TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081991/0819000.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.6 KB | 123 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 31

COVER STORIES

Surviving in Captivity


Though life has reportedly improved, the remaining hostages are
still suffering at the hands of their Shi`ite captors

By BRUCE W. NELAN


    "Tolerable" was the word John McCarthy carefully chose to
describe living conditions during his most recent months as a
hostage in Lebanon. He assured the families of three of the men
who had been held with him -- Americans Terry Anderson and
Thomas Sutherland and fellow Briton Terry Waite -- that when he
last saw them, "they were in good health and good spirits."

    McCarthy also said mildly that his first two years as a
prisoner were "very difficult." In fact, the years after he was
kidnapped in Beirut in 1986 were hellish. Brian Keenan, an Irish
teacher released last year who spent part of his captivity with
McCarthy, described life with Islamic Jihad: "Tiny, tiny cells,
constant blindfolds, prolonged days in the dark, sometimes weeks
without light." The guards, he said, "just could not control the
urge to beat very badly." When he and McCarthy were moved from
one vermin-infested flat to another, they were covered with
tape and stuffed under the floorboards of a truck.

    For Associated Press correspondent Anderson, who has been
held since March 1985, longer than any other Westerner, it has
been at least as bad. Some of the hostages freed earlier have
reported that Anderson's first cell was a cramped room in
Beirut's Shi`ite slums where he lay chained and blindfolded.
Later he and four others were moved to a basement dungeon that
was partitioned into cubicles. The guards beat them and
repeatedly threatened to kill them. Food was a meager ration of
bread, tea and cheese.

    Shared suffering did not make the cramped quarters any
easier for them to bear. Anderson, a liberal Democrat, and
another hostage, David Jacobsen, a conservative Republican,
found that politics could make strained bedfellows. After his
release, Jacobsen told a British newspaper, "I was chained for
19 months, night and day, with Terry Anderson, a bleeding-heart
liberal. It was hell for me, and you can imagine what it was
like for Terry Anderson."

    Later, when several men shared a room and were allowed to
remove their blindfolds, Anderson carried out a compulsive daily
routine of cleaning, pacing the room, talking aloud. Keenan
says, "Terry's a bit of a bulky and belligerent man" with "a
voracious hunger for intellectual conversation." Anderson went
on a hunger strike at least once. Keenan says Anderson took his
ailments stoically, "for in truth all pain and illness were
generally dismissed by our keepers, though they would eventually
supply us with some form of antibiotics."

    The hostages held regular Christian services in their
"Church of the Locked Door," using bits of bread to celebrate
Communion. Anderson had been a lapsed Catholic but rediscovered
his faith with the counsel of another prisoner, the Rev.
Lawrence Jenco, who was freed in July 1986.

    After guards took away the chess set he made from tinfoil,
Anderson asked Sutherland to teach him French. Sutherland also
kept them occupied with lectures on agriculture and his Volvo
car. One day at the end of 1987, overcome by frustration,
Anderson banged his head on the wall until his scalp bled. But
later, when a French hostage, Marcel Fontaine, said he hoped not
to die a prisoner, Anderson replied, "I don't want to die
anywhere." Like Anderson, Sutherland experienced days of
despair. Several times he tried, but failed, to suffocate
himself with plastic bags.

    Much less is known about the conditions of Waite's
captivity. The Church of England envoy was on his fifth trip to
Beirut to negotiate for the freedom of other hostages when he
was kidnapped in January 1987. British diplomats and friends in
Lebanon had warned him not to return, saying the situation was
too dangerous. Waite ignored them. He vanished while waiting in
a go-between's home to meet representatives of Islamic Jihad.
For years no faction claimed to be holding him, and nothing was
heard of him. Many Western officials privately concluded he had
been killed, possibly because he was suspected of working with
the Reagan Administration in the arms-for-hostages swap with
Iran.

    Keenan raised new hopes after his release a year ago. He
said he was convinced Waite was still alive and was being held
in isolation in Beirut. He told a television interviewer that
his guards had called the man in the cell next to his "Terry,"
and he knew it wasn't Anderson.

    Some time after that, Waite was allowed to join McCarthy,
Anderson and Sutherland. "We had to work very hard between us
to keep our spirits up," McCarthy said last week. "We have done
that very well, I think. The men I was with -- Terry Waite,
Terry Anderson and Thomas Sutherland -- were all very strong
men. They supported me, and I hope I've supported them."

    He added that Waite had been seriously ill. ``He had a
very bad problem with his lungs -- asthma," said McCarthy.
"They did take him to a doctor and gave him medicine for that,
and now I hope that he will be okay until he is released."

    Former hostage Jacobsen, once director of the American
University Hospital in Beirut, has predicted they will make it.
"If you can last a month," Jacobsen said last year, "you can
last forever. The only danger is illness." The remaining
hostages have already survived illness and years of cruelty and
boredom. Now it is up to their captors to decide how many of
them will be allowed to savor freedom.