- All army leave cancelled as fear of violence grows
- Death sentence could spark attacks, officials say

Iraqi authorities plan to impose a curfew in Baghdad and all army leave has been cancelled as tensions grow ahead of tomorrow's expected verdict in the trial of Saddam Hussein and seven co-defendants for crimes against humanity in the town of Dujail 24 years ago.

With violence raging in the capital and across swaths of central Iraq, a senior Iraqi security official told the Guardian last night that they were "prepared to take every precaution and measure to stop insurgents and terrorists from undermining the rule of law".

If found guilty of ordering the deaths of 148 Shia men and teenage boys in Dujail, and the subsequent destruction of farmland, following an assassination attempt against him in 1982, the former Iraqi dictator could face death by hanging.

The security official, who declined to be named, said there was evidence that former members of Saddam's now banned Ba'ath party, which is reorganising into underground cells, planned to instigate a number of big attacks around the country if Saddam was sentenced to death.

Bracing for violence after the judgment, due to be read out in a fortified courtroom inside Baghdad's green zone, the defence minister, Abdul-Qader al-Obeidi, cancelled army leave. "All vacations will be cancelled and all those who are on vacation must return," he said at a meeting with the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki.

The official nervousness is an indication of how the US-backed judicial process - intended to unite Iraqis by helping them to gain closure on years of Ba'athist rule - now threatens further division of the troubled country.

The United Nations reported yesterday that nearly 100,000 Iraqis are fleeing the country every month to Syria and Jordan in the face of increasing instability and sectarian violence.

Although a guilty verdict is likely to be welcomed by Iraq's Shia and Kurdish populations, who suffered disproportionately under Saddam, the once dominant Sunni Arabs who are the mainstay of the insurgency could see the decision as further evidence of their marginalisation.

During the nine-month trial Saddam Hussein faced charges over the mass executions and torturing of Shia villagers in Dujail. Also on trial are Taha Yassin Ramadan, a former vice-president; Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam's half-brother and a former head of the Mukhabarat secret service; Awad Ahmad al-Bander, a former chief judge; and four Ba'ath party officials from Dujail. The prosecutor has also asked for the death penalty for Mr Tikriti and Mr Ramadan. The other defendants are expected to get less severe sentences.

Officials at the Iraqi high tribunal said the verdict would probably be read out by the chief judge, Rauf Abdel Rahman, but would represent the views of a simple majority among the five-man panel hearing the case. The former president has the right to appeal to a nine-judge panel if convicted. If the panel upholds the decision the punishment must be carried out within 30 days.

Under Iraqi criminal law a death sentence must be carried out by hanging, though Saddam wants to be put before a firing squad. Saddam and six former officials are already standing trial in a second case, alleged genocide against the Kurds during the Anfal campaign of 1988. It is unclear whether those cases would move forward if Saddam is condemned to hang.

The Dujail trial has occasionally verged on anarchy. Three defence lawyers have been murdered; there has been procedural wrangling, political grandstanding by the accused and protestations of illegitimacy and injustice by the defence team. The credibility of the trial has been called into question by human rights organisations and the UN.

In a further twist, Saddam's chief defence lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi, said yesterday he had written to the tribunal requesting a two-month adjournment to allow the defence to complete its presentations. He told Reuters in Amman that the tribunal was being unduly pressured by the US to deliver a verdict tomorrow to aid the US Republican party ahead of the midterm elections.

The statement offered no direct comment on the outcome of the trial but did say, however, that the EU had repeatedly condemned "the systematic, widespread and extremely grave violations of human rights and of international humanitarian law committed by the regime of Saddam Hussein".

The U.S.-backed Iraqi High Tribunal judged Saddam guilty of crimes against humanity for his role in the killing of 148 Shi'ite villagers after a failed assassination bid in 1982.

U.S. White House spokesman Tony Snow said the judgement was a "good day for the Iraqi people", while British interior minister John Reid said the ruling should be respected.

Around the region, the outcome satisfied countries that Saddam invaded, but caused resentment amongst some Arabs who see him as the victim of a U.S.-inspired show trial.

Human rights groups and legal experts have called the year-long trial, during which three defence lawyers were killed, deeply flawed.

Of course, it couldn't happen to a better man. Nor a worse. It couldn't be a more just verdict - nor a more hypocritical one. It's difficult to think of a more suitable monster for the gallows, preferably dispatched by his executioner, the equally monstrous hangman of Abu Ghraib prison, Abu Widad, who would strike his victims on the head with an axe if they dared to condemn the leader of the Iraqi Socialist Baath Party before he hanged them. But Abu Widad was himself hanged at Abu Ghraib in 1985 after accepting a bribe to put a reprieved prisoner to death instead of the condemned man. But we can't mention Abu Ghraib these days because we have followed Saddam's trail of shame into the very same institution. And so by hanging this awful man, we hope - don't we? - to look better than him, to remind Iraqis that life is better now than it was under Saddam.

