Ethnic Discord : What About the . . .Other Hostages : World furor died down when the last Westerners were freed two years ago. But thousands of Lebanese are still missing.

As the hostage drama that held the world’s superpowers captive to renegade Lebanese kidnapers fades into this city’s troubled memory, Lebanon’s own hostage nightmare goes on.

The international crisis that began more than a decade ago when gunmen held citizens of the United States, Britain, France and Germany as hostages of a bloody civil war largely ended nearly two years ago, when men like British church envoy Terry Waite and American journalist Terry Anderson emerged from captivity and closed the door on one of the West’s most unsettling adventures in the Middle East.

But Lebanon’s own hostages remain largely unaccounted for. Up to 17,000 Lebanese disappeared during the nation’s 14-year civil war--snatched from their cars at checkpoints, grabbed off the streets or taken from their homes in the middle of the night. And still, no one can say what happened to most of them.

Some have been missing since the war began in 1975. The most recent, a right-wing Falangist political leader, disappeared in an area of East Beirut under the government’s control only eight months ago.

For thousands of Lebanese families, the hostage crisis won’t be over until the files of the disappeared are closed.

“I think they cannot possibly be alive. Because we would have known it. We would have heard a rumor or something. Someone would have been able to pay someone, and send a letter. But nothing,” said Bernard Pfefferle, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation in Beirut.

Yet dozens of families still cling to hope, saying they have evidence that their loved ones are being held captive by Hezbollah (Party of God) in the remote reaches of the Bekaa Valley outside the control of the Lebanese army. Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia and political organization that is Lebanon’s most important Islamic movement, was thought to control most of the Shiite Muslim clans that held Western hostages in Lebanon.

Odette Salem, a Maronite Catholic, said she has met with Lebanese who were among the dozens who have been released, a few of whom have reportedly said they were held in a room at Hezbollah’s Sheik Abdullah barracks in Baalbek. She said a Shiite Muslim intermediary has found evidence that her son and daughter were among them.

Her son, Richard, 22, and daughter, Christine, 19, were driving home with their uncle from the family business in West Beirut one afternoon in 1985 but never reached their destination. After telephoning friends, and then the hospitals, Salem finally called the police.

An officer who met with her noted that the two young people, whose identity cards identified them as Christians, had been traveling through a Muslim-controlled area of Beirut. “He told me that the probability would be 99% that they had been kidnaped by Hezbollah,” she said.

Salem, a neatly coiffed woman inclined to fashionable suits and pearls, made an unlikely visit to Hezbollah’s headquarters amid the teeming Shiite Muslim suburbs of southern Beirut and met, along with 15 other women with kidnaped relatives, with the party’s deputy leader, Sheik Naim Kassem.

Salem confronted Kassem with information she had received from a Shiite man, Emad Dabbous, who identified a photograph of her son as someone he had seen during six years he was held by Hezbollah before his release in July, 1992.

At first Kassem insisted, “We have nobody,” she said. Pressed, he conceded that Hezbollah had held some captives. “We had to detain them because we want to make exchanges (of prisoners),” Salem quoted the sheik as saying. Half a dozen others, he reportedly told her, were in the hands of the Israeli-backed militia, the South Lebanese Army.

Salem, meanwhile, continues her search. “Everybody who knows about the case of my children confirms that they are still alive,” she says.

Red Cross officials say they know Hezbollah continues to hold prisoners, but they have no idea how many because international observers have no access to them. Presumably, most are military prisoners taken from the South Lebanese Army during conflicts around Israel’s self-declared security zone in southern Lebanon. (Ten new prisoners were taken captive in a single week earlier this month.)

And Israel could be holding some of the missing. The Red Cross has no access to a group of 10 Lebanese being held in Israeli prisons, including kidnaped Shiite cleric Abdel Karim Obeid, captured by the Israelis in 1989, and more than 200 Lebanese prisoners being held in the Israeli security zone in southern Lebanon.

Also still missing is Israeli aviator Ron Arad, shot down over the southern Lebanese city of Sidon in 1986. Arad’s whereabouts are unknown, but it is widely presumed that he is in detention under Iranian control--though officials say that could well be in Iranian-controlled territory within Lebanon.

Sinan Barraj, an attorney representing an organization of thousands of families of Lebanese kidnap victims, holds out only a little hope that any are alive. Most were probably killed and buried in mass graves long ago, he said.

“I don’t have any confirmation that anybody is still alive, and I don’t have any confirmation that all of them have been killed. And that is our problem,” he said.

The committee is working now to promote legislation that would have all victims of kidnaping or disappearance declared dead once they have been missing for 10 years. Only then, he said, will families be able to begin to get on with their lives.

Unlike the Western hostage crisis, which began in the mid-1980s and largely ended in 1992, the Lebanese kidnaping crisis began in the early days of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. As many as 400 people a day were disappearing from the streets, most of them because they were Christians or Muslims caught in what were rapidly emerging as the wrong parts of town.

The process quickly became retaliatory: The Shiite Amal militia would grab 10 Christians at a checkpoint, and their Christian counterparts, the Lebanese Forces, would grab 10 Muslims in return. Up to 90% of the kidnap victims were released, but nonetheless up to 30 a day were simply disappearing.

The real problem came after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, when the Lebanese army and the Lebanese Forces moved into the streets of Beirut after the assassination of President Bashir Gemayel.

According to Barraj’s Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, the infuriated Lebanese Forces detained 2,111 people on the streets during roughly 24 hours after the assassination. An additional 1,110 were taken by the Lebanese army. Of those, 540 were later released, and the whereabouts of the other 560 are unknown.

The full-scale kidnaping era began in 1984-85 with the taking of most of the Western hostages along with large numbers of Lebanese. The committee estimates that 600 to 800 people disappeared during those two years, mostly at the hands of Hezbollah, though documents collected by the committee indicate that over the years a total of four organizations were involved: the Lebanese army, the Lebanese Forces, Amal and Hezbollah.

In all, about 17,000 people have disappeared since 1975. Of those for whom documentation exists, 70% were Muslims and 30% were Christians.

Christian militia leaders have disclaimed individual responsibility but have accused rival leaders of killing most of their detainees in 1982. Hezbollah has said simply that it is not holding any hostages. Despite reports to the contrary, when the Lebanese army took over control of the Sheik Abdullah barracks in Baalbek from Hezbollah in the summer of 1992, no detainees were found.

Now, relatives of the disappeared are pushing for legislation to have Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s government investigate the cases and issue a blanket declaration of death for all those missing more than 10 years.

Such a declaration will take care of some of the most pressing problems of the families who remain behind, Barraj said. Wives and children cannot access the kidnap victims’ bank accounts without a declaration of death. A wife cannot drive or sell her kidnaped husband’s car. Under Maronite law, a woman’s husband is not considered dead until he has been missing 100 years.

A parliamentary committee this month recommended legislation to allow families to get court-ordered death declarations for those they could prove to be missing for a decade or more. But Barraj said the proposal is inadequate because it is not a blanket declaration that will put the matter to rest and because it contains no provision for investigating what happened to the missing.

“For the first time, the Lebanese authorities are speaking about kidnaped people, and that is progress,” Barraj said. “But I said from the beginning that when we made this proposal of law, it was under the condition that there would be a search.

“I myself am divided into two parts. One part, I want to make a final declaration, for the social rights of the family. But from the other part, as a man, even with no hope, I feel we must search.”