The Iraqi Prime Minister has said he hopes legal proceedings against Saddam Hussein will be short.
Nuri al-Maliki said he hoped the former president would be found guilty and sentenced to death soon.
Two Kurdish detainees gave evidence to the former leader's trial on genocide charges today.
They described how Saddam Hussein's troops drove terrified Kurdish villagers into the desert and gunned them down by the truckload.
The two escaped after last-minute struggles with the death squads. They told of stumbling into the night while a full moon shone down on a landscape dotted with mass graves and corpses.
Their testimony was the first eye-witness account of mass killings during Saddam's 1988 'Anfal' campaign against Iraq's Kurdish minority.
Prosecutors allege that 182,000 people were slaughtered during that operation.
Saddam and six co-defendants were represented by court-appointed counsel as the hearing resumed, although Judge Mohammed al-Oreibi al-Khalifah said that if their own private lawyers turned up they could return to court.
For the past month, the defence has boycotted the trial in protest at alleged interference by the Iraqi government.
The defence team said today it needed to discuss a string of demands before it can call off its boycott.
The former president and his co-defendants insist the operation was a legitimate military campaign against separatist guerrillas and fighters who sided with Iran, with which Iraq was at war during the 1980s.
Saddam Hussein and Ali Hassan al-Majid, a former military commander who became notorious for anti-Kurd gas attacks and was dubbed 'Chemical Ali' by the US, are accused of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
The five others are charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, and all seven face the death penalty if convicted.
The case was adjourned until Thursday.
The Iraqi High Tribunal has set 5 November for a verdict in the earlier trial for crimes against humanity arising from the killing of 148 villagers in the 1980s.
