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Iraq's Aziz back in the dock
Topic Started: Feb 15 2009, 12:33 PM (54 Views)
Warren
Administrator
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Iraq's Aziz back in the dock

From correspondents in Baghdad

May 21, 2008 04:49am
Article from: Agence France-Presse

TAREQ Aziz, the international face of the brutal regime of hanged Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, was back in the dock today on charges of crimes against humanity - but without any lawyers to defend him.

Aziz, 72, is on trial along with seven other defendants over the execution in 1992 of 42 Baghdad merchants accused of racketeering while Iraq was under UN sanctions. They could be sentenced to death if convicted.

The former foreign minister and deputy prime minister, who surrendered to US forces in April 2003 shortly after the invasion, charged that people who had tried to assassinate him in the past were out to finish the job.

"I know it is a plot of personal revenge because the people who are governing Iraq now tried to kill me on the first of April 1980 in front of hundreds of people, but they did not succeed," he told the court.

"Now they are saying, 'Let us do what we have failed to do in 1980'."

Aziz, the only Christian in Saddam's inner circle, said he was "proud" to have been a member of the now disbanded Baath party but that he could not be held responsible for the charges against him.

Prosecutor Adnan Ali outlined the charges against Aziz and the other defendants, including Ali Hassan al-Majid - otherwise known as Chemical Ali who has already been sentenced to death for genocide in another case.

He said some merchants had their ears cut off and hands amputated for allegedly black marketeering or dealing in foreign currency between 1992 and 1995, at a time when Iraq was under crippling UN economic sanctions.

Mr Ali called for a "suitable punishment that will ease the hearts of widows and the oppressed".

All eight defendants were in court in Baghdad's highly-fortified Green Zone for today's hearing but Aziz remains without the lawyers he had asked for when the case first came to trial in April.

Presiding judge Rauf Rasheed Abdel Rahman - the same man who tried Saddam - adjourned the case to tomorrow, when witnesses are expected to testify.

The team of foreign lawyers who had agreed to defend Aziz, including French lawyer Jacques Verges, four Italian lawyers and a Lebanese-French attorney, were not granted visas for Iraq, his Amman-based son Ziad Aziz said.

Mr Verges has defended some of the world's most notorious figures, including Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and Venezuelan terrorist "Carlos the Jackal".

Dressed in a grey suit, Aziz entered the courtroom with the aid of a walking stick.

Ziad Aziz said that when he last spoke to his father on Wednesday he was "in a very bad health condition and coughing non-stop".

Ziad said his father suffers from high blood pressure, diabetes and ongoing respiratory and heart problems since a heart attack in a US military prison in December 2007.

"He needs surgery as soon as possible," he said.

Aziz's boss Saddam was hanged on December 30, 2006 over his role in the killing of 148 Shi'ite civilians after an assassination attempt against him in 1982.

Aziz, Chemical Ali and Saddam's half-brother Watban Ibrahim al-Hassan are the most high profile of the eight defendants in the latest case being heard by the Iraqi High Tribunal.

Chemical Ali was sentenced to death for genocide last June, along with former defence minister Sultan Hashim al-Tai and former armed forces deputy chief of operations Hussein Rashid al-Tikriti.

The three were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity for overseeing a brutal military campaign against Kurdish civilians in 1988 known as the Anfal that is said to have left 180,000 people dead.
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