JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – The day of reckoning when Saddam Hussein will be compelled to answer for some of the worst crimes in modern history is fast approaching.

Iraq’s fallen dictator will shortly suffer an indignity that seemed inconceivable during his 24 years of dominance. He will be taken from his cell near Baghdad Airport and placed on trial before a tribunal of Iraqi judges wielding the power to execute him.

This moment of accountability – something that Saddam would never have entertained when he resided in a presidential palace – drew closer when the first charge was pressed against him yesterday.

Under the indictment’s first entry, Saddam is accused of ordering the massacre of 140 Iraqi villagers as a punitive reprisal for a botched assassination attempt in 1982. That, as the deposed tyrant knows too well, is only the beginning.

He is likely to face about 12 charges, all of them capital crimes. When the trial takes place, Iraqis will be forced to relive the most violent episodes of his rule.

The tribunal will concentrate on his brutal “Anfal” campaign against the Kurdish minority in the north of the country, in which a gas attack on Halabja cost 100,000 lives in 1987-88.

Saddam’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait in 1990 will lead to further charges. He will also be held accountable for the ruthless suppression of the Kurdish and Shia uprisings between March and May of 1991.

At the height of this campaign, Saddam’s army forced 450,000 Kurdish refugees to flee to Turkey. In southern Iraq, his Republican Guard tank units attacked the Shia holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, killing between 30,000 and 60,000 people.

The judges will also investigate the destruction of the southern marshes, which Saddam carried from 1991 onward. The campaign cost tens of thousands of lives and forced 100,000 Marsh Arabs to flee.

Standing alongside Saddam will be an array of his henchmen. His co-accused in the first charge relating to the destruction of the village include the then head of the Mukhabarat intelligence service, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti; a former vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, and a former senior official in the Baath Party, Awad Hamid al-Bandar. If convicted, they could face the death penalty.

Yet outside observers are worried about the fairness of the proceedings. The tribunal established to try the dictator does not meet international standards for justice. A panel of five or seven Iraqi judges will hear the case against Saddam, drawn from a pool of 40 serving the tribunal. Aside from the chief judge, Raid Juhi, none has been named because of security fears.

Iraq has no tradition of judicial independence, let alone fair trials. Observers fear that Iraqi judges, whose only experience is of a chaotic, corrupted legal system, are incapable of overseeing fair trials.

International advisers are attached to the tribunal, and the judges have been given training. But critics say they have gone about gathering evidence in an amateurish manner, relying heavily on old reports compiled by Western human rights organizations.

Lawyers defending Saddam and his co-accused have not been given the normal privileges. Saddam has been allowed only two meetings with an Iraqi lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi.

Twenty-four other lawyers forming the core of his defense committee have been unable to visit Iraq, let alone confer with their clients. They have little access to the documentary evidence that will be presented against Saddam. The tribunal’s rules of procedure remain vague.

Saddam’s team claims the support of 2,000 lawyers worldwide. But its leading figure, Ziad al-Khasawneh, a Jordanian, said he was resigning last week and accused American lawyers among the supporters of undermining him.

This weak defense team appears incapable of standing up for Saddam even if the trial were to be conducted fairly.

Yet if he is convicted by proceedings that do not meet international standards, it may hand him a propaganda victory. His supporters will claim that he was the victim of an unfair trial.

The families of Saddam’s countless victims are unlikely to worry about the legal niceties. For them, justice will have been done.