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Kurd accuses Saddam in court of poison gas attacks

Posted on: Tuesday, 22 August 2006, 03:27 CDT

By Michael Georgy

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - An Iraqi Kurd told Saddam Hussein's genocide trial on Tuesday how jets dropped poison gas smelling of rotten apples on his mountain village and aides to the ousted leader defended his campaign against Kurdish rebels.

Taking the stand in Baghdad on the second day of the second capital trial the former president has faced, first witness Ali Mustafa Hama said: "Birds were returning to their nests. I saw eight to 12 jets patrolling the sky. There was greenish smoke from the bombs. There was a smell of rotten apple or garlic.

"People were vomiting ... We were blinded. We were screaming. There was no one to save us, only God."

Two of Saddam's former military commanders, among six fellow defendants charged with war crimes, had earlier been allowed to make brief statements in their defense, in which they portrayed the 1988 Anfal -- Spoils of War -- campaign as a legitimate response to Iraqi Kurds fighting alongside Iran against Baghdad.

"The Iranians and Kurds were fighting hand in hand against the Iraqi forces," former military intelligence chief Sabir al- Douri told the court. "Iran wanted to break through," he added, recalling Saddam's 1980-88 war against the Islamic Republic.

"No commander could fail to respond," said Sultan Hashim, the commander of Task Force Anfal and later defense minister.

Saddam and his cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, are charged with genocide over the seven-month campaign. Majid earned his nickname "Chemical Ali" after poison gas attacks in the north.

Hama, one of several witnesses to be presented by the prosecution to lodge a formal complaint against the defendants, spoke of events nearly a year before the formal launch of the Anfal campaign in the Balisan valley, north of Sulaimaniya.

DIED AT BIRTH

Speaking in Kurdish and wearing the traditional headdress of his mountain people, Hama, who is in his early 50s, recalled April 16, 1987: "There were two women. One of them was pregnant. When she gave birth, the little infant was trying to see the world. He breathed in all the chemicals and he died."

Unlike many witnesses in Saddam's first trial, for crimes against humanity over the killing of 148 Shi'ite men from Dujail, Hama did not try to conceal his identity from the man who ruled Iraq through fear for three decades. The curtain on the witness stand remained open and his voice was not distorted.

On Monday's opening day of the trial, at least one defense lawyer spoke through a distorting microphone and did not appear on television. Three defense counsel in the Dujail trial have been killed, prompting critics to say a fair trial is impossible amid the sectarian and ethnic bloodshed ravaging Iraq.

Some of Saddam's fellow Sunni Arab minority accuse the newly empowered Shi'ite Muslim majority and their Kurdish allies in government of persecuting them.

On Monday, Saddam refused to plead and called the court a tool of the U.S. occupation. The Shi'ite judge entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.

Trying to prove the campaign amounted to genocide of Iraq's Kurdish minority, prosecutors said villages had been razed in aerial and artillery bombardments, including poison gas attacks, and villagers forced into camps and shot, tortured or raped.

A verdict in the Dujail trial is expected in October.

The 69-year-old former leader faces the death penalty in both cases, but the scheduling of a dozen other trials could delay any execution for years, raising the possibility that like former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam may die in jail.

Source: REUTERS

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