Ex-hostage Waite offers advice on Iraq

WATERVILLE – A former hostage negotiator who was held captive for five years by Islamic extremists has some advice for Americans working to free hostages in Iraq, and interrogating detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Hostage negotiations in Iraq should be taken over by Muslim negotiators, said Terry Waite, who was seized in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1987 while negotiating as an envoy for the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The spate of hostage-taking in Iraq is the work of “splinter groups,” Waite said Thursday during a talk at Colby College. He said it is a situation that can be broken by turning to people like Abdulmajid Al-Zindani. A prominent cleric in Yemen, Al-Zindani is thought by some to be a fundamentalist sheik, but has issued fatwas calling for the release of hostages in Iraq.

“They are the best people to deal with hostage negotiations,” Waite said, “because the waters are so muddied by British and American involvement.”

Describing the unraveling security situation in Iraq as “a moral mess,” Waite said Western leaders need to better understand the different strains of fundamentalism in the Islamic world.

“There’s no question that Saddam Hussein is brutal and repressive,” Waite said. “Having said that, if you remove the dictator, inevitably, repressed groups will spring up and fight each other. Very quickly, they will turn against whoever is seen as the invading force, whose motives are questioned across the Arab world.”

Waite drew parallels between hostage-taking in Iraq and the detention of terror suspects by the American military in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He said the Guantanamo detainees were taken on suspicion, not allowed due process, and initially allowed no communication with their families.