Baghdad, Iraq ? Until this week, the chief judge in Saddam Hussein’s genocide trial had seemed to be just what the chaotic judicial process against Iraq’s former ruler needed: He was stern, judicious, efficient and brisk, and court sessions were proceeding in a disciplined fashion.

Then on Thursday, Abdullah al-Amiri, a 25-year veteran of Iraq’s judiciary, made a comment that startled some inside the courtroom in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone and raised fresh questions about the fairness of the effort to bring Hussein to justice, telling the former dictator that he does not believe he was in fact a “dictator.”

The opinion was offered during the seventh session of the trial of Hussein and six co-defendants on charges of genocide in the deaths of as many as 100,000 Kurds during the brutal 1988 Anfal military campaign to crush Kurdish resistance in the north.

Hussein, snappily dressed in a dapper blue suit with a silk tie tucked into his breast pocket, rose to question the testimony of a Kurdish farmer who had said that he visited “the dictator” some 20 years ago to plead for the release of relatives detained during the campaign.

“How is it that this farmer came to see me personally if I was the dictator I am said to be, and against the Kurdish people?” Hussein asked.

Chief judge Abdullah al-Amiri said in court that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had not been a dictator. Al-Amiri made the comments Thursday during Hussein's genocide trial in Baghdad, Iraq.

“I will answer you,” the judge said, speaking slowly and deliberately as he repeated three times: “You were not a dictator. You were not a dictator. You were not a dictator.”

A broad smile spread across Hussein’s face. “Thank you,” said the man almost universally regarded as a dictator, by both his friends and foes alike.

“It was the people surrounding you who made a dictator out of you,” al-Amiri elaborated. “It wasn’t you in particular. It happens all over the world, that the people create dictators.”

The extraordinary exchange jolted many observers of the courtroom sessions, which are broadcast live on state television, and seemed to affirm a prosecution complaint rejected by al-Amiri the previous day that he should be dismissed for showing bias.

“The Iraqi people are not very happy to see that,” Bassem Ridha, the Iraqi government’s representative in the court, said of the judge’s remarks. “He should really behave the way a judge should behave.”

But Ridha also said he thought the exchange underscored the challenges confronting any Iraqi jurist who attempts to sit in judgment of the much-feared former leader at a time of widespread instability and continuing political uncertainty.

Numerous judges rejected the job, fearing for their lives, before al-Amiri, a Shiite Muslim, accepted, he said.

“These are human beings being intimidated by Saddam,” he said. “A lot of judges were too afraid to judge Saddam at such a trial. If they go on TV and judge Saddam, they will be followed and their families will be killed by members of his former regime.”

Under al-Amiri’s firm hand, this second Hussein trial has been a markedly more controlled event than the chaotic and undisciplined shouting match that constituted Hussein’s first trial.

In that, Hussein and seven co-defendants faced charges of crimes against humanity in the execution of 148 Shiites in the village of Dujail in 1982. A verdict is expected within weeks.