BAGHDAD, Iraq — The Iraqi court trying Saddam Hussein announced Tuesday that it had charged him with genocide, saying he had sought to annihilate the Kurdish people in 1988 when the military killed at least 50,000 Kurdish civilians and destroyed 2,000 villages.
The case is the first against Saddam to address the large-scale human rights violations committed during his decades in power, the same acts the Bush administration has publicized in explaining the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Six other defendants also face charges. Saddam is already being tried for the torture and killings of 148 men and boys in the Shiite village of Dujail.
Since the United Nations adopted the genocide convention in 1948, very few courts have charged defendants with genocide, the attempt to annihilate an ethnic, religious, national or political group in whole or in part.
Convictions have been handed down in the tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia. This is the first time that a Middle Eastern ruler has been charged with it.
"It was during this campaign that thousands of women, children and men were buried in mass graves in many locations," Raid Juhi, the chief judge of the Iraqi High Tribunal's investigative court, said at a news conference. "The natives of Kurdistan suffered very hard living conditions, forced relocation and illegal detention for a large number of people."
Juhi said it would be up to other judges to decide when the genocide trial against Saddam would start, and whether it would overlap with the Dujail case. Defense lawyers must be given 45 days to review the case files.
The court defines the bloody Anfal campaign, whose name means "the spoils" from a favorite Quranic verse of Saddam's, as eight military operations in 1988 in the mountainous Kurdish homeland of northern Iraq. Families who escaped death squads or were allowed to live were forced to relocate into the hinterlands or in neighboring countries. The Kurds, who make up a fifth of Iraq's people, tried to fight back, but Saddam used chemical weapons, including mustard gas and nerve agents.
Juhi said the court had gathered enough evidence, like documents and mass graves, to prosecute the defendants in the deaths of at least 50,000 civilians. Kurdish officials and human rights advocates said the death toll had been much higher. They also said the Anfal campaign began years earlier, with other massacres and forced migrations.
All parties agree that at the very least, hundreds of thousands were arrested, tortured, relocated or killed.
All seven defendants are charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes related to an internal armed conflict. Saddam and one other defendant, Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali," also have been charged with genocide, which legal experts say is difficult to prove. Al-Majid was one of Saddam's most feared aides and oversaw the north during the Anfal campaign.
The other defendants include military commanders and senior intelligence officials.
"These charges should not be addressed to President Saddam," Khalil al-Dulaimi, Saddam's chief lawyer, said in a telephone interview. "They should be addressed to the American and British forces, because they are killing the Iraqi people and using weapons of mass destruction against the Iraqi people."
President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd who for years led militiamen in northern Iraq, praised the court's decision to bring the Anfal charges, and promised that he and other government officials would not try to influence the trial.
It has taken years to assemble the evidence for the Anfal case. U.S. officials say the Dujail crimes were selected as the first ones to try Saddam on because that case was not nearly as complicated as some others. It is also easier in the Dujail case to establish a clear chain of command between Saddam and those who carried out the executions, the officials say.
But they say that the Anfal massacres and the suppression of the Shiite uprising of 1991, which resulted in up to 150,000 deaths, are the two cases that go much more directly to the heart of Saddam's murderous rule, and could prove more cathartic for the vast majority of Iraqis.
The Dujail trial, expected to resume Wednesday with a cross-examination of Saddam, is entering its final phase, in which the court will review formal charges and hear arguments from the defense lawyers. The trial is expected to run until at least May.
If a death sentence is handed down to Saddam, it is unclear whether the court would carry out the execution before other cases begin or are concluded. Any death sentence is automatically reviewed by an appellate court.
There is no deadline for a decision, but if the appeal is denied, then the statutes of the Iraqi High Tribunal mandate that the defendant must be executed within 30 days. Even the president's office, which is supposed to approve all death sentences, would be able to do little to delay that, according to American legal experts advising the tribunal.
Many Iraqis who despise Saddam, especially Shiites and Kurds, have denounced the tribunal and called for Saddam's immediate execution, while some officials, like Talabani, have said they want Saddam to stay alive long enough to face trial on all possible charges.
There are about a dozen investigations under way, all of which may result in individual sets of charges. Separate from Anfal is the infamous massacre in the village of Halabja, in which at least 5,000 Kurds died from gas attacks on March 16, 1988.
The operations of the tribunal and its oversight of the Dujail case have been tumultuous, plagued by the assassinations of a judge and lawyers, political pressure from the Iraqi government and power struggles among the judges.
Questions have been raised about why the tribunal was never set up in an international venue, where security would not be a paramount concern. U.S. and Iraqi officials have struggled to endow the trial with legitimacy, but many foreign governments and human rights advocates continue to view it as a show court, with an inevitable verdict for Saddam.
The levying of charges in Anfal brings a new set of problems, they say. If the trial were to proceed concurrent to Dujail, then Saddam's defense team could be placed at an unfair disadvantage, as they are forced to juggle two trials, unless Saddam hired new lawyers. The prosecutors and judges do not have to deal with a shortage of manpower; a separate prosecutor and five-judge panel will oversee Anfal.
With Saddam needing to focus on final arguments in Dujail, "how he could do all that and then simultaneously prepare for a larger and more complex litigation - it goes to issues of fairness," said Marieka Wierda, a senior associate at the International Center for Transitional Justice.
The other seven defendants in Dujail are entirely different than those in the Anfal case.
Kurdish officials often say that 180,000 were killed in the Anfal campaign, but the actual number is closer to 80,000, according to Joost Hiltermann, the Middle East director of the International Crisis Group, who is writing a book on the Kurds. The scope of the trial is generally limited to the eight military operations from February to late August 1988, but will also examine evidence starting from March 1987, when Saddam appointed Majid the senior official in the north and gave him complete powers to quash the Kurdish militias and suppress any uprising.
In the years preceding Anfal, Kurds in villages near Iran were forced to abandon their homes. Those areas were labeled "prohibited," and anyone living there was deemed to be an Iranian agent or saboteur. The Anfal campaign was undertaken to eradicate those who had moved back to or remained in the prohibited areas.
The other defendants in the Anfal case are Sultan Hashem Ahmed, the military commander of the campaign and defense minkster starting in 2001; Sabir Abdul-Aziz al-Duri, director of military intelligence; Hussein Rashid al-Tikriti, deputy of operations for the Iraqi forces; Tahir Tawfiq al-Ani, governor of Mosul; and Farhan Mutlak al-Jubouri, head of military intelligence in the north.
Contributing: Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi, Kirk Semple.