Kurdish women curse Saddam at genocide trial

BAGHDAD: Kurdish women whose families were decimated in a poison gas attack cursed ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on Wednesday, as they gave harrowing evidence to the third day of his genocide trial.

 

"May God blind them all," cried 45-year-old Adiba Owla Bayez, accusing Saddam and six co-defendants who are charged with masterminding the brutal 1987-1988 Anfal campaign against Iraq's Kurdish minority.

 

The accused appeared before a panel of judges at the Iraqi High Tribunal in Baghdad, where prosecutors called four more witnesses to testify to the savagery of the Iraqi military sweep through their villages.

 

Following the hearing, Judge Abdullah al-Ameri adjourned the case until September 11 at the request of the defence, three days after the trial began.

 

Saddam is accused of ordering his forces to conduct a campaign to exterminate up to 182,000 Kurdish civilians and raze around 3,000 villages in Iraq's northern hills and deserts.

 

Bayez, the wife of the first Kurdish witness to testify on Tuesday, told the court one of her daughters had died within three months of the chemical attack on her village, and that she has since had two miscarriages.

 

She told the court about an attack on the village of Belisand, describing how she and her family were temporarily blinded by gas during an air raid by Iraqi jets on April 16, 1987.

 

"I was screaming because I did not want to lose my children. I could not see them and they were also blind. So I was screaming," she told the court.

 

"It was a judgment day," she added.

 

She recounted how the villagers, many of them blinded, stumbled towards higher ground to seek shelter, pursued by fire from military helicopters. They were tracked down by Iraqi troops and taken to a detention centre, she said.

 

"I went for four days without eyesight. My children could not see. I was just screaming. On the fifth day I slightly opened my eyes and it was a terrible scene. My children and my skin had turned black," she said.

 

After several days, 29 men from the village were separated from their families and taken away, Bayez said, alleging that they had been "Anfalised", the term used today in Kurdistan for those who disappeared.

 

The remaining survivors were cast loose. "Army trucks came. We were loaded on them and dumped in open ground near the village of Khalifan," Bayez said.

 

Another witness from Belisand, Badriya Said Khidr, said she had lost nine members of her family in the attack --including her husband, son, father and mother -- while she still suffers the after-effects.

 

"I can't speak. I am breathless," she wheezed. "I want the court to treat Saddam as he treated us."

 

A third woman, Bahiya Mustafa Mahmoud, also described a gas attack, and told the court that she had lost her husband during Anfal.

 

The accused insist that their campaign was a legitimate counter-insurgency operation aimed at Iranian infiltrators and separatist guerrillas.