France Resists Kidnaper Demands, Fears New Violence

Premier Laurent Fabius, insisting that France will not give in to the blackmail of the kidnapers of French hostages in Lebanon, warned a national television audience in somber tones Sunday night that the kidnapers might try “a new escalation of violence” to pressure the government during this last week of the parliamentary election campaign.

Fabius did not say whether he expects possible violence at home or against French citizens in Lebanon. A series of bombings that wounded 19 people in Paris last month was widely attributed to kidnapers trying to pressure the government into meeting their demands.

Crisis in Air

A crisis atmosphere pervaded top government offices here as Fabius met with his ministers to try to work out a response to the kidnapings on Saturday of four members of a French television crew in Beirut. Islamic Jihad (Islamic Holy War) claimed responsibility for the abductions, bringing to eight the total of French citizens taken by this obscure, fundamentalist Muslim organization during the last year. The group also reportedly holds six American hostages.

Even while proclaiming the government’s defiance of the kidnapers, the premier said that France has never refused to open discussions on the issue with “those of good faith.” Earlier in the day, the government sent a special envoy, Dr. Razah Raad, a Lebanese-born, French physician, to Damascus. It was believed that Raad will travel on to the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley of Lebanon to try to make contact with the kidnapers. Islamic Jihad, in its statement on the latest kidnaping, named Raad, with whom it has met twice before, as an acceptable negotiator.

The Socialist government, which is expected to lose its majority in the French National Assembly in next Sunday’s election, has taken a buffeting of criticism in the last few days because of the flare-up of trouble for France in Beirut.

The tension began Wednesday when Islamic Jihad announced that it had executed one of the French hostages, researcher Michel Seurat, in retaliation for the French expulsion of two Iraqi dissidents to Baghdad.

The dissidents, like Islamic Jihad, had close ties to the Iranian government. One of the Iraqi dissidents was reported to have been killed by the Iraqi government soon after he came off the plane in Baghdad.

The body of Seurat has not been produced, and there are some doubts that he really was executed. On top of this, the French ambassador to Baghdad reported Sunday that both Iraqi dissidents are alive.

But even if all three are still alive, the French government will have a difficult time erasing the bumbling image produced by the affair. The French press has assumed that the two Iraqi dissidents were expelled to the hands of their enemies in Iraq either because the French government wanted to placate the Iraqi government over reports of secret French arms sales to Iran or because agents of France’s rightist intelligence agency wanted to embarrass the Socialist government.

‘Suspicious Movements’

Islamic Jihad, in its statement telephoned to foreign news agencies in Beirut, said the television crew was arrested for “suspicious movements in the Islamic suburbs” and demanded that France obtain the release of “our two comrades from the cellars of the Iraqi regime” in one week.

After the bombings in Paris, the French government received written demands for the release of several terrorists, including a squad that tried to assassinate exiled former Iranian Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar, killing a French policemen and a woman bystander instead.

It was reported in the influential Paris newspaper Le Monde that the French government, in fact, had earlier negotiated a deal swapping the leader of the terrorists for one or more of the French hostages. The deal fell through in January, perhaps because of police resistance to the release of the killer of a policeman. The bombings, in the view of Le Monde, were a form of pressure to persuade the government to implement the deal.

Despite its continual insistence on refusing to negotiate directly with the kidnapers, the French government has puzzled the public with some actions that seem related to the case. The government recently released two convicted terrorists, both members of the notorious group of Abu Nidal, a renegade Palestinian blamed for last December’s assaults on the Rome and Vienna airports in which 20 people, including five Americans, were killed. The two had served half of their 15-year sentences for the murder in Paris of two officials of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Le Monde reported that the government released the two after the Abu Nidal group fulfilled a promise made in 1982 to refrain from any terrorist attacks on French soil. While their case was not directly linked to the case of the kidnaped hostages in Beirut, it was assumed that France wanted to send a signal to Beirut that the kidnapers could deal with the French government.

President Mitterrand’s rise in polls may aid Socialists in Sunday’s French elections. Page 7.