Kurdish witnesses took the stand on Monday and told of the horror of gas attacks unleashed against them during the brutal Anfal campaign of 1987-88.
"The whole beginning (of witness testimonies) is aimed at creating a split within Iraq between the Kurds and Arabs," the ousted dictator accused.
Saddam and six co-defendants including his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, dubbed "Chemical Ali", face charges including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity over Anfal.
Prosecutors have alleged the attacks were a systematic campaign of slaughter that killed 182,000 Kurds.
They accuse Saddam of gassing Kurds and bombing their villages to quell an insurgency that coincided with the last years of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
Witness tells of chemical attacks
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 now works as a writer in the United States.
”Shameful trial”:Saddam
The former Iraqi leader 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."
"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".
"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 is also awaiting a verdict in a trial over the killing of Shi'ite villagers after an attempt on his life in 1982 and if found guilty, he faces execution by hanging.
Bombing kills 12
As the trial resumed, a suicide bomber killed 12 people in a minibus transporting Iraqi army recruits.
Most of the dead in the blast were young recruits who had boarded a public minibus outside the Muthanna base in central Baghdad.
The base has been targeted in the past by insurgents from the Sunni Arab minority, who oppose the US-backed Shi'ite-led coalition government.
Video warning
Meanwhile al-Qaeda has released a video on the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks claiming that US forces in Iraq were "doomed" to fail.
Ayman al-Zawahri, deputy al-Qaeda leader, said in remarks apparently addressed to Western leaders: "I tell them do not bother yourselves with defending your forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. These forces are doomed to failure."
On Friday a US Senate report concluded that Saddam had no links with Al-Qaeda prior to the September 11 attacks as US President George W Bush's administration had repeatedly charged.