BAGHDAD, Iraq – Nobody in Saddam Hussein's inner circle was more tirelessly reverential toward him while he was in power than Tariq Aziz, who is said to have been in the habit of saluting the telephone when Hussein called.
So it was little surprise yesterday when Aziz, 70, became the first senior member of the old ruling elite to testify on behalf of Hussein at his trial on charges of crimes against humanity. Nor did Aziz depart from form: In an hour on the witness stand, Aziz, once Hussein's principal international envoy and now an inmate in a U.S. military prison outside Baghdad, offered extenuating arguments for Hussein's actions that kept his old boss smiling genially from the dock.
Hussein, 69, is charged with directing the persecution of the townspeople of Dujail, 35 miles north of Baghdad, after a foiled assassination attempt on him there in July 1982. The indictment says that Hussein's secret police arrested hundreds of men, women and children; tortured dozens to death; banished more than 300 others to years of exile in the desert; and ordered a vast acreage of date palm groves at Dujail plowed under. Hussein is accused of signing execution orders for 148 people, including 32 who were under age 18.
Yesterday, Aziz wore what appeared to be an open-necked hospital gown, with a patient's plastic identification tag on his wrist, perhaps to lend credence to his family's claims that he is too ill from an undisclosed ailment to remain in prison, and to face what the court has said lies ahead – a trial in which Aziz himself will be among the defendants for other killings under Hussein. Though seemingly frail, Aziz offered as energetic a commendation for Hussein as any he offered while Hussein's emissary.
Hussein, Aziz said, had done no more than what any president would have done after an attempt to kill him, and, as “a man of the law,” had acted with laudable restraint in the aftermath of the attack in Dujail, when gunmen fired at his motorcade from a palm grove on the edge of the town. Hussein was “a brave man, a generous man, who loved his people very much” and had committed “no legal or humanitarian errors” over events at Dujail, Aziz said.
He also argued that punishing the people of Dujail was a legitimate response to a series of assassination attempts against top officials after Hussein took power in 1979, including a grenade attack on Aziz at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad in April 1980. Aziz said that attack, and the one at Dujail, were organized by an Iranian-backed Shiite religious party, Dawa, which has provided two of the three Iraqi prime ministers since the toppling of Hussein – Ibrahim al-Jaafari, head of the interim government until last weekend, and Nouri al-Maliki, who took office at the head of a full-term government on Saturday.
“I was the victim of a criminal attack by the party that is in power right now,” Aziz said. “Why don't you put those people on trial? One of their leaders was the prime minister until recently, and the other is prime minister now.”
Also, he compared the razing of Dujail's palm groves with the U.S. decision to level palm trees on Baghdad's airport road to deny terrorists cover.
