Survivor Waits for Saddam to Get Justice
June 30, 2004 — -- Taymour Rowghzaee has been waiting 16 years to testify against Saddam Hussein.
He was 12 years old in April 1988, when Iraqi troops herded the entire population of his Kurdish village, Kulajo, into a mass grave and opened fire with machine guns.
"They started shooting at us. I saw with my own eyes," said Rowghzaee. "They were shooting at kids, at pregnant women."
Rowghzaee says he was shot in the shoulder by an Iraqi soldier who kicked him into a trench filled with dead bodies before shooting him again in his lower back. He escaped by hiding under a pile of bodies before running to safety. His mother and sisters did not not survive.
Rowghzaee, now 28 and living in Virginia, is one of the few eyewitnesses who survived Saddam's massacres who can testify firsthand that the Iraqi dictator committed mass murder during his 24-year rule.
It has been well documented that Saddam's armies used bullets and poison gas to murder hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, of his own people.
The former dictator and 11 of his top lieutenants will appear Thursday before an Iraqi judge to hear criminal charges likely to include war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.
It will be several months or even years before the trials end, but the outcome is not really in doubt.
"This is not going to be a difficult case," said Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador who who first documented Saddam's genocidal campaign against the Iraqi Kurds in 1991, when he served on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "All that needs to be demonstrated is that the crimes took place and that Saddam Hussein was the president of Iraq, and as the president of Iraq he was in charge."
Going After ‘Chemical Ali’
The regime's own documents are extremely damning. One order written in 1987 to Iraqi troops in the northern part of Iraq relates to Kurdish villages. It reads: "Those between 15 and 70 must be executed after any useful information has been obtained from them."
"That would certainly be the perfect example of the kind of order, if it could be traced to Saddam, that would be the basis for a conviction of certainly murder and probably genocide as well," said Noah Feldman, former adviser to the Iraqi Governing Council and a New York University law professor.
Much of the evidence against Saddam will involve the orders he gave to his cousin, Gen. Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali" because of his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds.
He will be among the first to go on trial, officials told ABC News.
Al-Majid has in the past denied any involvement in the massacre, but he can be heard on an audiotape planning the attacks.
"I can say I will hit them with the chemicals and kill them all," he says on the tape, speaking in Arabic. "Who is going to say anything? The international community? To hell with the international community."
Human rights groups say it is important that evidence be presented on as many as possible of the many massacres that took place — including those that occurred when Saddam was considered a friend of the United States.
As for Taymour Rowghzaee, he told ABC News a trial is too good for Saddam.
"I would love to see him dead, hanging from a tree somewhere in the middle of the road, that everyone see him and throw a rock at him," he said. "And now it's payback time."