Allawi said in Baghdad.

The US military acknowledged yesterday that eight of Saddam’s 11 top lieutenants went on hunger strike over the weekend to demand Red Cross visits, but they were eating again by Monday.

A lawyer for former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said they were protesting at the legality of their trials and their detention. Saddam’s own lawyers in Jordan had issued a statement protesting at the US refusal to let them see the deposed dictator.

Saddam and his 11 top lieutenants have been held for months in an undisclosed location, believed to be near the Baghdad International Airport, west of the capital. They appeared before the Iraqi Special Tribunal in July to face preliminary charges from the former regime.

Saddam was presented with seven charges that included gassing thousands of Kurds in 1988, the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the suppression of 1991 revolts by Kurds and Shiites, the murders of religious and political leaders and the mass displacement of Kurds in the 1980s.

Some Allawi critics have claimed he is politicising the trials ahead next month’s elections.

Government leaders have recently said that the Special Tribunal is not yet prepared to begin the trials. They need to train judges and prosecutors, sort through stacks of evidence, all under the pressure of a deadly insurgency that has been able to strike at will.

“The prosecution team, the defence counsel, the investigative judges, the documents are not ready,” National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie said last week. “It will take time. If you want to get it right, it will take time.”