Madiba could chair Bush 'trial'

2006-01-29 14:35

Amman - International activists and lawyers involved in the defence of Saddam Hussein said on Sunday they would organize a mock trial of US President George W Bush and the British and Israeli prime ministers for alleged war crimes committed in Iraq and the Palestinian territories.

The prosecution will be headed by former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who sits on Saddam's defence team, according to one of the organizers.

The two-day event, slated to open on Friday in the Egyptian capital, will be sponsored by the Cairo-based Arab Lawyers Federation and bring together international lawyers and human rights activists, including former Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella and ex-Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohamad, said Ziad Khasawneh, the federation's assistant secretary general and once Saddam Hussein's chief lawyer.

He told The Associated Press that former South African leader and anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela had accepted an invitation to be the chief judge "if his health condition allowed him to travel."

Ben Bella and Mohamad are also part of a committee to ensure Saddam's trial is fair.

The witnesses include former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, who monitored Iraq's weapons program under Saddam, and Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who was kidnapped in Iraq in February 2005 and released a month later.

Charges against Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon include "crimes committed against civilians in Palestine and Iraq," Khasawneh said, declining to elaborate. He said details would be unveiled at the event.

The trial is not legally binding, but it will be an "exhibition of popular opposition to the policies of those three leaders in the region and the extent of harm and damage they inflicted on civilians and countries by wars they waged and the oppression practiced in jails run by their (security) forces," Khasawneh said in an interview.

Saddam lawyers and other international activists have long spoken of plans to convene the mock trial, saying the publicity would help expose their views that Saddam was innocent of war crimes and that Bush and Blair were "aggressors" because they invaded Iraq under the false pretext that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons were ever found.

- AP