For Saddam, a spartan life near former palace John F. Burns/NYT NYT Monday, September 20, 2004
Time spent reading and tending garden BAGHDAD Nine months after American troops pulled him disheveled and disoriented from an underground bunker near his hometown, Tikrit, Saddam Hussein is living in an air-conditioned cell measuring three meters by four meters on the grounds of one of his former palaces outside Baghdad. He tends plants, proclaims himself Iraq's lawful ruler, and reads the Koran and books about past Arab glories. . American and Iraqi officials who have visited the former Iraqi leader say he wears plastic sandals and an Arab dishdasha robe, eats American soldiers' ready-to-eat meals for breakfast, and is permitted three hours' daily exercise in a courtyard outside his cell. He has been flown by Black Hawk helicopter to an American military hospital in Baghdad, where doctors ran tests for an enlarged prostate, which they believe could be an early pointer to cancer. . He has undergone hours of interrogation by investigators preparing evidence for his trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. But he has refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing, or to show remorse for the hundreds of thousands of people killed during his 24-year dictatorship, officials say. He has insisted that his position as Iraq's president gave him legal authority for all that he did and that his victims were traitors. At every encounter, the officials say, he insists that he is still the constitutionally elected president. More than 80 other high-value detainees at the same prison, including more than 40 who were in the Pentagon's "pack of cards" of Iraq's most-wanted fugitives, are kept away from Saddam, said Bakhtiar Amin, the Iraqi human rights minister. Saddam has been in solitary confinement since his capture on Dec. 13, officials said, because of a fear that he would try to rig evidence or intimidate old associates in the prison. . But the core of the group, 11 men who appeared with him in court on July 1, are allowed to exercise together, and to play board and card games. . When Saddam appeared in court to be advised of his legal rights and of the charges under investigation, officials said it could be two years or more before he was brought to trial. None of the other former officials who appeared with him was likely to come to trial for as much as a year, they said, because of the amount of documents to be processed, as well as the need to interview the thousands of Iraqis who have come forward as potential witnesses. . But the interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has decided to fast-forward the legal processes. It has begun a shake-up of the staff at the special tribunal set up last year to hear the cases and hopes to begin the first high-profile trial, probably against Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of Saddam's known as Chemical Ali, by November. Saddam's trial will follow, perhaps next year if the prosecutors are ready, Iraqi and American officials say. . In an interview at his heavily guarded residence in Baghdad on Thursday, Allawi said that the government had received the resignation of Salem Chalabi, the American-educated lawyer who has been the court's chief administrator. He is a nephew of Ahmad Chalabi, the exile leader who was favored by the Pentagon before the March 2003 invasion, but who has recently been shunned by the American hierarchy here. Ahmad Chalabi has set himself up as a rival to Allawi among Iraq's majority Shiites, and his nephew, who has been implicated by the Allawi government in a murder case unrelated to the work of the tribunal, has been out of Iraq for most of the past two months. In prison, Saddam has asked for some vestiges of the pleasures he enjoyed when he moved among dozens of palaces. "This was a man whose regime used a shredder to turn human bodies into ground beef," said Amin, the 46-year-old rights minister, who spent years abroad as an exile chronicling the abuses of Saddam's government and petitioning foreign governments and rights organizations to shun the Iraqi government. "And now he sits there in his cell and asks for muffins and cookies and cigars." Saddam and his top lieutenants are being held at Camp Cropper, a heavily fortified compound that crouches behind high walls topped with rolls of razor wire, beneath sandbagged watchtowers manned by soldiers with machine guns. The camp lies within a vast American headquarters complex known as Camp Victory. Planes using Baghdad International Airport pass low over the prison, 15 kilometers, or 10 miles, from the center of Baghdad. . For the trials, courtrooms are being readied in one of the vast, neo-imperialist buildings inside the former Republican Palace compound in central Baghdad that makes up the Green Zone, the headquarters for the Allawi government and 2,500 American military and civilian officials. The five-judge panels that will preside at the trials - without juries - will have the power to impose death sentences on Saddam and his associates, some of whom wept when they were told at the July hearing that they faced possible execution. . For Saddam and his victims, a trial in the new court building, which The New York Times was asked not to identify for security reasons, will have a special irony. Saddam, who favored an architectural style emphasizing huge sandstone columns and portals, will face a reckoning in one of the buildings he erected to glorify his rule. In the dock, he will be a short walk away from the Republican Palace beside the Tigris River, once his main seat of power. . The