Tough new judge threatens to derail rocky Saddam trial

Judge Rauf Rasheed Abdel Rahman made it clear from the very start of the hearing he was not going to tolerate the outbursts by defendants that had given the trial the reputation of being turbulent and disorganised.

His efforts to crack down on the unruly defendants, however, resulted in the walkout of the entire defence team and half of the defendants, including Saddam, and has only cast further doubt on the credibility of the trouble-plagued trial.

The resignation of the previous chief judge under political pressure, the assassination of defence lawyers and the decision to try Saddam inside Iraq rather than at an international court have all sparked debate about whether the trial was truly fair.

International human rights groups, many of which have spent the past few decades collecting material on the abuses of Saddam's regime in hopes of an eventual trial, prefer the proven credibility of an international tribunal such as the one now trying former Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic.

Instead Saddam and other former regime figures are being tried by an Iraqi court inside a country where all judges were once appointed by the previous regime.

Most of the judges in the Iraqi High Tribunal were actually lawyers under Saddam, with one of the few exceptions being former presiding judge Rizkar Mohammed Amin.

Amin opted for a softly, softly approach while presiding over Saddam and his co-defendants.

He allowed Saddam's half brother, Barzan al-Tikriti, to ramble on endlessly, in a painfully slow process that nevertheless heard the testimony of 15 witnesses and kept all the defendants in the courtroom, apart from a one-day boycott by the former president.