THE BAIT FOR MR HEATH
John Simpson meets the
hostages out of whom Iraq wants to make political capital
Baghdad IT TOOK our car five minutes to drive down Abi Nuuw' as Street, along the right bank of the turgid river Tigris, from Firdos Square to Tahrir Square. In that time our unhappy government minder said the same thing three times: 'There must be a good reason. We just don't know what it is, that's all.' I grinned to myself in the back of the car, watching his anxious hand move- ments, the jerk of his neck, the shake of his head. Our minder was a decent man and I had been working on his sensibilities un- mercifully. Now I tried again with 'What- ever reason can there be to keep a dying man from seeing his children, or an old couple who couldn't harm anyone?' The hand moved again, the neck jerked. 'It's just that we can't know what the reasons are.'
I left it there. The minder and I had been visiting the wife of one of the British prisoners in Iraq, a man who has been diagnosed as having terminal cancer. His doctors estimate he has 18 months to live, and he and his wife are anxious to spend them in their native Lancashire, rather than in the Al-Mansour Melia Hotel in Baghdad. The old couple come from Scot- land; the husband has a weak heart, his wife has pernicious anaemia, and before this she had never been out of the United Kingdom in her 71 years. The Gulf crisis caught them visiting one of their children in Kuwait. They live at present in the quiet residence of the British ambassador in west Baghdad, wandering round the garden in the cool of the day and working their way through the ambassador's library in the rest of their waking hours. They are very gentle and very frail. The wife need not stay here, but like Maureen Wilbraham, the wife of the Lancashire prisoner, she preferred to stay with her husband.
There was of course no mystery at all about why the Iraqis would want to hold on to a group of sick and elderly people. This is a society where giving something for nothing in political terms is regarded as weakness; Saddam Hussein is not the man to present himself in any way as being weak. Everything he does, every statement he makes, is designed to present him as tough, unyielding, super-powerful. Iraq would not therefore present Mrs Thatch- er's Britain with a free gift of half a dozen of its citizens, no matter how sick or elderly they might be. It wants something in return.
Iraq's political and diplomatic analysts are, on the whole, clever and educated men; and inasmuch as their education has often been carried out partly in Britain, they tend to have a reasonable awareness of British politics. I am told that from early on in this crisis the name of Edward Heath cropped up in Iraq as a possible counterba- lance within the Conservative Party to Mrs Thatcher's Gulf policy. From mid-August onwards they worked on a plan to get him here. How the idea was transmitted to the Foreign Office, and to the relatives of the British people held prisoner, has not finally been established, though it would scarcely 'lint sick and tired of making you endless cups of tea.' have been difficult for the Foreign Office and the relatives to have worked it out for themselves, given Mr Heath's own speeches on the subject and his attitude to Mrs Thatcher.
So the small, dispirited group of British people who are suffering from serious illness of one kind or another are staked out in Baghdad like a goat tethered in a jungle clearing, and the old tiger of British Conservatism picked up the scent and moved cautiously closer; the only problem with this analogy being that it was the intention of the Iraqi hunters to let the tiger clear off with the goat. By simply luring Mr Heath to Baghdad, Iraq achieved its aim: recognition from a senior world statesman that Iraqi views cannot altogether be ignored, more discord within the ranks of the enemy.
Maureen Wilbraham would in normal times be a natural supporter, not of Mr Heath but of Mrs Thatcher; yet her hus- band's illness and imprisonment in Bagh- dad have turned her into a passionate advocate of Mr Heath's decision to visit Baghdad. She comes from the Golden Mile in Blackpool, and still has a house there.
The dearest wish of the Wilbrahams is that they will spend whatever time is left to them among their friends and relatives in Blackpool. Mrs Wilbraham is a sturdy and handsome woman who looks younger than her 50 years; the kind of person who restores your faith in the British. Her expression, when I told her about the English girl who had led the Iraqi soldiers to her father's hiding place in Kuwait because she had been told she wouldn't be allowed to leave unless she turned him in ('Where are the fishfingers?' 15 Septem- ber), was a study in national character. Much the same look must have passed across the face of Boadicea, Elizabeth I and Edith Cavell. 'She never die was what Maureen Wilbraham said, as she looked down at the biography of Sir Winston Chuchill which lay on her lap. `What we need is a few more like him,' she added.
Mrs Wilbraham is no weakling, then, and although she doesn't say so, it isn't likely that she has a high opinion of Saddam Hussein. But she knows that Edward Heath was the only hope her husband, and the other seriously ill prison- ers now have. If he had decided not to come here, they would have remained in Baghdad indefinitely. A government which is perfectly happy to use the terminally ill as pawns in a political game is unlikely to let them go on purely humanitarian grounds. When I asked Maureen Wilbra- ham if she thought Edward Heath should come here, I got the kind of look she gives when hearing stories of cowardice and surrender. 'God help us if he doesn't,' was what she said.
John Simpson is the foreign affairs editor of the BBC.
Previous page
