One year has passed since five British citizens disappeared into the mean streets of chaotic Baghdad. This is hell and hell has no exit doors. I wonder how those five invisible men - whose names have not even been officially released by the Government - celebrated their first year in Hades. Most of us rarely have nightmares. They disturb us in our sleep for a little while; then they are gone, unconscious phantoms play-acting in the dark side of our psyche.

But for five men in Baghdad the nightmare is no fantastic projection of the mind. For them the nightmare is very real and they are the ghosts who inhabit it second by second, week by week, month by month, enduring a gruesome eternity to find that it has only been a year, one long utterly terrifying and horrific year. The news footage of one of the hostages speaking to camera resurrected nightmares that I had long since forgotten.

Why has it been a year? That's the big question that every one of the hostages is asking himself. Then they start drowning in an ocean of whys. Why am I here? Why doesn't someone do something? Why do they treat me like this? Why don't they understand that I am human, not an animal? And so it goes on until you start beating your head against a wall, trying to numb yourself from all the questions.

The answer to all those questions lies in that well-worn phrase, “the British Government does not talk to terrorists”. Though why it should continue to assert this is beyond me. It is not only irresponsible, it is a lie.

Britain has frequently consorted with so-called terrorists in its history. In my own country, Ireland, it has now admitted to having secret meetings with leading IRA figures. It negotiated with Israeli terrorists who were shooting British troops in Palestine before the establishment of Israel. Britain has a long history of talking to the enemy. Lines of communication are always opened up with the enemy tent. It is how wars are progressed to their ultimate conclusion. Every conflict is always and only resolved by dialogue. Talking and listening are the only and ultimate arbiters. They need to be meticulously, honestly and openly worked out.

The five men chained up in Baghdad have to do it every day with their captors, their companions and, more painfully, with themselves just to survive and stay sane. So who are their captors, who describe themselves with shadowy Islamic acronyms? They don't see themselves as terrorists but as fighters against an army of occupation, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. So the Iraqis fight back against the overwhelming might of the invader with the only weapons they can. Hostage-taking is ammunition and five human beings have been caught up in this hideous firefight between misguided military adventurism and equally misguided religious and national fervour.

It is absurd that anyone can talk of a softly-softly, low-profile diplomatic approach while British and American troops are patrolling the streets and their tanks are bulldozing an already bulldozed city. Softly-softly, low-profile approaches have a place but they work only when they move quickly. After a year you're probably getting closer to nowhere than to getting anyone out of anywhere. The Middle East is a mercurial place. Things change suddenly, events happen quickly and in a very real sense nobody has any grasp of reality. The longer the captivity goes on, the harder it becomes to focus: too many people have too many irons in the fire.

A public campaign should be raised on behalf of the five hostages whose families have been kept out of the public gaze. It could represent, in a tangible, collective way, the public's deepening uncertainty about Iraq. But that could also explain why the Government insists on a quietly- quietly approach.

Public campaigns are good for the hostage. Just to know that out there people care is powerfully sustaining. It gives you hope, a sense of a future, a reason to live. It's good for families, for they too are helplessly locked up. They need to be assured that their husbands, sons or brothers are cared about and that the British Government values all its citizens. Public campaigns are also very good for collective morality. They empower people to be actively and personally concerned about issues that are more important than the sordid politics of neocolonialist enterprises.

Governments don't like such public campaigns. Governments love high-sounding rhetoric, such as not doing business with terrorists. They love talk of democracy, freedom from oppression and a people's right to choose their own future. But they don't like it when the public demand that they act upon such cherished idealism - especially when it is something as inconvenient as five human beings trying to survive in a godforsaken, filthy corner of the Earth.

I watched the hostage speaking on the grainy video. I tried to study his eyes. Eyes tell you everything about a man. The footage was too short and the image unclear. I couldn't read his eyes, but I can tell the reader this. You can die in captivity without someone killing you. When you are facing into another year in hell, another piece of you dies.

Brian Keenan was kidnapped by Islamic Jihad and held hostage for more than four years in Lebanon

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