Tyrants seem shrunk in court

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- It was only in the courtroom, at the U.S. military base, that their physical insignificance, their sheer unremitting ordinariness, became so plain.

On television last Thursday, the images of the 12 former Iraqi leaders conveyed an altogether bigger impression, perhaps because the lens tightened until their faces filled the screen. But to a reporter sitting 25 feet away, for the five hours it took to complete preliminary hearings against Saddam Hussein and 11 others who terrorized Iraq, they seemed to have shrunk, pressing home the question: How could these utterly unremarkable men, forgettable in any other context, have so tyrannized their 25 million countrymen that they remained unchallenged for 35 years?

Perhaps it was the fear that made them seem, in person, so small. When a man takes a nation by the throat, in the way that Stalin, Hitler and Mao did, and then retreats into secret places, the propaganda images -- the menacing statues, the brooding portraits, the leader saluting massed parades -- become a reality of their own.

So it was with Saddam, who stared down at every corner, on walls in every office and every home, until the apprehension settled, even among foreigners, that he was always watching. No matter that he almost never appeared anywhere that made him accessible to ordinary Iraqis, sending out a team of doubles to maintain the pretense of being the people's tribune, while sparing him from assassins' threats; immured in his palaces, he was ever the grim but inaccessible colossus.

That era ended, when he emerged last December from his coffinlike bunker near Tikrit, looking like a vagrant as he surrendered to U.S. troops. Since then, he has been sequestered somewhere outside Baghdad, on the promise that he would, in time, be brought into an Iraqi court.

Now, at the base that the Americans call Camp Victory, there was the courtroom's silence, taut expectation gripping the 35 people waiting for that moment to arrive: the judge and clerks of the Iraqi Special Tribunal, established under the U.S. occupation to hold Saddam's government accountable for its crimes; officials of Iraq's interim government, empowered earlier in the week when sovereignty was formally restored; the U.S. admiral in sports club casuals overseeing the media pool; a handful of reporters, Iraqis and Americans, representing hundreds of others. At last, there were footsteps approaching, manacles and restraining chain tinkling, doors opening, two Iraqi guards gripping the prisoner; all imaginings spent.

Before the court, at that instant, 25 years almost to the week after he seized power in Baghdad, stood Saddam Hussein al-Majid al- Tikriti, the man who awarded himself numerous titles of honor and glory; the man who launched, or in some measure provoked, three disastrous wars; the man whose legacy runs to countless mass graves, and to hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, his very name synonymous, across much of the world, with a totalitarianism that turned the Iraqi state into a machinery of torture and death.

The next 26 minutes were as compelling as any in a reporter's life. My notes, I realized later, were scribbled even less legibly than normal, reflecting the tension of a moment awaited, in a manner of speaking, since I reached Baghdad for the first time as a reporter nearly 15 years ago, when I imagined, hopelessly, like other Western journalists, that I might one day get an interview with Saddam: "Saddam looking wasted, emaciated, bearded; footsteps uncertain, manner exhausted, eyes scanning left and right. His voice: husky at first, then oddly high-pitched, at moments nearly breaking."

"Under strain," I wrote a minute or two later, "rubbing eyes, finger to eyebrow, hand splayed to cheek, timbre of voice changed."

On the images that rolled on Iraqi television every night until the Americans came, Saddam was always shown as indomitable, his presence diminishing all others. Until he picked up a cigar at a palace meeting, nobody else in his inner councils dared; when he spoke, top aides sat expectant, heads angled reverently, pencils poised. If he joked, all laughed; if his mood darkened, all would frown.

But in the courtroom, in a mosque annex within a lakeside palace complex near Baghdad airport that serves as the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, he seemed, in those first moments, like nothing so much as a man quite lost.

Over the next half-hour, that changed as he recovered something of his old presence and resolve, assuring that the stories that went around the world were mostly about an unrepentant Saddam defying the court, condemning the U.S. occupation and the Iraqis collaborating with it, and declaring himself the lawful president. As well, he pronounced Kuwait to be Iraq's legitimate territory and leaders "animals," and he belittled the 1988 poison-gassing of Halabja, and his own alleged role, as something he had "heard about on the radio," as though being accused of murdering 5,000 people in an afternoon was somehow an irrelevance, or a bagatelle.

