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Former Iraqi Foreign Minister Testifies at Saddam Trial

Posted on: Wednesday, 24 May 2006, 21:00 CDT

BAGHDAD, Iraq _ Former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz took the witness stand in the trial of Saddam Hussein on Wednesday, making his first public appearance since he was arrested by U.S. forces in 2003 to defend the former president he served for 25 years.

One of the highest-profile figures from the Baath 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 pyjamas 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.

Saddam is charged along with seven others in a variety of crimes, including murder and torture related to the 1982 crackdown against Shiites 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 frequently put him in the position of defending Saddam's actions to the international community in the past, outlined the broad themes that the defense strategy will adopt in the weeks ahead.

Speaking in a gravelly voice, Aziz portrayed Iraq under Saddam as a country struggling to contain the ever-present threat of violence by the underground Shiite 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 which 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 Saddam'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 that was dealt with by local security services.

Speaking on behalf of Barzan Ibrahim, Saddam's half brother who was in charge of the Mukhabarat intelligence service at the time of the crackdown and who has been accused personally of torturing some of those detained, Aziz said Ibrahim was a close 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, without making it clear whether this was a common occurrence. "He never told me he had captured and tortured people from Dujail. He did not say this."

The court also heard from Saddam's closest aide and bodyguard, Abed Hamid Mahmoud al-Tikriti, who was renowned within Iraq as one of Saddam's closest confidants and who ranked number four in the American deck of cards of Iraq's most wanted regime leaders. Aziz was ranked 43.

He recounted details of the assassination attempt from the vantage point of the car in which Saddam was traveling at the time, describing how Saddam's convoy was fired upon by assailants hiding in an orchard.

The court has already heard two weeks of testimony on behalf of the four junior defendants, all of them accused of being active in the local Dujail branch of the Baath Party at the time of the crackdown.

The defense has called at least 50 more witnesses to testify on behalf of Saddam and the other top leaders. U.S. officials close to the court say they are hoping this first trial of former regime leaders, which started last October, will be over by June, with a verdict delivered by the judges a "couple of months" after that.

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(Nadeem Majeed contributed to this report.)

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(c) 2006, Chicago Tribune.

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Source: Chicago Tribune

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