Iraqi Judge Questions Aides of Hussein With Lawyers

By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 18 - The chief investigative judge for the Iraqi tribunal established to try Saddam Hussein and his top aides said Saturday that he had held formal interviews with Ali Hassan al-Majid, known to Iraqis as Chemical Ali, and Sultan Hashim Ahmed, the Iraqi defense minister during the United States-led invasion last year.

Their questioning followed a flurry of statements by top Iraqi officials indicating that the beginning of formal trials was imminent for least some of a core group of 12 former members of Mr. Hussein's government who are being held in an American military detention center near the Baghdad airport. On Thursday, a Jordan-based legal team retained by Mr. Hussein's family said the former Iraqi ruler had met with a lawyer for the first time since his capture on Dec. 13 last year.

But a news conference called after the Saturday interviews by the chief investigative judge, Raid Juhi, failed to make clear whether the sessions amounted to a new stage in the tribunal procedures, much less the formal start of trials. Rather, they appeared to have been part of the tribunal's routine work that officials decided to publicize to meet pressures from Iraq's interim government.

Tribunal officials have said the cases against both the men center on gas attacks by Iraqi forces on Kurdish villages in the late 1980's, and on the savage repression of a Shiite rebellion in southern Iraq that followed the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

A Western official familiar with the tribunal's work cautioned reporters not to describe the judge's questioning of Mr. Majid and Mr. Hashim as the first such sessions held by the tribunal with the 12 detainees, and noted that such encounters were a regular part of the tribunal's preparation for eventual trials.

This suggested that statements in recent days about the tribunal reaching a new watershed in the judicial process may have been inspired more by Iraqi politics ahead of the elections set for Jan. 30 than by any actual acceleration of its work.

The newest element of the Saturday sessions may have been that the defendants were represented by court-appointed lawyers - necessitated by the fact no other lawyer volunteered to represent them - or that it took place in a courtroom rather than the detention center. Television coverage showed Mr. Majid, 58, being led into the courtroom in a gray suit and open-necked shirt. He paused to have his handcuffs removed, then sat down in a chair placed in the center of the court.

During the interview Mr. Majid, a relative of Mr. Hussein, clutched a walking stick, perhaps because of the diabetes for which he has been treated by American doctors since he was captured in August 2003.

The heavy-set Mr. Hashim, 54, similarly dressed, was shown seated in the same chair. Tribunal officials had said he had been cooperating with investigators, providing information about the involvement of other detainees, including Mr. Majid.

The pressure for early trials became public in September, when Ayad Allawi, the interim Iraqi prime minister, told The New York Times in an interview that Iraq needed to put the brutalities of Mr. Hussein's rule behind it, and that he wanted the trials of Mr. Hussein and others to begin before the end of the year. Aides said then that Dr. Allawi, a survivor of an ax attack by agents of Iraq's intelligence service while he was living in exile in London, wanted the trials begun before the elections for a 275-member national assembly, scheduled for the end of January, so that he could cast himself as the man who brought Mr. Hussein and his aides to justice.

Dr. Allawi formally began to campaign for the election this week at the head of a coalition of secular political groups known as the Iraqi List, but despite the advantages in publicity his current role affords, he is regarded as something of an underdog, partly because of the widespread perception of him as America's man, and, paradoxically, because of his past as a onetime enforcer for Mr. Hussein's ruling Baath Party, before he fell into disfavor in the 1980's and joined the exiled opposition.

Many Iraqis say the front-runner among the slates registered in the campaign, given the country's 60 percent Shiite majority, is the United Iraqi Alliance, a broad coalition of Shiite religious parties.

Since the July court hearing, and particularly in recent weeks, the special tribunal has come under intense scrutiny, both within Iraq and among human rights and legal watchdog groups abroad. Critics have questioned whether there can be adequate guarantees of fair trials before a court established by the American occupation authority, operating under Iraqi criminal laws that were drawn up under Mr. Hussein, and run by judges and prosecutors appointed by the Americans or, more recently, by Dr. Allawi's government. The New York-based group Human Rights Watch joined the chorus of skepticism this week with a statement that said the law establishing the tribunal "lacks significant fair-trial protections, including explicit guarantees against using confessions extracted under torture, and a requirement that guilt be proven beyond a reasonable doubt."

Mr. Juhi, 35, presided at the only open hearing held so far for the 12 detainees, a procedural one on July 1. He was elusive when asked by reporters how long it might take to begin the trials, saying that the process would involve months of questioning the suspects, sifting through documents and examining the mass graves of victims. He appeared to want to rebut allegations that the tribunal had fallen under the sway of Dr. Allawi's government, or of the Americans.

"Dr. Allawi is the prime minister of Iraq, and his government is supporting the tribunal, but I can assure you that it will not intervene in these legal processes," Mr. Juhi said. "Ours is a purely legal proceeding. It has nothing to do with politics."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company