IN 24 years of tyrannical rule, Saddam Hussein brought death to millions in three wars, torture to the countless pitiful souls incarcerated in his dungeons and isolation from much of the world to the once-proud country that he cowed.

Today Iraqis expect to see the leader who terrorised them condemned to face a hangman’s noose for just one of his many crimes — the execution of 148 Shi’ite men from the village of Dujail, 40 miles north of Baghdad, in retaliation for an attempt on his life there in 1982, when he had been in power for only three years.

The country is braced for the verdict amid fears that the dictator’s Sunni supporters will mount revenge attacks on Shi’ite areas.

In a clear echo of the mood of most Iraqis, Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, said yesterday that he hoped Saddam would be given “what he deserves” when the verdict is handed down.

If, as expected, Saddam is convicted of crimes against humanity and stands in the dock to hear his sentence, I will watch with that particular attention that comes from fascination and disgust. I have reported on the misery that he has inflicted on his countrymen for more than 20 years, from the ill-judged invasion of Iran that left more than a million dead, to his equally disastrous foray into Kuwait, which left his nation in ruins.

He has cast a dark shadow of evil over every moment I have spent in Iraq — a man who had personally tortured some of his victims and even walked his young sons through his prisons to witness the barbarity.

Today’s case dates back 24 years to an ambush in which 10 gunmen fired at his convoy. In revenge, the surviving villagers testified, Saddam had hundreds of them arrested and tortured. As well as the 148 executed, a further 399 men, women and children were consigned to a desert camp.

The survivors say they relish the prospect of Saddam suffering the same punishment that he meted out to so many others. He ordered myriad death sentences for crimes as petty as insulting him or his sons, Qusay and Uday, sometimes in remarks conveyed to the authorities by teachers overhearing their pupils’ accounts of conversations at home. Nowhere was safe in Saddam’s Iraq.

The chief judge is due to read out a 200-page verdict on Saddam and seven co-defendants. Also facing possible death sentences will be Barzan al-Tikriti, his half-brother and intelligence chief, and Taha Yassin Ramadan, the former vice-president.

It will be the culmination of a bitterly divisive case that began in October last year in a crowded and chaotic courtroom where Saddam and the others heard shocking testimony from their seats in a heavily guarded “cage”.

A Dujail woman who was 16 in 1982 testified that she had been hung by her wrists, then by her ankles. She was tortured with electric shocks, beaten with cables and forced to watch her family being killed, she said. The court was told that by the time the hangman received a list of 148 men to be executed, 46 had already died under torture.

Saddam’s cold disregard was emphasised when he intimated that he had no reason to recall Dujail’s destruction or the deaths of men, women and children. “It’s not as if Saddam Hussein did not have (other) work to do,” he told the judge.

His contempt for the villagers reflected his attitude to far bloodier campaigns against the Kurds in the north and Shi’ites in the south. In his 1988 campaign against the Kurds, he unleashed his army on northern Iraq and killed 100,000, including 5,000 in the village of Halabja, where chemical weapons rained down death.

In 1991, after the Americans drove Saddam out of Kuwait, he killed a similar number of Shi’ites in the south, mowing them down with helicopter gunships when they dared to rise up against him.

Saddam and his cousin, Ali Hassan al Majeed, known as Chemical Ali for his role in the poison gas attack, both face the charge of genocide for the Kurdish campaign in a separate trial.

The dictator’s complete lack of remorse is striking. He seemed genuinely puzzled when confronted by testimony of torture and killing. “Where’s the crime?” he asked the judge, arguing that such reprisals were only to be expected against traitors.

The 55-week trial was meant to mark the start of Iraq’s Nuremberg — the exposure of an evil regime. Instead, dogged by delays and interruptions, it has veered between tragedy and farce.

Saddam harangued the judges, insisted that he was still the president of Iraq and told the court to “go to hell”. Two judges were changed: one resigned and a second was forced to step down after saying that Saddam had never been a dictator. Three defence lawyers were murdered.

Amnesty International has been among the strongest critics of the trial, arguing that it was “a deeply flawed process”. American officials in Baghdad were relieved that it had not collapsed. “A verdict on Saddam is what we wanted and at last that’s what we’re getting,” said one.

Saddam’s case will automatically go for review to an appellate chamber, Iraq’s highest court. If it upholds the outcome, he will face the gallows 30 days later.

Saddam’s death could go a long way towards curbing the insurgency that is tearing Iraq apart. Most of the Sunni militants are former members of his Ba’ath party, fighting to win back the power they have lost. They still harbour the faint hope that he will lead them again.

The crime he will never answer for is the ruination of the lives of millions of Iraqis who survived the wars and repression, but are still condemned to lives of chaos and despair.

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