Saddam to write memoirs?
Ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein will write his memoirs from the jail where he is awaiting trial, a British newspaper has reported, quoting one of his lawyers.
Giovanni di Stefano, a member of Hussein’s legal team, was quoted by the Financial Times as saying that Saddam would write about his childhood in Iraq, his early exile to Egypt and his military adventures in Iran and Kuwait.
He will try to embarrass the great powers that once saw him as a useful buffer against the ambitions of Iran after the 1979 Islamic revolution, di Stefano was quoted as saying.
He will tell how France and Britain betrayed him by also helping Iran during the 1980-89 war with Iraq.
”There will be quite considerable detail,” the lawyer was quoted as saying. “The Americans holding him are relaxed about it and we have seen some of the translation.”
Charges
Hussein, a Sunni Arab, faces charges related to crushing Kurdish and Shia revolts.
One of the more specific charges against the former president accuses him of killing members of the Kurdish Barzani family en masse, as well as a 1988 chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja that killed thousands.
Hussein appeared in front of an investigating judge last year and defended his 1990 invasion of Kuwait as fulfilling a just territorial claim.
He denied committing the Halabja massacre and said he heard about that through the media.
The former president was born in 1937 in the Awja village near Tikrit north of Baghdad. He turned 68 in late April.