Translated material
The process has begun
Saddam's trial begins
The trial of Saddam Hussein begins today in Baghdad's heavily guarded Green Zone. The US State Department says that this is an “Iraqi process”, that is, prepared with American assistance “in accordance with international norms and Iraqi laws.” The trial, according to the Americans, is intended to “close a dark page” in the history of Iraq.A special tribunal for the trial of the 68-year-old ex-president, captured by the Americans on December 14, 2003, was created in January 2004. Saddam's neighbors in the dock will be his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Hasan al-Tikriti, former Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan and five other senior functionaries of the overthrown Baath Party regime. Earlier, Iraqi authorities announced that the trial would be open and that Saddam would be charged with 12 crimes against humanity, including aggression against Kuwait in 1990. Hussein could be sentenced to death for the mustard gas poisoning of five thousand Kurds in the city of Halabja in 1988, as well as mass repressions against Shiites and Kurds in 1974, 1983 and 1991.
The first charge is expected to be the murder of 140 residents of the Shiite village of Dujail north of Baghdad in 1982. Among the dead were the brother and four cousins of the current Prime Minister of Iraq, Shiite Ibrahim al-Jaafari. The day before yesterday, he said that the special tribunal had been preparing the trial for too long, despite “the obviousness of Saddam’s crimes.” The prime minister cautiously added that “this is not about revenge.”
However, recent events in the country overshadow the bloody stories of the Saddam dictatorship. According to joint estimates by the Oxford Research Center and the Iraq Sociological Center, after the invasion of Iraq by the United States and its allies in March 2003, civilian casualties exceeded 25 thousand people. Of these, more than nine thousand, including five thousand women and children, became victims of US air raids.
Washington believes that the trial of Saddam will not lead to increased participation of Sunnis in the rebel movement. But they already play a significant role in it. “The Americans themselves pushed them to do this by banning members of the Baath Party from holding any more or less significant positions in Iraq. Now they want to enshrine this ban in the constitution,” Vladimir Isaev, deputy director of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Vremya Novostei. Yesterday on the Internet on behalf of There was a Ba'ath call to "welcome the leader's public appearance at the trial with strikes against US military forces and their Iraqi agents." The appeal was addressed to "resisting Ba'athists" and "former Iraqi army personnel who joined the resistance."
The start of the trial coincides with the summing up of the results of the October 15 referendum on the new constitution. Yesterday the Central Election Commission announced that it would need several more days to complete the vote count.
The Iraqi Central Election Commission reported "unusually high voter turnout by international standards." In the Shiite and Kurdish provinces the turnout was about 90%, in the Sunni provinces it was just under 80%. The votes of half the Iraqi electorate are sufficient to approve the draft constitution. To fail it, the disagreement of two-thirds of voters in three of the 18 provinces of the country will be enough.
In the Sunni provinces of Salah ed-Din and Anbar, the project, according to preliminary data, was rejected. In Sunni-dominated Nineveh, vote counting continues. Apparently, it will be decisive for the fate of the constitution. During the counting, fraud cannot be ruled out. In the fourth Sunni province of Diyala, the project seems to have been approved. But one of the Sunni leaders, Salih al-Mutlaq, has already stated that there were more voters than registered voters.
Vladimir Isaev believes that one cannot definitely talk about election fraud, but “they cannot definitely be free due to the foreign military presence in Iraq.” “The Sunnis who ruled Iraq in recent decades found themselves with nothing,” the scientist believes. “According to the draft constitution, the independent de facto Kurdish North can become so de jure. A similar chance is given to the Shiite South (the draft fixes the federal structure of Iraq and the right of one or more provinces to "form a region." - Ed . The Kurdish North and Shiite South, where Iraq's main oil reserves are concentrated, according to Mr. Isaev, “will not necessarily share revenues with the federal government, and the Sunnis may even be left landlocked” if the country collapses.