Saddam Hussein's trial kept Rasha Saad busy reading the Arab press Saddam Hussein made a strong comeback in the headlines, columns and cartoons in the Arab press this week. After his capture in December the fallen Iraqi leader had been making scant news until his trial opened last Thursday, prompting widespread coverage. There were all types of stories. His appearance before the US-appointed Iraqi judge; his verbal attack against the US president and the Kuwaitis; Arab and international reaction to the trial; and obviously speculation over what the trial will mean in the end for Saddam and his country. There were also stories on Iraqi reaction to the trial. Indeed, there was hardly a day that passed away without having at least one Iraqi reaction feature in the Arab press: the Kurds and Shiites were pleased and wanted Saddam to be executed in public for his heinous crimes against them. But not the Sunnis who were angered by the trial and wanted their president freed. "The mass graves and Halabja are American-made lies", read the headline of an interview with Saddam's chief lawyer in the Saudi- financed and London-based Asharq Al-Awsat. According to lawyer Mohamed Rashdan, the team of attorneys defending Saddam have "documents and information" that they will use to prove that all allegations suggesting that Saddam was responsible for mass-gassing Kurdish Iraqis in Halabja or killing hundreds of thousands of his opponents and throwing them in mass graves are absolute lies fabricated and circulated by the Americans. Just as Saddam tried to present himself before the court as "the president of the Iraqi people," Rashdan, too, insisted that Saddam was in fact the "legitimate and former president of Iraq. "The aggression against Iraq was illegal and therefore all its consequences are simply illegal." Saddam's lawyers were a must-have story for many newspapers which could not agree on the facts. One day a paper would suggest that Saddam was being represented by over 100 lawyer; the following day another paper would say that they were around 50. One day, all the lawyers were Iraqi; the next they were attorneys from across the Arab world and beyond. One thing was sure though: on Monday the daughter of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, Aicha, added her name to the list of attorneys defending Saddam. But "Does Saddam deserve all this eagerness to defend him?" So asked Qatari commentator Abdel-Hamid Al- Ansari on Tuesday in another London-based daily Al- Hayat. "It seems that Saddam has been able to attract considerable sympathy," noted Al-Ansari. But again he asked what had prompted all these lawyers to jump to the defence of a man who might be behind the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Al-Ansari answered his own question. "The right to have a lawyer is an established legal right even for a man who swam in the blood of the people he killed." However, Al-Ansari could not find a legal context within which he could explain the keenness of so many lawyers to defend Saddam -- something that former Serbian President Slobodan Milosovic would have loved to have -- except perhaps the search for fame on the part of some lawyers, and an anti-Western political affiliation on the part of others. Whatever their motives, stressed Kuwaiti commentator Ahmed Al-Rabei in his daily column in Asharq Al-Awsat on Sunday, these lawyers, who showed no similar interest in defending Palestinian freedom fighter Marwan Al-Barghouti, should be ignored. According to Al-Rabei, they subscribe "to a group of Arabs who cannot see a nation without a dictator who kills its people. As far as they're concerned the nation always needs this bloody killer who talks day and night of defeating the enemy but who ultimately kills the people of the nation." "The first observation that one could make on Saddam Hussein's trial is that Saddam is a lucky man," wrote Lebanese commentator Hazem Saghiya in his regular column in Al-Hayat of Saturday. "Unlike his many victims and the many people he killed, Saddam is getting a trial. This as such is a point in favour of the new Iraqi regime that was handed some sovereignty but has still a long way to go on this road," Saghiya wrote. The link between Saddam's trial and the dramatic yet uneventful and abrupt handover of power to the Iraqi caretaker government was made by commentators. Many argued that since this government has no real power and was not elected by the Iraqi people in the first place, then it has no right to put Saddam on trial "on behalf of the Americans." They suggested that Saddam should have been tried before an international court of justice where "justice could be really served" and not before a court manipulated by the US "where the electoral interests of the US president are being served," otherwise the trial could have taken place following the election of a representative Iraqi government. "Saddam is being tried for crimes he committed and he, therefore, should be tried by a real Iraqi court that represents all the Iraqi people and in the presence of a legitimate Iraqi defence, not by judges installed by the US and lawyers who do not belong to the Iraqi people," wrote Joseph Samaha in the Lebanese daily As-Safir on Saturday.
