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THE ROVING
EYE
How much is a hostage
worth?
By Pepe Escobar
Last Saturday, at 11am Baghdad time, the
door of an underground cell was opened and "number
5 and number 6" were ordered to go the toilet -
the same ritual they had been following since
January 5. But only a few seconds later a guard
muttered what they must have interpreted as a
magic spell: "Today, Paris". Florence Aubenas, a
seasoned correspondent for the French daily
Liberation, and her fixer Hussein Hanoun, a
Shi'ite from the Saadi tribe and former fighter
pilot in Saddam Hussein's air force, were taken to
an adjacent room. He was told to put on a white
tunic, she was told to put on a black robe with a
chador (veil) and was offered "two rings
and a bottle of perfume". They drank tea and ate
chicken kebab. A few hours later, after 157 days
of captivity, they were both free.
In a
stunning press conference this Tuesday in Paris,
Aubenas, with precision and occasional flashes of
her trademark stainless-steel sense of humor,
re-enacted her five-month hostage ordeal in a
dark, 8-meter by 2-meter cell, totally silent,
blindfolded, hands and feet tied, "counting the
minutes, the seconds, the words. A cell, it's 24
steps and 80 words". It was also "two toilet trips
a day, one shower a month, a boiled egg in the
morning, rice at noon", the heat progressively
hitting 50 degrees, the lack of oxygen, torpor, a
sense of "time that is endless".
Aubenas
and her fixer Hanoun were kidnapped at gunpoint on
January 5 at the University of Baghdad while she
was trying to do a story on Fallujah refugees - a
taboo theme for both the occupiers and Sunni
Arabs. She was branded as a spy - the standard
accusation against Western journalists in dodgy
situations in the Middle East and Central Asia.
During the ordeal, Aubenas was only 90 centimeters
away from Hanoun, locked in the same cell. She was
"number 5", he was "number 6". But they only
learned about it when they were released.
Smile, you're on TV
Unlike the
tragic Giuliana Sgrena affair - which resulted in
the killing of Italian agent Nicola Calipari - the
French government took unlimited precautions to
extract Aubenas from Iraq. (See They shoot journalists, don't
they?, April 28.) The last instructions
were personally phoned by French President Jacques
Chirac. The French Embassy had even prepared a new
passport so Aubenas could leave Iraq legally.
Influential Muslim clerics like the Saudi sheikh
Abdullah Ben Biyeha served as mediators. The
strategy to dribble the American and Iraqi
checkpoints was the stuff of Hollywood thrillers.
Aubenas' role changed continuously - in the end
she was "the driver's wife, if someone talks to
you, you start crying". When she was finally
transferred to a car bearing French diplomatic
plates, the car had to weave around 80 kilometers
of hardcore streets that Baghdad police wouldn't
dream of cruising.
On Sunday morning, they
still had to go to the airport, taking the most
dangerous stretch of highway on the planet (not
the one where Calipari was killed, which was a
privileged American military road). The French
ambassador had decided to do it in daytime -
unlike Calipari - and provided the American
Embassy with extensive details of his journey. But
with a crucial omission (the Italians had done the
same thing) ... he didn't tell the Americans he
was carrying former hostage Aubenas. "They might
get shot at," said a French diplomat.
Amid
all her startling revelations, Aubenas was careful
to highlight the geopolitical role of television,
and how unprecedented French public opinion and
media mobilization had a powerful effect on the
kidnappers: "Every time there was something they
would come to the cell, very excited, saying,
'It's working, they talked about you on TV'. That
was the ultimate criteria. It didn't matter what
was said." Once again this proves two things:
first, hostages' spirits are always lifted when
they see they are not left to rot and their plight
is mobilizing a whole nation; second, their own
price inevitably goes up in this post-modern form
of the slave market.
Which raises the
inevitable question: how much is a hostage in Iraq
worth?
Who are these people?
According to French diplomats and
counter-terrorism officials in Brussels, Florence
and Hanoun were kidnapped most probably by a
shadowy Sunni Arab guerrilla group composed of
former Ba'ath officers. Hanoun - who as a member
of a Shi'ite tribe that also includes Sunnis -
told Le Monde's Patrice Claude he thought the
kidnappers were "Sunni and Salafi, but rather
moderate". He described them as "Islamic Iraqi
patriots" fighting the occupation.
Not
much is known about the group's structure. They
had no "signature" - not even a symbolic name (the
Romanians, for instance, were kidnapped by the
"Brigade of Muad Ibn Jabal"). No website, no
production of ideological texts. Just a video on
March 1, delivered to the Reuters office in
Baghdad, which happens to be on the same street as
the French Embassy.
Kidnapping of
foreigners - wherever they come from - is a
lucrative business in "liberated" Iraq. An
important point is that the Aubenas affair
generated very few reactions and commentaries in
Islamist websites. This would imply that hardcore
jihadis - who make a lot of Internet noise - were
not directly involved. And since there were no
political demands, what is left is just a
financial operation to generate easy cash. The
French government, for obvious reasons, is not
giving any leads on the "follow the money" front.
The kidnapping business in Iraq even
reaches surrealist heights - when one knows that
Sunni Arabs and Turkmen in Kirkuk have been
kidnapped by Kurdish police and kept in Kurdish
prisons with full support of Kurdish political
parties and possibly even the American military.
But this does not prevent Washington from saying,
with a straight face, it is "concerned" with
"exacerbated tensions".
There's wide
speculation in France about a role in the Aubenas
case played by Syrian secret services. French
experts sustain that the strong, former Saddam
security services factor in the Sunni Arab
resistance favors a close link with Syrian secret
services. This would explain why the kidnappers
were not in a hurry.
A series of
"messages" to France is also constantly invoked -
after Paris aligned itself with Washington in
forcing Syrian troops to withdraw from Lebanon.
Former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, who
was assassinated, was a close personal friend of
Jacques Chirac. Lebanese journalist Samir
el-Qassir, killed on June 2 by a car bomb, was
close to France and carried a French passport. And
Syria was involved - however laterally - in the
spectacular affair of the three Romanian TV
hostages kidnapped on March 28 and liberated on
May 22. According to Romanian President Traian
Basecu, the brains behind the operation was a
Syrian-Romanian businessman, Omar Haysam, now in
jail in Bucharest.
Aubenas is now free, 12
kilograms slimmer, still in love with Iraq, even
though she knows - as any other independent-minded
journalist - it's now absolutely impossible to
work like one has to, not embedded but "going to
talk to people in the streets". And just like the
Italians in the Sgrena case, just like the
Romanians with their three TV reporters, the
French government in the Aubenas case is bent on
respecting an implacable law of silence. For the
George W Bush administration, any hostage is a
dead hostage. As far as Europe is concerned, one
may never know how much is a hostage worth.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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