Former Hezbollah hostage Terry Waite shares his experiences
Janel Shoun |
Waite, a British humanitarian who won fame in the 1980s for his successful hostage negotiations and then for his captivity at the hands of the Islamic Jihad, laid out a chronology of his hostage experience and then called on the audience to “lessen the misery” of the world by remembering that we are all human beings with families and children.
Waite spoke before an audience of 500 who were attending either the Business Leadership Speaker Series luncheon or Lipscomb’s first Regional Forum on Conflict Management.
In keeping with the conflict resolution theme, Waite outlined the events leading up to his capture, noting the steps he normally took to achieve a successful hostage negotiation.
After successfully negotiating the release of hostages from Iran and Libya, the families of hostages in Beirut, including the family of American journalist Terry Anderson, asked Waite to try negotiating for the release of their relatives.
His first step was normally gathering information, and in the case of the frequent kidnappings in Beirut at that time, he found that no one had much information. In fact, no one knew who was responsible for the frequent kidnappings or what the demands were, he said.
So he reached out to the captors through the media, and eventually received an invitation to meet them. The invitation was delivered by having Anderson and other hostages sign a piece of paper, wrapping the paper around a rock, and tossing it through the window of the Beirut Associated Press office.
Waite said it had always been his style to seek a face-to-face meeting, so he did the same in this case and traveled to Beirut to meet the captors, who provided proof that the hostages were still alive. They told him they wanted relatives, who were being held and tortured in Kuwait, to be freed.
Waite returned to Britain and began to collect information about the Kuwaiti prisoners, but he found he could not get the political support to allow him into Kuwait. He soon found out why when David Jacobsen was released and America’s Iran-Contra scandal, a deal to provide arms to Iran in exchange for pressure on Lebanese radicals to release hostages, was revealed to the public.
Given the dramatic turn of events, the Islamic Jihad in Beirut believed that Waite was involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, so when he returned to continue negotiations for the hostages, they kidnapped him and placed him in solitary confinement.
When they led him into an underground, tiled cell, Waite said he knew his efforts had failed.
“I knew I was no longer in a negotiation, but I was a hostage. I knew those cells were tiled because they were easier to clean after knocking people around,” he said.
While being held, Waite said he focused on three attitudes: no regrets about his life so far, no self-pity about his predicament, and no over-sentimentality. He was most often chained to the wall 24 hours a day. He slept on the floor and was often beaten with canes. It was years before frequent tapping on the wall revealed to him that Terry Anderson and several other hostages were housed next door.
When he was finally released, the Hezbollah leaders acknowledged to him that his captivity had served no purpose for anybody.
Despite the trials he went through, Waite is still a staunch supporter of peace. In press statements after the speech, he urged America not to pull out of the Geneva convention, expressed his concerns about prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay and noted that the Pope’s recent statements about Islam demonstrate how fragile global relationships have become.