Baghdad’s Other ‘Guests’: Some Want to Go Home and Some Don’t : Iraq: Brazilian scientists are released. But Germans might face charges over chemical arms.

When Hugo de Oliveira Piva, a retired Brazilian army general, arrived in Baghdad nearly a year ago with 21 handpicked young Brazilian scientists, all were very special guests of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

They had come with a top-secret job for the Iraqi leader and his powerful armed forces: to build “the Piranha,” a high-tech, air-to-air missile that their own country does not have in its arsenal.

But during the last two months, these same young physicists and missile engineers have been special “guests” of a far different sort, part of the thousands of foreigners barred from leaving Iraq--”human shields” against war whom Baghdad refers to as guests and Westerners call hostages.

The Brazilians’ story is one of many dramas that have largely eluded the attention of the United States, where the focus has been on the 1,000 Americans still unable to leave Kuwait and Iraq. For now, the Brazilians are simply among the “others” in accounts of the hostages.

It was not until this week, after Hussein had released nine French hostages in a move aimed at weakening the U.N.-sponsored embargo against Iraq, that attention turned to these “others.” It is among such nations that Hussein hopes to drive wedges in the international wall built to isolate him after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August.

The Brazilians, for example, reached an agreement with Iraq for the release not only of the 21 scientists, but also of 168 other Brazilians who were supervising highway construction, irrigation and car-assembly projects when Hussein virtually closed Iraq’s borders to foreigners. On Wednesday the group flew out of Baghdad, bound for home. A total of 82 Brazilians remain behind.

“Saddam is being very clever. He is driving wedges in every target area he can,” said one Western diplomat who had closely followed the negotiations between Iraqi officials and a three-man Brazilian delegation. “Some of them are subtle sleepers, some are blatant direct hits. But there are little fissures, little cracks, that can all be exploited. And by rewarding countries like Brazil, he’s making the neutrals stay neutral.”

Beyond the political dimension, though, the non-American foreign hostages represent behind-the-scenes insights into Iraq in its time of isolation.

It is in the accounts of the “others,” gathered in interviews during the last month, that some of the most compelling and ironic human dimensions of the hostage drama emerge.

Unlike the Brazilians, there are, for example, a number of German scientists and businessmen who do not necessarily want to leave Baghdad all that soon--and who certainly do not want to go home.

“Some of them almost definitely will be indicted if they land on German soil,” one European military analyst said. “They are under investigation right now in Germany for helping Iraq develop its chemical weapons facility and for assisting the Iraqis in developing a long-range ballistic missile capability.”

In a touch of irony, at least half a dozen Germans taken by Iraqi authorities from Kuwait and placed in the special category of several hundred “guests” held at strategic military sites are now housed in the main chemical plant that other German technicians helped develop.

Several others can be seen almost every evening drinking in the bar of a luxury hotel in Baghdad. Intensely private about their reasons for being in Iraq at the time of the invasion, one remarked the other night: “I import things and sell them. All things. Anything. If the Iraqis need shirts, for example, I find them shirts. If they need something else, I find them something else.”

Although Germany has not sent a military force to back the multinational armada in the Persian Gulf, Bonn has pledged funds for the U.S.-led military operation, and most analysts say Germany is not among Hussein’s potential soft spots in the alliance.

Portugal, however, is a different story, as one recent anecdote illustrates.

The Portuguese angle, which has appeared prominently only in the Lisbon press, focused on the wife of a British hostage, Colin Wells. He had been taken by Iraqi authorities from his home in Kuwait along with his Portuguese wife, Filisbela Homem de Figueiredo, and their two children.

As Iraqi authorities prepared to send Wells to a strategic site, his wife and children decided not to take advantage of Hussein’s order to release all foreign women and children, electing instead to join their husband and father in detention.

Somehow word of the move reached the woman’s former husband in Portugal, who is the father of the older child. He filed a lawsuit in Lisbon protesting his ex-wife’s decision to expose their daughter to the dangers of a possible U.S. air strike--and easily won the case.

As an apparent gesture to the largely neutral Portuguese, the Iraqis permitted Gabriel Mesguita de Breto, Portugal’s ambassador to Iraq, access to the family at the strategic site, where he secured the release not only of the daughter in question but also of the mother and the younger daughter, who then decided to leave as well.

Countless other oddities and ironies are to be found among the diverse foreign community that continues to fill Baghdad’s five-star hotels and palm-lined suburban neighborhoods.

There’s a Dutch agronomist, for example, who was working on agricultural development in Kuwait when it was invaded. After the invasion he came to Baghdad and, since the Dutch are not on Hussein’s list of “special guest” nations, he checked into a luxury hotel.

But the Dutchman was bored, so he approached Iraqi authorities and requisitioned some land, where he is now planting a 10,000-acre high-yield potato crop.

Keeping busy, it seems, is the most universal and trying task among the foreigners, both in the American and “other” communities. Many simply spend their days in and around Baghdad’s modern hotels, where they have developed, with the help of Iraq’s euphemistic parlance, a vocabulary with a whole new meaning.

“Are you a guest?” foreigners are often heard asking each other in hotels where the term means far more than whether they are staying in the same place. “Or are you a journalist?”--the one category of foreigner exempted from the departure ban.

But the language has been complicated still further by the fact that the Iraqis use the term guest to include both categories of hostages--those held at strategic sites and those who can travel freely within Iraq.

So a new word has been coined here to describe those not under military detention--”guestages.” Those at strategic sites are known as “special guests.”

To pass the time, Americans taking refuge at several diplomatic compounds read books or watch videos, and the British play cricket on their sprawling compound.

Other nationalities try other ventures. Four Australian grain executives, for example, had just finished their contract in Basra. Like the Dutch, they are “guestages.” So they came to Baghdad and asked for a new contract on improving grain yields.

“It was ultimately decided that it was deemed inappropriate,” an informed Australian source said. “Australia, as you know, has sent naval ships to the (Persian) Gulf, and all ‘round, it was felt best not to give off the wrong signals.”

Indeed, it was among the Australians, several of whom privately concede that their nation could rank among Hussein’s potential “soft targets” for concessions, that there was a final irony.

Graham Lightfoot, a 59-year-old “guestage” who was working as a shipping executive in Kuwait at the time of the invasion, is also the founder of an Australian-Arab group that has promoted commerce with Iraq.

“I have spent the last 10 years of my life working to build cultural and commercial bridges between our countries,” he said this week as he arrived in Baghdad after two months of virtual isolation in his house in Kuwait. “We have taken up all sorts of Arab causes. There’s an irony in it. I don’t feel bitter, but to end up like this. . . .”