Saddam Hussein refused to enter court for his trial yesterday, bringing the often chaotic proceedings to a halt before the judge decided to press on with the televized hearing without him.
 
After telling the court to "go to hell" the night before, the 68-year-old former leader boycotted what would have been the fifth session of the trial and spent most of the day in talks with lawyers and a battle of wills with the Kurdish presiding judge.

Judge Rizgar Amin eventually opted to push ahead with proceedings and heard testimony from two more witnesses before adjourning the trial until December 21 six days after next week's election for the first full parliament of the post-Saddam era.

Amin said he would use the two-week break to consider a defence motion to review the way evidence was being given.

As the witnesses gave their testimony, Saddam's black leather chair stood conspicuously empty at the front of the defendant's penned-in dock in the marbled Baghdad courtroom.

The witnesses, speaking from behind a curtain for fear of their lives, described abuses they say they suffered in Saddam's jails in the 1980s and one of them, identified only as Witness F, said he saw a fellow prisoner tortured to death.

"They told us they wanted to speak to us for 10 minutes," the final witness, G, said of a round-up of people in the Shi'ite town of Dujail after an assassination attempt on Saddam in 1982.

"We were gone for four and a half years."

Saddam's no-show is the most dramatic twist so far in a trial that has been plagued by delays, faulty equipment and rambling testimony since it opened on October 19.

It has already been adjourned twice once to allow the defence time to prepare their case and once after two defence lawyers were shot dead. The latest adjournment had been widely expected because of the election.

Under Iraqi law, which forms the basis of the tribunal's rules in an amalgam with other principles of international law, the trial can continue to its conclusion without Saddam.

With the election looming, the Shi'ite and Kurdish-led government is keen to show the long-oppressed majority community that their former dictator faces justice.

The UN's human rights chief in Iraq says he sees little prospect of the trial meeting international standards.

Saddam's half-brother Barzan, his then intelligence chief, complained of his treatment in jail. He said he had been denied tea and coffee for a year, lost 18 kilograms in weight and offered only inferior brand cigarettes.

(China Daily December 8, 2005)