Saddam Hussein's cousin, known as "Chemical Ali," and another close aide to the dictator who represented him abroad appeared in court Sunday accused of orchestrating the bloody repression of Shiite riots after the 1999 assassination of the father of anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

It was the fifth trial of top Saddam-era figures and the second to include Tariq Aziz, who became internationally known as the dictator's defender and a fierce American critic after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent 1991 Gulf War.

Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, one of the most powerful Shiite clerics in Iraq in the 1990s, was killed with two of his sons in an ambush on Feb. 20, 1999, in the holy city of Najaf. His followers said Saddam's agents were to blame.

The next day, angry loyalists rioted near a mosque in Baghdad's main Shiite district - then called Saddam City but later renamed Sadr City after the elder cleric - blockading roads and ordering shop owners to shutter up in mourning. Iraqi policemen trying to break up the protest were beaten and police cars destroyed.

Saddam's paramilitary Fedayeen militia opened fire on the protesters and a curfew was imposed while the whole district was sealed off until the next day.

Citing documents from Saddam's now-outlawed ruling Baath Party, chief prosecutor Munqith al-Faroon on Sunday said Saddam's security forces opened fire on the Sadr City crowd, killing 16 people. He said 14 others were killed in a similar crackdown in the Shiite southern city of Amarah.

Families were then ordered not to hold public funerals for those killed, al-Faroon said, citing Baath Party documents.

The documents acknowledge that some people were shot by mistake because they were near the riots, and listed the names of some victims along with their political backgrounds, according to al-Faroon.

Aziz claimed the defendants had not been granted sufficient time to discuss the case with their lawyers. "We want real meetings with our lawyers," he told the court.

Another defendant who had been interior minister at the time, Mohammed Zumam, insisted he was innocent. "I have nothing to do with this case," he said.

Aziz, the only Christian among Saddam's inner circle, was for years one of the most visible leaders of the ousted regime. Among his 15 co-defendants, who were all present in court Sunday, was Ali Hassan al-Majid, known by the nickname of "Chemical Ali" for ordering poison gas attacks against Iraq's Kurdish minority in the 1980s.

Formal charges were to be filed later in the trial, but a court official, speaking on condition of anonymity for lack of authorization to release the information, said the charges were expected to include crimes against humanity, which would carry the death penalty.

Aziz also faces charges in another trial under way for officials accused in the 1992 execution of dozens of merchants accused of manipulating food supplies to drive up prices during hard economic times under U.N. sanctions.

Al-Majid has already been sentenced to death for his role in the crackdown against the Kurds, but the execution has been delayed by legal wrangling. He also has been accused in an ongoing trial over the deadly crushing of a Shiite uprising that followed the 1991 Gulf War.

Saddam was sentenced to death in May 2006 for his role in the killing of Shiite Muslims in the town of Dujail after an assassination attempt against him there in 1982. Saddam was hanged the following December.

Turkey's state-run news agency says an oil pipeline has been repaired after a three-day fire and has resumed carrying oil from Iraq to the Mediterranean.

The Anatolia agency quotes pipeline authorities as saying workers have finished the repairs after putting out the fire triggered by an explosion Friday near the town of Midyat, 80 kilometers (50 miles) from the Iraqi border.

The agency says authorities blame Kurdish rebels for the explosion.

Pacific Rim nations assured the world Sunday that the global financial crisis can be quelled in 18 months, but provided few details of how they expect that to happen - or how their governments can help.

The 21 economies, which represent more than half of the world's productive power, also pledged during a two-day summit not to erect new protectionist barriers for the next year, and to jump-start stalled World Trade Organization talks.

The main accomplishment of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum was a widening of support for the Washington Declaration made last weekend by major economies that pledged to maintain free trade despite pressures to protect domestic industries.

The leaders voiced confidence that the crisis could be resolved by mid-2010, though they did not go much beyond the steps outlined in the Group of 20 summit in Washington.

"We are convinced that we can overcome this crisis in a period of 18 months," the leaders said in a statement. "We have already taken urgent and extraordinary steps to stabilize our financial sectors and strengthen economic growth."

The reassuring words were added early Sunday to a declaration the leaders had signed off on the previous day. Delegates from several countries said the changes were made overnight at the request of the summit's host, Peruvian President Alan Garcia.

"We have agreed that this meeting produce a clear and firm statement that breaks the vicious cycle of anguish and uncertainty," Garcia said Sunday. "We - united as the world's peoples, governments and businesses - are going to beat the crisis."

The 18-month timeline fits with a calculation by the International Monetary Fund, which forecast developed economies would grow barely 0.1 percent in 2009, and that the world would emerge from the crisis the following year.

But some delegates and analysts were skeptical that the timetable was much more than wishful thinking, and some leaders distanced themselves from the language. Mexican President Felipe Calderon described the date as more of an estimate than a prediction.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper went a step further.

"I think it would be speculative to commit to that kind of timeline," he said.

And Dan Price, an aide to George W. Bush, said the U.S. president thinks the global economy can be fixed even faster.

"That particular sentence was added by the president of Peru as the chair," Price said aboard Air Force One. "Certainly, some in the region may think that recovery may take 18 months. President Bush believes that the actions we are taking now will begin to produce results in the much nearer term."

Vinod Aggarwal, director of the APEC Study Center at the University of California-Berkeley, said the timeline was useful in sending a signal to markets.

