France’s Hostage Crisis Turns Election Into Emotional Test of Socialists’ Rule

A couple of weeks ago, the chic Paris tabloid Liberation ran a front-page headline about the lackluster campaign for the French parliamentary elections this Sunday. “Vive l’ennui,” said the clever headline in bold, black letters. “Hooray for boredom.”

Now, the campaign is tragically far from boring, and no newspaper is publishing clever headlines about it. In the final days of the campaign, the Socialist government has been trapped into an intensifying crisis over the possible murder of a French hostage and the kidnaping of additional French hostages by a group called Islamic Jihad in Beirut.

The crisis has overwhelmed the campaign. Newspapers and television concentrate on the hostages and give the electioneering of the politicians secondary play. In fact, with opposition candidates refusing to attack the government during this trying period, a casual observer could be deluded into thinking that the two matters are separate.

Likened to Carter Crisis

But the crisis, which may grow worse, is sure to be uppermost in the minds of voters. That may hurt the ruling Socialists. Many French editorialists have likened the plight of the government of President Francois Mitterrand and Premier Laurent Fabius to that of President Jimmy Carter when the unresolved Iran hostage crisis contributed to his defeat in the 1980 election.

The French Ministry of External Relations did announce the encouraging news Wednesday that Iraq has agreed to free and pardon two Iraqi dissidents expelled there by the French last month. Their release was among the demands that Islamic Jihad (Islamic Holy War), the fundamentalist Shia Muslim band with ties to the revolutionary regime in Iran, said must be met to prevent the killing of a second hostage.

In an apparently unrelated development, a French peacekeeping officer was killed Wednesday in Beirut.

The cause of the Socialists, who are trying to prove the public opinion polls off-base and prevent a coalition of two conservative parties from seizing control of the French National Assembly, was surely damaged Tuesday night when the widow of the murdered hostage, in a dramatic television interview, blamed the French minister of interior for the death of her husband.

Islamic Jihad announced the execution of French researcher Michel Seurat last week. The group said it was retaliating because the French Ministry of Interior had expelled the two dissident Iraqis from Paris to Baghdad last month directly into the hands of a hostile Iraqi government. Iraq has been warring with Iran for five years.

No Explanation

Beyond calling the expulsion a mistake, the French government has never explained what happened. President Mitterrand has reportedly twice refused the resignation of Interior Minister Pierre Joxe over the incident.

In the televised interview from Beirut after Islamic Jihad released a photo of the body of Seurat, an anguished Mary Seurat said: “I accuse Monsieur Joxe of the responsibility for the execution, the murder of my husband. Hezbollah (a Shia political organization that is believed to use the name Islamic Jihad at times) has executed my husband. Monsieur Joxe had him killed.”

With publication of polls prohibited during the final week of the campaign, it is difficult to accurately assess the political fallout. Opposition leaders have closed ranks with the government in a show of national unity.

Former Premier Raymond Barre praised the government for taking “the proper attitude” during the crisis. Jacques Chirac, also a former premier, insisted that “anything that could provoke a political polemic about this tragedy is bad.”

Nevertheless, the Socialists know they have a political problem. Lionel Jospin, the party’s first secretary, said Tuesday night that it is dangerous and unhealthy to make an issue of the handling of the hostage crisis. To do so, he added, only plays the game of the terrorists.

“But,” he went on, “I think this question will dominate and weigh heavily on the end of the campaign.”

The government’s problems have been accentuated by a nagging question and a hazy posture. The question is obvious: Why were the Iraqis expelled back to Iraq? While the government has hinted a bureaucratic error was made, there has been no explanation and no public punishment of those involved.

The haziness centers on just how far the government is willing to go to meet the demands of the kidnapers. Premier Fabius took to national television Sunday night to reaffirm that the French government would not give in to the blackmail.

Yet the French press reported that the government has offered in the past to exchange Iranian prisoners convicted of homicide in France for the hostages and has repeated the offer during the latest flare-up of the crisis.

Also, the French government angered the Reagan Administration last November by refusing to arrest and extradite a Palestinian accused of taking part in the hijacking of the TWA airliner last June 14 and the holding of 39 passengers and crew members for more than two weeks. The French press speculated that the Palestinian, a Hezbollah militant, might have come to France in November to negotiate on the plight of the French hostages.

Since March, 1984, there have been 17 kidnapings of foreigners in Beirut. Responsibility for most of them has been claimed by Islamic Jihad. The victims are eight Frenchmen, six Americans, one Italian, one Briton and one South Korean. Islamic Jihad has announced the execution of two of them, American diplomat William Buckley and Seurat, the French researcher, but neither body has turned up.

The latest kidnaping was Saturday night when a four-man French television crew was taken.

The French government has been faced with an ultimatum from Islamic Jihad threatening more executions by election day. In addition to the release of the two Iraqis, it has demanded that the French free a group of Iranians convicted of murdering a policeman and a woman bystander in an attempted assassination of former Iranian Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar. Islamic Jihad also has demanded that France change its policy of selling arms to Iraq.