 As his trial on the charge of genocide began Monday, Saddam Hussein insisted he was still the president of Iraq and refused to enter a plea on accusations of ordering massacres, deportations and chemical attacks to annihilate the country's Kurdish minority.
| Still singing the same old song. Queue the clowns and revolver jugglers... |
| “Saddam Hussein insisted he was still the president of Iraq and refused to enter a plea...” |
For most of the five-hour session, the defiant Saddam sat stone-faced in a courtroom in the fortified Green Zone of Baghdad, listening to prosecutors give a detailed account of how he and six co-defendants embarked on an eight-stage military campaign in 1988 to eliminate the Kurds from swaths of their mountainous homeland in northern Iraq. Prosecutors said the campaign, called Anfal after a Koranic phrase that means "the spoils of war," killed at least 50,000 Kurds and resulted in the destruction of 2,000 villages. More than an hour into the session, they presented grim photographs of mass graves, including one with the body of a young girl, and cited orders from one of Saddam's top aides telling military commanders to rid many villages of "human or even animal presence." |