THIS is victor’s justice. There is a tiny chance that it will calm Iraq’s turmoil, but much more likely, it will have the opposite effect.

The verdict is no surprise. One hundred per cent of Iraqis anticipated it; 80 per cent with a sense of vindication, 20 per cent with fury.

The only doubt yesterday was whether the court would consider that the Dujail case was sufficiently strong to warrant the death penalty, or whether it would wait for one of the later charges, where the chain of command from Saddam Hussein to the killings might be more firmly established. But it didn’t.

For more than a year, this court has looked like an exercise in vengeance of the Shia majority in Iraq, brutally suppressed by Saddam Hussein. The court and its succession of judges have been overwhelmed by violence, threats, and the sectarian rifts within the country’s politics, to the point where it became impossible to see it as a contribution to the political health of the country.

There were high hopes at first that it might help to heal Iraq’s rifts, but it is hard to see now that it will do anything but deepen them.

The initial aim behind holding the trial in Iraq, under an Iraqi legal system, was clear and, at first, defensible. The United States wanted the trial to advertise the ability of the new Iraqi administration to run the country, under a nationwide legal system. It did not want the trial to seem American in the eyes of Iraqis, a possible consequence had it been removed to an international court.

The capture of Saddam was, at the time, seen as a “turning point” in the country’s recovery after the years of dictatorship. The US hoped that the spectacle of a fair trial would help to unite the country, reassuring even those Sunnis who had prospered under Saddam that the new Iraq would embrace the rule of law.

That seems a distant dream, improbable (as many US officials acknowledged) even at the time, and now bitterly farcical. More than two years of sectarian killings have created an unbridgable rift between Sunni and Shia; even in Saddam’s time, it was more blurred.

The procedures of the trial came under fierce criticism from the start. Judges struggled to keep control; Saddam was often able to dominate proceedings. Rules for introducing evidence and witnesses appeared to change.

Human Rights Watch, the human rights lobby group, has argued that this inexperienced court would have had more access to advisers from other quarters — for example, the European Union — if Iraq had not held on to the death penalty as a punishment.

But it is worth remembering that it was Paul Bremer, the much-criticised US administrator who took over the running of the country in the immediate aftermath of the war, who scrapped the death penalty, fearing sectarian persecution; Iraqi administrations reinstated it.

Sonya Sceats, of Chatham House, the think-tank, argues that “although this trial was beset by irregularities, it was not the complete train wreck that many critics predicted. In between the dramatic exchanges that made headlines across the world, a proper criminal case was made.”

Witnesses did appear, despite threats against them, and delivered hours of testimony, even if some of it was no more than rumour and personal venom. Saddam did keep a defence team together, despite targeted killings of his lawyers.()

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