But if Saddam looked for much of his time in the courtroom like a shadow of the man he had been, he towered compared with the others. It was as though only one defendant, Saddam, believed there was anything to fight for, beyond survival. All pride spent, they behaved as though they, at least, had accepted that the game was up and that their purpose must now be to escape going down with Saddam. Some among them, recognizing their humiliation, appeared to be holding back tears. Dictators need followers, not leaders, and these followers appeared, mainly, to have abandoned the cause, demonstrating as they did why Saddam, and not any of them, had risen to the pinnacle of the regime.

Where Saddam defied the court, they deferred. Where he refused to review or sign papers acknowledging the proceedings, they signed, some with an almost too-eager compliance. The young investigating judge had battled Saddam on issues that involved the court's legitimacy, and on the question of whether he should be entered on the papers he ultimately refused to sign as "President of the Republic of Iraq," as Saddam demanded, or as "the (former) President," as the judge instructed the clerk, adding parentheses.

But the others, who were brought to the court together by U.S. troops -- while Saddam arrived and departed alone with a separate American guard -- seemed mostly intent on winning the judge's favor.

The complaisant attitudes came from some surprising quarters. Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, Saddam's former bodyguard and secretary, listened intently to the rights available to all appearing before the tribunal -- to a lawyer, paid for by the state if they are indigent, as well as to remain silent in court -- and offered his congratulations. "These rights are excellent," he said, smiling broadly.

It was left to others to ponder whether Mahmud, accused of "crimes against the Iraqi people" in the brutal repression of a Shiite uprising in 1991 in which tens of thousands of people died, had considered what the absence of such rights had meant to Iraqis who fell victim to the old regime.

Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as Chemical Ali for his alleged role in overseeing the Halabja attack, was also pleased, smiling broadly at the judge after the rights were read and saying, "Thank you, thank you." Then he asked if the judge could help him track down his counsel. "If you don't mind, I'm going to give you a piece of paper with a telephone number of the lawyer," he said.

Steadying himself on his walking stick as he rose to leave, he invoked God's help, as did Saddam and several others. "In the name of God the most Merciful and Compassionate," he said, quoting from the Quran.

Salem Chalabi, executive director of the tribunal and nephew of Ahmed Chalabi, once the Pentagon's favorite for leadership of Iraq, said when the hearing ended that at least one of the men had offered to cooperate in return for escaping the death penalty, agreeing to testify against others, but that no decision had been made. While the hearings that began on Thursday will continue, with the judge deciding who has a case to answer, Iraqi and U.S. officials have said that trials are not likely to begin at any time soon. In Saddam's case, they have hinted, the date could be a year away, or even more.

At least two detainees -- Tariq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister who headed crucial diplomatic negotiations, and Sultan Hashim Ahmed, who was defense minister when the Americans invaded last year -- suggested in court that they may seek to save themselves at trial by arguing that all blame should be shifted to Saddam, or at least to a small group around him.

Like Nazi leaders at Nuremberg, Hashim claimed that at times when he is alleged to have participated in mass killings he was only taking orders; Aziz claimed that being a member of Saddam's Revolutionary Command Council should not be taken as proof that he had anything to do with decisions leading to deaths of innocents that were made by the "leadership," meaning Saddam.

From their confusion as they arrived, and the relief that some showed after talking with the judge, it seemed plain that none of the 12 knew more than vaguely what to expect when they reached the court. For men who held unlimited powers, with little or no need to consult law books, it seemed possible that the moment when the manacles were removed and they stepped into court may also have been the first moment they realized that they were to be assured of rights, or even what legal rights in a country emerging from dictatorship might entail.

U.S. military spokesmen have said before that none of the "high value detainees," including Saddam, have been allowed to know what has happened in Iraq since they fell into American hands, and it was possible the confusion did not stop there. At one point, a former prime minister, Muhammad Hamza al-Zubaydi, who is 66, asked for the judge's helping fixing the years in which he held various posts, saying he was "exhausted from the flight" to the hearing.

It was the strongest hint all day of something the Americans have kept a guarded secret: where Saddam and others have been confined. Since none of the Iraqis made any mention of the issue before the court, the implication seemed to be that they, too, may have little idea where they have been, even whether they have in fact been in Iraq, as U.S. officers have hinted but never conclusively affirmed.

Copyright C 2004 Deseret News Publishing Co.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.