"I don't think it will make that much difference, but I don't think it hurts," he said.

More important, he said, was the leaders' agreement to send ministers to Geneva next month to jump-start the so-called Doha round of World Trade Organization talks. Concern over the global financial crisis has injected new urgency into the negotiations, which collapsed in July.

In their final declaration, the APEC leaders said they were deeply concerned about instability in food prices, were committed to battling corruption and piracy, and supported "decisive and effective long-term cooperation" to combat climate change.

The leaders called for greater APEC participation in the IMF and other multilateral lenders. Japan said last week it was ready to lend up to $100 billion to the Washington-based organization, but China has so far resisted entreaties to dig into its $1.9 trillion in reserves.

The summit could be the final foreign trip for George W. Bush as U.S. president. Barack Obama replaces him on Jan. 20, and delegates in Lima said there was little incentive to propose more concrete action without Obama's presence.

Obama, who did not send representatives to Lima, pressed forward back home, announcing a plan to save or create 2.5 million jobs by the end of 2010 and preparing to introduce leaders of his economic team on Monday.

Harper said he expects Canada to officially enter recession by the New Year and is studying a financial stimulus package.

"If it is necessary for there to be government spending to bolster domestic consumption and stimulate investment markets, we will undertake those measures," he said.

As a dangerous confrontation flared between China and Taiwan in 1996, Bill Clinton deployed the Seventh Fleet to deter the two rivals from going to war. Five years later, when a U.S. spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter, George W. Bush faced a prolonged international crisis. Meanwhile, human rights and democracy in China were a perennial hot-button issue.

Now it's Barack Obama's turn to deal with the China challenge, and this time, it's all about the money. As the global financial system teeters, China, with its $1.9 trillion in foreign reserves and slowing but still strong economy, offers a potential lifeline.

The crisis that Obama is inheriting has pushed aside the old points of contention and underscored how profoundly the power equation between Washington and Beijing has changed.

China now owns over half-a-trillion dollars in U.S. government bonds, more than any other country, and Washington needs Beijing to continue buying them to help finance the national debt and the $700 billion financial industry bailout.

And while China's economy is heavily dependent on exports to the U.S., it is also a growing market for U.S. products, making trade retaliation - long a threat wielded solely by Washington - more of a two-way street.

"The power shift in China-U.S. relations is making them more interdependent," said Cheng Xiaohe, an international relations scholar at Beijing's Renmin University. "This next president will need to exercise greater caution."

When Clinton first ran for the White House, he made human rights an issue, accusing then President George Bush of "coddling" the communist dictatorship. But during his presidency, the administration moved to uncouple human rights from trade privileges - a milestone in normalizing ties between the two powers.

During Bush's presidency, as Chinese exports boomed, China's trade surplus hit $163.3 billion in 2007, becoming an increasingly fractious political issue, even as the question of human rights was moving to the fringes of the public agenda.

In the Barack Obama-John McCain race, human rights figured early when Tibetan unrest flared and Obama called on Bush to boycott the Beijing Olympics. But the issue soon faded from his talking points, and when relations with China briefly resurfaced, the context was purely economic.

During the campaign, Obama described China as "neither our enemy nor our friend; they're competitors." He called for broad cooperation with Beijing while repeating the accusation that the trade surplus was stoked by a Chinese currency kept artificially cheap.

The currency has been an especially hot topic in Congress and could arise again as an irritant in relations. On Thursday, a congressional advisory panel recommended Congress enact legislation to pressure Beijing into forcing up the value of the yuan, thereby making Chinese imports more expensive.

China is a veto-holding permanent member of the U.N. Security Council and there are many other reasons why Washington needs Beijing's help - to maintain detente in the Taiwan Strait, strip North Korea of its nukes, and pressure Iran into cooperating with nuclear inspections.

Throw in the economy, and many expect Obama to take a mild approach toward Beijing on issues of human rights, freedom of speech and Tibet.

That would be a mistake, argues Wei Jingsheng, the internationally renowned pro-democracy dissident whose imprisonment and exile came to define the difficulties of the U.S.-China relationship in the 1980s and 1990s.

Wei, who now lives in Washington, D.C., maintains that the root of the economic crisis lies in the trade imbalance with China, and that China's industrial might is built on underpaid, badly treated workers. China gets away with it because Western business doesn't want human rights getting in the way of profits, he says.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Wei rejected the idea of China as the West's economic lifeline, saying China would have a hard time saving its own economy and anyway wouldn't mind seeing the West failing.

"This expectation of China to save the West is only a dream," he said. "But why is this dream fanned up so much? Because the big businesses in the West are pumping up this idea; they do not want to see Western governments take severe measures against the Chinese government."

He recalled the days when Western governments and media were focused on Chinese human rights abuses - "It is really because of their effort that people like me survived" - and urged Obama to renew the pressure by establishing a link between trade privileges and workers' rights.

"It would be like killing two birds with one stone - reducing the trade deficit while boosting rights for Chinese workers," he said.

But Chinese scholars at government-backed research bodies sound confident that no radical changes in the relationship will happen under Obama.

"Although we'll see some disputes around issues like trade, human rights and climate change, the general framework will be stable," said Jin Canrong, an expert on the U.S. at Renmin University. "This is mature bilateral relations between two big powers."