Frenchmen Tape Appeal for Freedom : Hostages Beg Paris to Help; Shias Link Trio to 17 Kuwait Prisoners

BEIRUT — Three Frenchmen held hostage in Lebanon since mid-1985 made an impassioned, videotaped appeal to their government today to negotiate their release from what one called “the slow death” of captivity.

Three days after Islamic Jihad released a similar videotaped plea from two captive Americans, the Shia Muslim group delivered the tape of the Frenchmen to the office of a Western news agency in Muslim West Beirut.

With the tape was a typewritten statement in Arabic from Islamic Jihad saying it would free the Frenchmen if Kuwait frees 17 prisoners convicted of bombing the U.S. and French embassies there in December, 1983.

It was believed to be the first time that Islamic Jihad has linked the fate of the French hostages to the 17 Kuwait prisoners. The group has made the same demand for freeing the Americans. Today’s statement made no mention of the American captives.

In the 20-minute tape, French hostages Marcel Fontaine, Marcel Carton and Jean-Paul Kauffmann said their government had abandoned them.

Kauffmann bitterly charged the government with hypocrisy for invoking what he termed “grand principles” preventing negotiation with the kidnapers.

“It’s long, very long. I cannot take it any more,” Fontaine, 45, vice consul of the French Embassy who was kidnaped on March 22, 1985, said on the tape, addressing his wife. “I am desperate, tired and about to fall off the cliff.”

Fontaine said he felt Premier Jacques Chirac’s government was giving the families of the hostages and the French public opinion “nice promises but in reality no action.”

“How much longer will I be able to stand it? All that remains of me is my skin and bones. Maybe another Christmas, another New Year without you, if I am not dead before that,” he told his wife.

Carton, 63, a French Embassy protocol officer who was kidnaped the same day Fontaine was abducted in a different location in West Beirut, also addressed his wife, Denise.

“I am at the end of the rope, desperate. I do not know what words to invent to tell you what I feel. . . . I feel I am weaker and physically and morally vulnerable. We are really at the end of the road,” Carton said.

Carton said Chirac’s center-right government had “certainly done better” than the previous Socialist Administration in the effort to gain the hostages’ release. But he said Chirac appeared to have been satisfied with the release of two French journalists last June and “let us down.”

Kauffmann, 42, of the French L’Evenement du Jeudi weekly, appeared more composed than his fellow hostages.

Kauffmann, who was abducted on the Beirut airport highway May 22, 1985, said he had the “impression that our government would like the people to forget us and shut out our case.”