A series of unauthorised attempts to free two French journalists held hostage in Iraq for more than six weeks have caused acute embarrassment for President Jacques Chirac and may have jeopardised official negotiations for their release.
Confusion surrounds the rescue mission launched independently by a maverick politician from Chirac’s own ruling UMP party, Didier Julia, and his envoy Philip Brett, a former security guard for the extreme-right National Front movement. On Friday they promised that the journalists were about to be freed, but on Saturday there was still no sign of them.
Chirac expressed ‘anxiety’ about this freelance initiative and said he hoped it would not have a ‘negative effect’ on the Foreign Ministry’s parallel efforts to save Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot and their Syrian driver Mohamed al-Joundi.
However, the highly publicised nature of the rival negotiations have underlined the failure of the French diplomatic efforts to extract the journalists from Iraq, despite early optimism about the prospects of a swift release.
The private attempt to save Chesnot and Malbrunot, who were seized on 20 August, has been characterised by extravagant claims. Julia, an active campaigner for the lifting of sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s, was so confident of an imminent rescue on Friday afternoon that hotel rooms were booked for them in Damascus.
Julia blamed the failure of the mission on the lack of co-operation from the American forces, who he claimed had done much more to facilitate the release earlier last week of the two hostages from Italy, a supporter of the US-led campaign in Iraq.
He alleged that the US had intensified its bombardment of the area where the hostages were held soon after his announcement of their imminent liberation. It had been impossible to flee the region because US forces had erected 20 new roadblocks along their escape route, he said.
Julia’s claims have been met with some scepticism in France. The Foreign Ministry refused to comment, but a US military spokesperson in Iraq denied the claim.
Brett is a former chauffeur and security guard for Bruno Gollnisch, deputy leader of the National Front, which was sympathetic to Saddam Hussein. There was uncertainty about how Brett, who was close to the former Baathist regime, had got access to the original hostage-takers, a militant group calling themselves the Islamic Army of Iraq. Brett said on Friday that the journalists had been passed to a more secular group, which was prepared to release them. Hostages are frequently trafficked among groups in Iraq but rarely from religious to less religious groups. The original kidnappers demanded that France revoke legislation banning Islamic headscarves from schools.
In Iraq, however, there is increasing anger about the huge attention paid to foreign hostages while hundreds of locals are being abducted. More than 100 Iraqi doctors have been kidnapped or killed since the fall of Saddam’s regime, official figures released last week reveal. Hundreds more have fled overseas, seriously weakening efforts to reconstruct the dilapidated healthcare system.
Mohammed al-Hassouni, director of a unit at the Ministry of Health dedicated to protecting medical staff against violence, said it was planning to give doctors armed bodyguards and security training. He said he feared that the danger could lead many of the country’s best scientific minds to leave the country.
The threat is continually evolving. In one recent development, pharmacists and university professors are also being targeted, with ransoms of up to $50 000 demanded.
Several doctors were interviewed by The Observer but none was willing to be named. ‘I’m terrified, but what can I do?’ said one. ‘You look to the government for protection, but know they can’t help. At least the kidnappers are unlikely to kill you. You’ll just be left a bankrupt.’
Some have been targeted by insurgents set on disrupting reconstruction. However, Yahia Saeed, an Iraq specialist at the London School of Economics, said that 90% of the kidnapping was ‘criminal’.
‘There has been an explosion in the crime,’ he said, while stressing that abductions had taken place under Saddam. ‘As sanctions began to bite in the Nineties, there was an explosion in criminality and criminal gangs connected to the increasingly fragmented regime often targeted businessmen.’
Now, Saeed pointed out, it is not simply doctors but all successful people who are at risk. ‘Prominent academics, doctors, merchants — and especially their children — are all vulnerable,’ he said.
Al-Hassouni said that a group of kidnappers had recently been broken up by police but that convicting the criminals was hard because no victims wanted to give witness statements. He planned to ask senior clerics to issue appeals not to abduct medical staff. ‘What are the kidnappers going to do if they fall ill?’ he said. – Guardian Unlimited Â