Only so ghastly is the hell-disaster that we have inflicted upon Iraq that we cannot even say that. Life is now worse. Or rather, death is now visited upon even more Iraqis than Saddam was able to inflict on his Shias and Kurds and - yes, in Fallujah of all places - his Sunnis, too. So we cannot even claim moral superiority. For if Saddam's immorality and wickedness are to be the yardstick against which all our iniquities are judged, what does that say about us? We only sexually abused prisoners and killed a few of them and murdered some suspects and carried out a few rapes and illegally invaded a country which cost Iraq a mere 600,000 lives ("more or less", as George Bush Jnr said when he claimed the figure to be only 30,000). Saddam was much worse. We can't be put on trial. We can't be hanged.

"Allahu Akbar," the awful man shouted - God is greater. No surprise there. He it was who insisted these words should be inscribed upon the Iraqi flag, the same flag which now hangs over the palace of the government that has condemned him after a trial at which the former Iraqi mass murderer was formally forbidden from describing his relationship with Donald Rumsfeld, now George Bush's Secretary of Defence. Remember that handshake? Nor, of course, was he permitted to talk about the support he received from George Bush Snr, the current US President's father. Little wonder, then, that Iraqi officials claimed last week the Americans had been urging them to sentence Saddam before the mid-term US elections.

Anyone who said the verdict was designed to help the Republicans, Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, blurted out yesterday, must be "smoking rope". Well, Tony, that rather depends on what kind of rope it might be. Snow, after all, claimed yesterday that the Saddam verdict - not the trial itself, please note - was "scrupulous and fair". The judges will publish "everything they used to come to their verdict."

No doubt. Because here are a few of the things that Saddam was not allowed to comment upon: sales of chemicals to his Nazi-style regime so blatant - so appalling - that he has been sentenced to hang on a localised massacre of Shias rather than the wholesale gassing of Kurds over which George W Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara were so exercised when they decided to depose Saddam in 2003 - or was it in 2002? Or 2001? Some of Saddam's pesticides came from Germany (of course). But on 25 May 1994, the US Senate's Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs produced a report entitled "United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences (sic) of the Persian Gulf War".

This was the 1991 war which prompted our liberation of Kuwait, and the report informed Congress about US government-approved shipments of biological agents sent by American companies to Iraq from 1985 or earlier. These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces anthrax; Clostridium botulinum; Histoplasma capsulatum; Brucella melitensis; Clostridium perfringens and Escherichia coli. The same report stated that the US provided Saddam with "dual use" licensed materials which assisted in the development of chemical, biological and missile-system programmes, including chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility plans).

Yes, well I can well see why Saddam wasn't permitted to talk about this. John Reid, the British Home Secretary, said that Saddam's hanging "was a sovereign decision by a sovereign nation". Thank heavens he didn't mention the £200,000 worth of thiodiglycol, one of two components of mustard gas we exported to Baghdad in 1988, and another £50,000 worth of the same vile substances the following year.

We also sent thionyl chloride to Iraq in 1988 at a price of only £26,000. Yes, I know these could be used to make ballpoint ink and fabric dyes. But this was the same country - Britain - that would, eight years later, prohibit the sale of diphtheria vaccine to Iraqi children on the grounds that it could be used for - you guessed it - "weapons of mass destruction".

Now in theory, I know, the Kurds have a chance for their own trial of Saddam, to hang him high for the thousands of Kurds gassed at Halabja. This would certainly keep him alive beyond the 30-day death sentence review period. But would the Americans and British dare touch a trial in which we would have not only to describe how Saddam got his filthy gas but why the CIA - in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi war crimes against Halabja - told US diplomats in the Middle East to claim that the gas used on the Kurds was dropped by the Iranians rather than the Iraqis (Saddam still being at the time our favourite ally rather than our favourite war criminal). Just as we in the West were silent when Saddam massacred 180,000 Kurds during the great ethnic cleansing of 1987 and 1988.

And - dare we go so deep into this betrayal of the Iraqis we loved so much that we invaded their country? - then we would have to convict Saddam of murdering countless thousands of Shia Muslims as well as Kurds after they staged an uprising against the Baathist regime at our specific request - thousands whom webetrayed by leaving them to fight off Saddam's brutal hordes on their own. "Rioting," is how Lord Blair's meretricious "dodgy dossier" described these atrocities in 2002 - because, of course, to call them an "uprising" (which they were) would invite us to ask ourselves who contrived to provoke this bloodbath. Answer: us.

