Saddam Verdict Watch
Verdict due Sunday (tomorrow):
Iraq's prime minister on Saturday urged his countrymen to accept the verdict against Saddam Hussein without violence, then in the next breath declared that the former dictator must get "what he deserves" with the decision that could send him to the gallows.
Nouri al-Maliki - the highly partisan Shiite Muslim prime minister who was forced into years of exile during Saddam's Sunni-dominated rule - imposed an open-ended curfew on Baghdad and two nearby provinces, and closed the international airport until further notice.
Checkpoints went up across Baghdad, and many cities and towns to the north were sealed by Saturday morning to keep residents in and potential attackers out.
The onerous measures threatened gunmen or anyone who ventured out with being shot on sight. Residents scrambled to stock up on food to wait it out indoors, and streets emptied by nightfall.
Iraq's High Tribunal hands down verdicts and sentences Sunday for Saddam and seven co-defendants - judicial findings that stood the chance of tipping the country into a full-blown sectarian civil war after a trial that stretched over nine months in 39 sessions and ended nearly 3 1/2 months ago.
A survey of the works of "The Butcher of Baghdad" from the Times of London:
IN 24 years of tyrannical rule, Saddam Hussein brought death to millions in three wars, torture to the countless pitiful souls incarcerated in his dungeons and isolation from much of the world to the once-proud country that he cowed.
Today Iraqis expect to see the leader who terrorised them condemned to face a hangman’s noose for just one of his many crimes — the execution of 148 Shi’ite men from the village of Dujail, 40 miles north of Baghdad, in retaliation for an attempt on his life there in 1982, when he had been in power for only three years.
The country is braced for the verdict amid fears that the dictator’s Sunni supporters will mount revenge attacks on Shi’ite areas.
In a clear echo of the mood of most Iraqis, Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, said yesterday that he hoped Saddam would be given “what he deserves” when the verdict is handed down.
If, as expected, Saddam is convicted of crimes against humanity and stands in the dock to hear his sentence, I will watch with that particular attention that comes from fascination and disgust. I have reported on the misery that he has inflicted on his countrymen for more than 20 years, from the ill-judged invasion of Iran that left more than a million dead, to his equally disastrous foray into Kuwait, which left his nation in ruins.
He has cast a dark shadow of evil over every moment I have spent in Iraq — a man who had personally tortured some of his victims and even walked his young sons through his prisons to witness the barbarity.
Today’s case dates back 24 years to an ambush in which 10 gunmen fired at his convoy. In revenge, the surviving villagers testified, Saddam had hundreds of them arrested and tortured. As well as the 148 executed, a further 399 men, women and children were consigned to a desert camp.
The survivors say they relish the prospect of Saddam suffering the same punishment that he meted out to so many others. He ordered myriad death sentences for crimes as petty as insulting him or his sons, Qusay and Uday, sometimes in remarks conveyed to the authorities by teachers overhearing their pupils’ accounts of conversations at home. Nowhere was safe in Saddam’s Iraq.
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