Word: shying
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...whereabouts of seven missing servicemen but promised to be "very flexible" about the terms for trading its Arab prisoners in southern Lebanon that would in turn spring the release of the Western captives. Jerusalem offered a two- step plan. In phase one, Israel would release about 50 Shi'ites after receiving a full report on its soldiers, verifiable by either videotape or international observers. The second stage would see the release of the remaining Shi'ite detainees (is the total 375, as Israel maintains, or more than 400, as others claim?), including the south Lebanon spiritual leader Sheik Abdul Karim...
While the contours of the deal seemed clear, the mechanics posed nettlesome questions. Among the most vexing was a condition contained in the letter former British hostage John McCarthy brought to Perez de Cuellar from Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist Shi'ite faction, operating under the banner of the pro-Iranian Hizballah, that holds several Westerners. It called for "the release of our freedom fighters from prisons in occupied Palestine and Europe." To whom that referred was anybody's guess -- and for whom Islamic Jihad presumed to speak was no more apparent. Was this a bargaining point or an implacable demand...
General Antoine Lahd, commander of the South Lebanon Army militia, weighed in with a requirement that nine of his militiamen held by Hizballah be released or accounted for. Lahd holds the keys to El Khiam prison in southern Lebanon, where Israel detains 350 of the Shi'ites sought by Islamic Jihad -- though Israel would probably make him unlock the door if its soldiers are recovered. Damascus has also put in a bid for the release of an unspecified number of Syrian soldiers it claims were detained by Israel in the Golan Heights...
...remind an inattentive international audience of the fundamentalists' agenda. But as the Leyraud abduction demonstrated, that agenda is fragmented and riddled by competing demands. Islamic Jihad may also have acted in hopes of preventing a Syrian disarming of fundamentalist camps in Lebanon and of gaining new respect from disaffected Shi'ites. Says Richard Murphy, former U.S. Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs: "It's getting pretty lonesome these days to be a hostage holder...
...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...