Three more Westerners, a Briton and two Americans, have been kidnapped in Baghdad. There remains hope that they will not suffer the unspeakable fate of some two dozen other foreigners murdered by hostage-takers in Iraq in recent months. Their fears and those of their relatives can scarcely be guessed at, and those now seeking their release face the appalling, and appallingly familiar, dilemma of weighing a human life against the principle of not compromising with kidnappers.
That principle is as solid now as when Richard the Lionheart found himself a prisoner of Saladin — and as routinely undermined. The very phrase “hostage-negotiator” betrays the reality that in most kidnappings the perpetrators win, if not a ransom, then a platform for blackmail or demagogy that they should by rights have forfeited the instant that they stooped to criminality.
Concessions, even minor ones, help to establish hostage-taking as an industry. That industry in Iraq is driving foreign contractors into heavily guarded compounds or out of the country, thus undermining reconstruction projects and fuelling popular resentment. These dishonourable aims are cherished by insurgents, whose greatest fear is that Iraq will be stable and, eventually, prosperous.
President Bush’s latest national intelligence assessment on Iraq is not so much gloomy as realistic. There is indeed a risk of the violence there descending into civil war, as there has been since last year’s invasion; a risk which coalition troops and law-abiding Iraqis have so far ensured remains no more than that. Yet regarding the spate of hostage-taking there is still time for clear thinking and effective action. As Iraq’s police acknowledge, and as their counterparts have found from Chechnya to Mexico, kidnappers thrive and multiply when their risks are minimal and their rewards great.
In hostage crises triggered by fanatics, a tragic outcome — like that in Beslan — is almost inevitable. But in general the approach of law enforcement and employers alike must be to minimise the hostage-takers’ hope of a reward, and maximise their risk.
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The first of these tasks is the more complex. The arguments against flirting with the masked face of terror or the disembodied voice of extortion are clear to all, and governments cannot afford to waver even at the risk of innocent lives. But those closest to the victims of this scourge will inevitably, and understandably, put the welfare of their loved ones above the defence of principle. But governments that give in to fanatical kidnappers are merely providing a motive for the next abduction.
The second task is simpler. The risks of hostage-taking can be massively increased. In Iraq this will require security, which, in the end, must be locally-enforced. This is why, for all the undoubted courage of those foreigners risking their lives to be there, the country’s foremost heroes are those queueing to enlist at its police stations.
Most of the 47 Iraqis who died in a car bomb explosion in Baghdad this week were doing just that. Their anguished relatives asked afterwards why security at the station in question had not been as tight as in the green zone where the interim Government operates with US protection. They were right to do so. There is no higher priority in Iraq than security for its own police. Without it, the supply of recruits will dry up, and with it, the country’s hopes for better times.