I and my colleagues watched this tragedy. I travelled on the hospital trains that brought the Iranians back from the 1980-88 war front, their gas wounds bubbling in giant blisters on their arms and faces, giving birth to smaller blisters that wobbled on top of their wounds. The British and Americans didn't want to know. I talked to the victims of Halabja. The Americans didn't want to know. My Associated Press colleague Mohamed Salaam saw the Iranian dead lying gassed in their thousands on the battlefields east of Basra. The Americans and the British didn't care.

But now we are to give the Iraqi people bread and circuses, the final hanging of Saddam, twisting, twisting slowly in the wind. We have won. We have inflicted justice upon the man whose country we invaded and eviscerated and caused to break apart. No, there is no sympathy for this man. "President Saddam Hussein has no fear of being executed," Bouchra Khalil, a Lebanese lawyer on his team, said in Beirut a few days ago. "He will not come out of prison to count his days and years in exile in Qatar or any other place. He will come out of prison to go to the presidency or to his grave." It looks like the grave. Keitel went there. Ceausescu went there. Milosevic escaped sentence.

The odd thing is that Iraq is now swamped with mass murderers, guilty of rape and massacre and throat-slitting and torture in the years since our "liberation" of Iraq. Many of them work for the Iraqi government we are currently supporting, democratically elected, of course. And these war criminals, in some cases, are paid by us, through the ministries we set up under this democratic government. And they will not be tried. Or hanged. That is the extent of our cynicism. And our shame. Have ever justice and hypocrisy been so obscenely joined?

"The EU opposes capital punishment in all cases and under all circumstances and it should not be carried out in this case either," the Finnish presidency said in a statement.

"Over the years, the European Union repeatedly condemned the systematic, widespread and extremely grave violations of human rights and of international humanitarian law committed by the regime of Saddam Hussein," it added.

Finland's opposition to the death sentence was echoed by UN human rights chief Louise Arbour, who called for a 'moratorium' on executions in Iraq following Saddam's verdict.

But reactions were more muted elsewhere in the 25-nation European Union, whose members have all abolished the death penalty and regularly condemn executions around the world.

In Italy, Prime Minister Romano Prodi said Saddam's death sentence reflected the international community's judgment of the former Iraqi leader, even as he expressed misgivings about the sentence.

"As much as the crime appalls us, our traditions and our ethics distance us from the use of the death penalty," Prodi said, in remarks quoted by the ANSA news agency.

A similar mix of satisfaction and unease was reflected in statements from Sweden, Spain, Denmark and Ireland

"Like any other political leader, Saddam Hussein should answer for his actions," Spain's Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero told reporters in Uruguay, where he is attending an Ibero-American summit.

"But the death penalty is not envisaged by any European Union procedure and is not well understood in our country," he added.

And while Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller saluted Iraq for conducting the trial in "an independent manner," he expressed reservations about the special tribunal that judged Saddam.

"In the case of Denmark, we don't support this special tribunal," said Moeller, whose country has 470 soldiers deployed in Iraq, mostly under British command.

In Britain praise for the Saddam verdict was unstinted.

"I welcome that Saddam Hussein and the other defendants have faced justice and have been held to account for their crimes," Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said in a statement after the Baghdad court's decision.

"Appalling crimes were committed by Saddam Hussein's regime. It is right that those accused of such crimes against the Iraqi people should face Iraqi justice.

Home Secretary John Reid said that while people might have their views on the death penalty "I am not sure that we have role to play" and called for respect for the "sovereign decision of a sovereign nation".

But in France, Foreign Minister Philippe Douste Blazy expressed fears Iraq's bloody sectarian strife could worsen as a result of the death sentence.

"I hope this decision will not lead to new tensions and that the Iraqis will show restraint, whatever community they belong to," Douste-Blazy said.

"This decision belongs to the Iraqi people," Douste-Blazy said of the sentence. But, he added, France and its EU partners would try to make their anti-death penalty stance known to Iraqi authorities.

Abolishing the death penalty is one condition for EU membership and in 1998 the block decided to spearhead the universal abolition of capital punishment and address the issue in its relations with all countries where the death penalty is legal.

"The courageous verdict issued by the judge in Saddam's case healed wounds of both Iranian and Iraqi nations, and is hoped to have positive impact on the two nations," said Ayatollah Shahroudi in an address to a group of judiciary officials.
Shahroudi termed the death sentence as a 'courageous and completely right, being consistent with the court's charter and judicial system of Iraq'.
He said Saddam's fate should serve as an eye-opener for all dictators and idols.
Saddam was sentenced to hang by the Iraqi High Tribunal, which found him guilty of crimes against humanity in the case of 148 Shiite civilians killed in revenge for a 1982 attempt on his life.
On Monday, Saddam's lawyers launched his appeal.
Under Iraqi law, if it fails he must be executed within 30 days.