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According to diplomats, most hostages at strategic sites are rotated among locations every week to 10 days, apparently to keep them from becoming too familiar with their surroundings and to prevent escape. They are permitted to write and receive letters. "We believe they are being treated well in the vast majority of cases," says a Western official.
Most of the other hostages (except about 100 Americans and Britons holed up in diplomatic residences) live in a strange limbo: relatively free to travel around the country, their mail and movements and phone calls monitored, riding the crest of each rumor and BBC or VOA report that portends hope, spending worthless Iraqi currency on rugs and jewelry in the suq.
Baghdad's citizens seem to have taken fondly to their hostages, particularly four young Dutchmen who cruise around town, top down, in the city's only red Mercedes convertible. They are up from Kuwait, where three of them worked in the oil fields and the fourth was in charge of digging a lagoon for the Emir's yacht. Boredom is the biggest problem. "Mostly we spend our time sitting at the pool plotting useless strategies," says an Irish doctor who arrived here Aug. 1 for what he thought would be two weeks of work and a tour of Islamic culture.
At night the hostages jam the city's open-air fish restaurants on the banks of the Tigris. Except for hotel dining rooms, almost all the city's restaurants are closed. Mangy cats beg for morsels of the fish -- called masgouf -- that are caught in the river, transferred to tanks, clubbed over the head and then roasted over a wood fire.
Afterward, Italian and Spanish diplomats socialize with the hostages for what they call Salsas si Puedas, which means very roughly "Dance If You Can While the Ship Goes Down." Meanwhile the Dutchmen organize a soccer game with a television crew just back from a press conference held by an exiled Saudi prince who enjoys closer ties to Beverly Hills than to Riyadh. He has a peace plan.
It is possible sometimes to imagine that this place is a set for a Peter Sellers movie. And then reality intrudes. A mother, perhaps 50 years old, clutches a letter from President Saddam Hussein. She lost seven sons in the war with Iran, and wrote the President this month to beg that her last male child not be taken from her and conscripted. The President has granted her wish, and she is grateful.