Saddam and six co-defendants including his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, dubbed "Chemical Ali", were in the dock again to face charges including genocide over the brutal 1987-88 Anfal campaign against Kurds in northern Iraq which prosecutors say left 182,000 people dead.

The trial, which began on August 21, has seen nine Kurds give chilling accounts of how Saddam's forces swept through the northern Kurdish villages killing and gassing people and destroying their homes.

On Monday the former ruler charged that the trial was dividing Iraq between the Kurds and the Sunni Arabs.

"The whole beginning (of witness testimonies) is aimed at creating a split within Iraq between the Kurds and Arabs," Saddam said in a tirade from the dock.

"I want to give a message to the Iraqi people that they should not suffer from this guilt that they killed Kurds. This is shameful," he said.

Saddam, who is also awaiting a verdict in a trial over the killing of Shiite villagers after an attempt on his life in 1982, is charged with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity over the Anfal campaign.

If found guilty, he faces execution by hanging.

Saddam, showing flashes of anger, claimed he had on several occasions acted on behalf of the Kurdish minority in Iraq.

"After the Iran-Iraq war ... I made a statement on TV and radio giving orders that no Iraqi security force should arrest Kurds, and if anyone has problems with Kurds, they should complain to Saddam Hussein."

The former dictator also said it was he who agreed autonomy for the Kurds in northern Iraq in 1970, when he was vice president.

"If the Arabs were racist and discriminatory, why would they accept an autonomy for the Kurds," he said, vowing however that "Iraqis will not split".

Saddam's outburst Monday came after three witnesses claimed he and his co-accused ordered the gassing of Kurds and bombing of their villages to quell an insurgency that coincided with the last years of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

Katherine Elias Mikhail, once a peshmerga Kurdish guerrilla, described how she was present when first her unit and then a year later her village were gassed by Saddam's air force.

"I saw hundreds of people -- not dozens but hundreds -- and they were vomiting and teary-eyed," she said describing a 1987 attack on a peshmerga base. "People with me collapsed because they had lost their sight."

In late 1988, the planes struck her village.

"We had been frequently attacked by aircraft, but this time the sound of the explosions was not as loud as before and after the explosion there was white smoke," said the woman who is now a writer in the United States.

Mikhail, who has long since shed her guerrilla fatigues for a business suit, said she lost most of her family to the old regime and her complaint was against Saddam and Chemical Ali and "the international companies who supplied the Iraqi regimes with these weapons".

She was followed on the witness stand by two more Kurds, including Ahmed Abdel Rahman, a farmer who described how troops came through his village in 1987, set fire to his village and drove off their cattle.

"We followed after them and begged them to return our cattle, and they told us that the Iraqi government had ordered them to kill us and loot our livestock," he said, going on to describe his subsequent imprisonment.