Iraq’s Bittersweet Drama: the ‘Hostage Salami’ : Captives: Foreign dignitaries visit Baghdad, praise Hussein’s peace talk and then a few more ‘guests’ go free. But hundreds more remain trapped.

An Asian diplomat here calls it “the hostage salami”: President Saddam Hussein’s practice off slicing off a few of Iraq’s foreign “guests” from time to time and sending them to freedom in the name of good will.

Two Americans, for instance, have been released in the last two days, both of them men who fit Hussein’s humanitarian category of being 55 or older. Yet, other Americans of that age remain held here against their will.

Although there has been no official linkage, the men presumably were freed in response to the visit here by former Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark earlier in the week.

That has been the pattern of the last month. Foreign political figures drop into Baghdad with praise for Hussein’s policy of seeking a peaceful resolution of the Persian Gulf crisis, and Iraqi authorities release a few of their compatriots.

For the hostages, their families and their governments, it’s a bittersweet trade.

In Washington, the State Department calls the practice cynical. But U.S. policy calls for seeking the release of all the Americans held here, and the task preoccupies the U.S. Embassy.

Charge d’Affaires Joseph C. Wilson IV, the ranking American diplomat in Baghdad, said Thursday he is in constant contact with Iraqi Foreign Ministry officials, pressing for release of the hostages. Diplomatically, he calls the conversations “frank.”

More than 2,000 Americans, Europeans and Japanese here and in Iraqi-occupied Kuwait have been denied exit visas.

Hussein has agreed to free foreign women and children plus men of Arab origin. Most have left, and the American Embassy is pressing now for the release of 75 men on humanitarian or medical grounds.

Equally anguishing are the cases of more than 100 American men--and hundreds of other Westerners and Japanese--held as so-called human shields at potential military targets to discourage any attack against Iraq.

Western diplomats say they have identified at least 35 such sites in Iraq and admit that they are not sure where individual captives are at any given moment. Some of those held in what one American called “the Iraqi gulag” have been moved four or five times.

A few have been released and have told their stories in the West. The only view of the hostages in Baghdad comes on the government’s television spot called “Guest News,” a bizarre presentation on the evening tube.

In the program, a hostage sits alone at a table against a blank wall. A sepulchral voice asks him to send greetings to his family and comment on his treatment. Then, as a finale, the voice asks the captive in the chair, “Would you like to say a few words about peace?”

In Kuwait, where the peace was broken by Iraq’s Aug. 2 invasion, word has gone out via Voice of America radio and Cable News Network television that another American refugee flight will be mounted Sunday. Only women and children, plus men of Arab origin, need apply.

The refugees will fly from Kuwait city to Baghdad aboard a chartered Iraqi Airways 707, then on to London. U.S. officials are uncertain about how many Americans will take the plane. But they assume they will be those who had turned down earlier opportunities and finally made the decision to leave Kuwait--and in some cases their husbands--because of worsening security and a subsistence-level life there.

Sunday’s flight will be the first U.S. refugee departure in more than a month; the stream that began with flights every other day in September has slowed to an intermittent trickle.

Besides the men in hiding in Kuwait--most of them British and Americans--and those detained at strategic sites, there are hundreds of Westerners trapped in Baghdad itself. Denied permission to leave and living with the potential threat of being picked off the street to join the human-shield corps, they are imprisoned by regulations.

Many have been sheltered on the diplomatic premises of their respective governments. There are small tent villages on some embassy grounds. Many of the residents leave the compounds occasionally, but not without risk.

The Americans cannot forget the incident in August when Iraqi officials asked sheltered husbands to accompany their wives as the women filled out requests for exit visas. The husbands who complied were picked up and sent to strategic sites.

The pain of those still sheltered is psychological.

“We listen to the news, watch television, do our own cooking, call our families,” said an Australian caught in this limbo. Iraqi officials have branded them “swimming-pool hostages.”

But free as they might appear, they cannot take a taxi to Saddam International Airport and catch a plane for home.