BAGHDAD -- Saddam Hussein, testifying yesterday for the first time in his trial, called on Iraqis to stop killing each other and instead fight US troops. The judge reprimanded him for making a rambling, political speech and ordered the television cameras switched off.
Hussein began his speech by declaring he was the elected president, touching off a shouting match with chief judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman.
''You used to be a head of state. You are a defendant now," Abdel-Rahman told him.
Hussein, dressed in a black suit and wearing large reading glasses, repeatedly brushed off the judge's demands that he address the charges against him, the killing of 148 Shi'ites and the imprisonment and torture of others during a crackdown in the 1980s.
Instead, he read from a prepared text, addressing the ''great Iraqi people" -- a phrase he often used in his presidential speeches -- and said he was ''pained" by the recent wave of Sunni-Shi'ite violence.
''Let the people unite and resist the invaders and their backers. Don't fight among yourselves," he said, praising the insurgency.
''In your resistance to the invasion by the Americans and Zionists and their allies, you were great. You were great in my eyes and you remain so. . . . It's only a matter of time until the sun rises and you'll be victorious," he said.
Abdel-Rahman shouted at him again and closed the session for 90 minutes, ordering journalists out of the room and the delayed broadcast cut while Hussein finished reading his speech.
The stormy exchanges were a stark contrast to the past few sessions, when each of Hussein's seven codefendants took the stand, one by one, and were questioned by the judge and prosecutor about the crackdown in the Shi'ite town of Dujail after a 1982 assassination attempt on the then-Iraqi president.
Even Hussein's half-brother, former intelligence chief Barzan Ibrahim, who has frequently caused an uproar in the court, submitted to more than three hours of questioning earlier yesterday. He denied any role in the crackdown, and as prosecutors presented a series of intelligence memos on the arrests allegedly bearing his signatures, he insisted each was a forgery.
Prosecutors will have another chance to try to question Hussein on the charges when the trial reconvenes April 5.
But in yesterday's session, Hussein sought to project the image of a man still in power addressing his people in troubled times, even as Abdel-Rahman repeatedly stabbed a button on his desk to shut off Hussein's microphone.
At one point, the judge screamed, ''Respect yourself!" Hussein shouted back: ''You respect yourself!"
''You are a defendant in a major criminal case, concerning the killing of innocents. You have to respond to this charge," Abdel-Rahman told him.
