No Reason to Get Involved, Rafsanjani Says of Lebanon Hostages : Iran: Its new leader doesn’t appear to be any more flexible than his rigid predecessor, the Ayatollah Khomeini, when it comes to the issue of captive Westerners.

Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani declared Monday that his government has no immediate interest in pursuing the release of foreign hostages in Lebanon.

“I don’t see any reason to get ourselves involved in this matter,” he told reporters here.

Rafsanjani, who pronounced himself willing to help in the midst of the hostage crisis two months ago, fell back on his subsequent position that “conditions are not right” for an effort on Tehran’s part now.

He repeated specifically his demand that the United States demonstrate “good will” by releasing impounded Iranian assets.

His response to repeated questions on the hostage issue quashed speculation that Iran had invited foreign journalists to a press conference here to announce some development on the hostages.

With more than 100 reporters and television crews crowded into a reception hall of a former royal palace, the brown-robed and white-turbaned president entered, took a chair, made no statement and fielded questions for nearly three hours.

The first--why has Iran not moved on the hostage issue?--went directly to the point.

“I doubt if Western governments want to solve this problem,” Rafsanjani responded. “I do have an interest in putting this at an end. We have already guided them (foreign capitals) to the clear ways, but they have never acted.

“It seems to us that they want this problem to exist. They want to use it for their special purposes.”

Besides the longstanding demand for release of the frozen assets, estimated at anywhere from $2 billion to $12 billion and impounded at the start of the Iran’s Islamic revolution more than a decade ago, Rafsanjani repeated a second demand: release of three Iranians taken hostage in Lebanon in 1982.

“If you think that Iran’s hostages are dead (according to some reports in Lebanon),” he said, addressing Western reporters in his audience, “you have to give us their bodies, give us the documents they were carrying, show us where they were buried and introduce us to their killers.”

And, he said, “if one day we are to get involved, we will act in such a way that the problems of all hostages--Iranians in Lebanon, Lebanese in Israel and other hostages in Lebanon--can be solved in a coordinated manner.”

In Washington, Bush Administration officials said Rafsanjani’s linkage of hostages with the Iran claims issue was nothing new.

“The hostage issue is a humanitarian one and is not linked to other issues,” State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said.

“Our position is well-known on the hostages,” she added. “We will not make deals, and we will not reward hostage takers. Anyone who has influence with the hostage takers should use it to obtain the immediate and unconditional release of all the hostages. . . . The matter of Iranian assets is pending before the Iran-United States Claim Tribunal. These matters are being resolved at the tribunal, which conducts its business in a legal and technical manner, and has no connection or linkage whatsoever with the hostage issue.”

Diplomats here say there has been no sign of recent Iranian activity on the hostage issue, and despite the conditions raised Monday by Rafsanjani, there are also domestic political restraints on his making a unilateral move.

Several times during the press conference, the president chided Western reporters and their governments for focusing on the 16 Western hostages, including eight Americans, held in Lebanon. “You have to have the same feelings and sentiment toward other people as you do to people in the West,” he reproved one questioner.

Speaking softly and deliberately, and fingering a chain of green worry beads, Rafsanjani appeared well-rehearsed on a range of subjects raised by reporters: the stalemate in peace talks with Iraq on the eight-year Persian Gulf War, halted by a truce in August, 1988; his five-year plan for reconstruction and development of the economy and relations with Iran’s regional neighbors.

But time and again the questions came back to the hostages. Among the observations of the 55-year-old cleric who has succeeded the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the nation’s political leader:

-- The pro-Iranian Hezbollah organization in Lebanon, which he favorably labeled “the most combative and self-sacrificial in the region,” has no connection with the hostages.

-- “Those who take hostages are not known,” he said. “We tried to find them through intermediaries. It is not easy. If it was, the United States, France and Britain would have done it before us.” He denied that recent visits by Hezbollah leaders to Tehran involved the hostage issue.

-- While denying any knowledge of them, Rafsanjani characterized the kidnapers as “tyrannized” groups. “They are like a small child who cannot bear a difficulty,” he lectured. “Who has made this small child to cry?”

Iran, he said, does not blame small groups, it blames governments. “You have to condemn Israel,” he insisted. “You have to condemn the United States, which has supported the Maronites (leaders of Lebanon’s Christian community).”

Several times during the press conference, Rafsanjani lashed out at the United States. American firms will have no role in potential foreign investment in Iran’s economic plans, he said. The 10th anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran by student militants will be celebrated Nov. 4 as an “important incident” in the history of the Islamic republic.

Other than indirect contacts during last summer’s hostage crisis, he said, he has not had any exchange with a U.S. official since Robert C. McFarlane’s trip to Tehran during the Iran-Contra affair.

To give life to Tehran-Washington relations, he concluded, the United States should release the frozen funds: “You will have to do it eventually, so act now.”

BACKGROUND

Pawns on the Middle East chessboard, Western hostages in Lebanon now number 16--eight Americans, three Britons, two Swiss kidnaped earlier this month, an Italian and two other unspecified Westerners seized in a West Beirut store in January, 1987. Probably the most prominent hostage--and the subject of the most rumors--is Terry Waite, envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has been missing since January, 1987. Longest-held hostage: American Terry A. Anderson of the Associated Press, abducted in March, 1985.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster, in Washington, contributed to this report.