Allawi government believes that the Iraqis, subjected to decades of terror, will begin to recover only when they see the men responsible brought to account. "Without justice, I don't see any possibility of healing the wounds in this society," Amin, the human rights minister, said. . There are political pressures, too. Allawi will be a candidate in elections set for January, a crucial step toward the goal of a constitutionally established, popularly elected government by January 2006. With the mounting insurgency, he needs to bolster his waning popularity among Iraqis who increasingly blame him for the chaos. By putting top figures from the former government on trial, aides believe, he can remind Iraqis of the trauma that ended with their overthrow. . In the interview, Allawi said political calculations and a desire for revenge played no part in his decision to accelerate the trials. Rather, he said, what he sought was a catharsis. He was nearly killed by assassins that Saddam sent to his exile home in London, who attacked him with an ax while he slept, leaving him hospitalized for a year. "We need to bury the past," he said. Allawi was a rising student leader in the governing Baath Party in the 1960s when he first met Saddam. He recalled him as a "thug who enjoyed hurting others," and as a man whose rule had been "like a horror movie." Now, he said, Saddam was paying the price. "My guess is that Saddam is dying every day," he said. "He is in prison, he is alone, he has lost everything, he has no power, nothing. And to him, that is worse than death." . Western legal experts familiar with the tribunal's work say they doubt the tribunal can meet Allawi's timetable for a November start to the trials. In many cases, the preparation of evidence is far from complete, and so far, the tribunal has found no Iraqi lawyers to defend Saddam and his associates. . In July, several defendants, including Majid, who is alleged to have led the chemical weapons attacks on scores of Kurdish villages that included the bombing of Halabja in March 1988, which killed at least 5,000 people, said they wanted lawyers from elsewhere in the Arab world, but none have come forward. "The high-value criminals have been informed about this, that no Iraqi lawyers are willing to take their cases, and that the foreign lawyers who said that they would, didn't come forward, either," Amin said. In his cell, Saddam has a fold-up bed, a desk and a plastic chair, as well as a supply of bottled water and ice, a prayer mat and a choice of more than 170 books from a library supplied by the International Committee of the Red Cross. He sleeps a lot, officials said, and reads Arabic-language books through thick-rimmed spectacles, including tomes of poetry and tales from 1,000 years ago, when Baghdad was a center of learning and the capital of the Islamic world. . On visits to the army's hospital in the Green Zone, Saddam has staked out his independence in other ways. In the hospital - named for Ibn Sina, a scientific pioneer of the early Islamic world - he has been treated by American military doctors and Iraqi physicians who were on his presidential medical team. Near wards filled with wounded American soldiers, he has undergone blood tests and scans that have confirmed that he has an enlarged prostate gland, medical officials said, as well as a hernia problem and trouble with one of his eyes. But he has refused a surgical biopsy that might determine whether the prostate condition was cancerous, a decision that officials involved said was common among American men of Saddam's age, 67, who often choose not to take the biopsy when they are told that the condition could take years to become life-threatening. "He has time," one official said. "There is no health issue that would prevent him standing trial." . Another official said Saddam had helped an American Navy surgeon take blood by gripping a tourniquet on his arm, and remarked, in English, "Perhaps I should have been a doctor, not a politician." . In the courtyard by his cell, Saddam has placed white-painted stones around the plants he tends, which struck Amin, the human rights minister, as bizarre. . "This is a man who committed some of the biggest acts of ecocide in history, when he drained the marshes in southern Iraq, used chemical weapons against 250 Kurdish villages, and shipped whole palm tree plantations to the charlatan leaders of the Arab world who were his shoeshine boys," he said. "And now he's a gardener." Amin said Saddam had been denied newspapers, radio and television, and thus knew little about the political events in Iraq that have followed his capture. . The New York Times See more of the world that matters - click here for home delivery of the International Herald Tribune. < < Back to Start of Article Time spent reading and tending garden ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> $9.95 domain names from Yahoo!. Register anything. http://us.click.yahoo.com/J8kdrA/y20IAA/yQLSAA/BRUplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> *************************************************************************** Berdikusi dg Santun & Elegan, dg Semangat Persahabatan. Menuju Indonesia yg Lebih Baik, in Commonality & Shared Destiny. www.ppiindia.shyper.com *************************************************************************** __________________________________________________________________________ Mohon Perhatian: 1. Harap tdk. memposting/reply yg menyinggung SARA (kecuali sbg otokritik) 2. Pesan yg akan direply harap dihapus, kecuali yg akan dikomentari. 3. 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