Kidnappings—Life in the Balance!
NOWHERE does the value of a single life seem more apparent than when a kidnapping occurs. Relatives, friends, sometimes whole nations become galvanized with fear for the life of the hostage. A mood of helplessness and angry frustration prevails. Heroic efforts to meet the kidnapper’s demands are made. Money becomes almost meaningless compared to the value of that one life.
Typical is the view expressed in a New York Times editorial: “As long as the victims’ lives are in danger, efforts to save them are paramount. . . . The first priority must go to saving innocent lives.” Thus authorities usually stay in the background to avoid jeopardizing delicate negotiations for release. And what relief and joy if the victim is released unharmed!
In a few short years, the world has plunged into what some are calling “the age of the kidnapper.” Kidnapping and its more recent counterpart—hostage taking—have suddenly mushroomed world wide. Argentina’s first kidnapping in thirty-five years occurred in 1968. There were two in 1969. But by 1973, they were averaging about ten a week! Ransoms totaled over $50 million that year. One abducted American businessman alone brought his captors more than $14 million.
“About the only growth industry” on the troubled Italian economic scene “is kidnapping,” observes Time magazine wryly. In fact, “kidnapping has become a very profitable industry,” says a member of Italy’s parliament. “In the last five years kidnappers have raked in $24.5-million, no less than $8-million in 1974 alone.”
Other nations around the globe have experienced rapid growth of kidnappings and hostage takings within their borders; but the problem is also international. Abductors now strike almost anywhere in the world. Why do they use such methods?
Why Kidnappings?
What many authorities long feared has taken place. Frustrated political groups seeking a hearing have discovered that kidnapping and hostage taking are ideal political weapons. When certain lives are at stake, they have found, there is little that families or authorities will not do to save them. Modern communications make these incidents into world events that are seen on television screens by countless millions. Thus the abductor’s cause gets global attention far more effectively than any number of less spectacular efforts.
What is most important to political extremists is that it seems to work. It seems to them that the more spectacular the act, the more likely the world is to discuss their grievances and exert pressure on their political opponents. Publicity spreads the word. Success of one group stimulates similar groups in other lands to use the same methods. “When spectacular terror succeeds,” notes the Long Island Sunday Press, “it is almost certain to be repeated, and a self-feeding phenomenon is in motion.”
Viewing the success of political opportunists, common criminals—seeing a way to make easy money with little risk—go into the same business. “We haven’t paid a bank [robbery] claim in the last two years,” says a Buenos Aires insurance man. “The robbers are all into kidnapping.”
To curb the trend, many believe that kidnappings should not be given so much publicity. “Publicity just leads to planting the idea in some [deranged person’s] brain,” declares a U.S. police official. The fact that such acts often come in waves, after a widely publicized incident, seems to bear this out. But others fear the implications of curbing freedom of the press in any way. “Suppression of news, even of the most shocking sort, is the handmaiden of tyranny,” writes the editor of U.S. News & World Report.
Some have even suggested making it a federal crime to pay a kidnapper’s ransom demands. The “family or any others who pay ransom are simply advertising that kidnapping pays,” declares a prominent U.S. government adviser. “They are thereby inadvertently involving countless other innocents in ordeals of terror.”
But others say: Consider the consequences of such a move. Would heartsick relatives of the hostage even notify officials if there were such a law? Would they not be tempted to handle the matter themselves to save their loved one, leaving authorities out altogether? Thus, some observe, enforcement efforts might be thwarted still more.
“Siege Mentality”
Government impotence at curbing the rising tide of criminal and political kidnappings has created a climate of fear among their prime targets—the wealthy and representatives of foreign corporations. Kidnappers have discovered that an executive’s corporation is a sort of “substitute family” that can be forced to pay even higher ransom demands than a wealthy person’s own family.
But they continue to prey on the local wealthy as well. “A siege mentality pervades the millionaire families that dominate local society” in Monterrey, Mexico, reports the New York Times. They have “quietly dropped from the social circuit.” Established life patterns have been changed. Potential victims are no longer free to come and go as they please. Daily schedules have to be varied, different routes taken to work—anything to avoid the habitual patterns for which kidnappers look. Some prosperous people in the north of Italy are reportedly sending their children to school in nearby Switzerland, hoping that they will be safe there.
In some places homes are made into fortresses with shatterproof glass in windows, barbed wire topping surrounding walls, all-night floodlights and patrolling armed guards. Automobiles are armored against bullets. Many hire bodyguards with the latest automatic weapons. Says one American businessman in Argentina: “Fear overshadows everything. I spend more time on safety than I do with [the business].” Another says: “It costs my company $5000 a month just to protect me and my family.”
Thus, aside from the direct cost of ransom payments, kidnapping and hostage taking create a huge burden of related security costs. Private security agencies that supply bodyguards and other protective services report big increases in their business world wide. Kidnap insurance sales are booming. One prominent international company reportedly offers a $1-million policy for about $500 annually if the insured pays the first $2,500 of the ransom. Of course, insured persons would be prime targets for kidnappers were it not for the fact that names are kept completely confidential.
Specially trained anti-kidnap dogs are in demand. One Italian kennel owner who trains killer guard dogs says: “I have already sold trained Alsatian dogs to top company executives, industrialists, actors and professional men and the demand is still growing.” The dogs, costing from $1,600 to $4,800, are trained to attack anyone who assaults their master. They can kill the attacker if not stopped, according to the trainer. One California firm has sold hundreds of guard dogs at $2,500 apiece.
With all the precautions, though, is one safe? A police officer assigned to a highly publicized U.S. kidnapping made this sobering comment: “What you have to realize is that if someone really wants to kidnap a person, that there’s just not much anybody can do to stop it.”
Similarly, an American diplomat, who was kidnapped in Mexico and released after the kidnappers’ demands were met, gave this advice to students at the American Graduate School of International Management: “A lot of people asked about carrying firearms and so forth. I think that’s foolish and ridiculous. You’re so outmanned and outarmed that it wouldn’t do you any good.”
Political activists seem bent on using this most powerful weapon to the limit. A spokesman for one international security firm predicts that his line of business is the wave of the future: “Never before in the history of man have we seen the types of violence, the animalistic acts that we are going to see soon in our society.” Surely mankind is feeling “the increasing of lawlessness” that the Bible predicts would mark “the last days” of this failing global “system of things.”—Matt. 24:3, 12; 2 Tim. 3:1.
A Balanced View of Life
There is something else to think about: Does it not strike you as strange that people are so appalled with threats to the lives of kidnap victims or hostages, yet countless other persons daily threatened with death are almost unnoticed?
Think of the millions who are starving at this very moment—what makes their lives less valuable? Abortions continually snuff out numerous young lives; multitudes are not just kidnapped, but murdered every day around the globe. And what of the myriads already slaughtered and now being killed in this generation’s wars? These lives usually pass with hardly a ripple.
Politics, crime and moral expediency have made life very cheap, while, paradoxically, threats to certain lives cause a terrific furor. As one person put it: “People will give millions to save one life, but very little to save millions of lives!” Do not such lopsided values reveal that there is something very amiss with the worldwide system of things that has produced them?
That is why only the complete global change promised by God can get mankind’s view of life back in balance. That change will necessarily be so sweeping that the Bible speaks of a “new earth” afterward, a new human society under new governmental arrangements, when the “former earth” and its cheap view of life will have “passed away.” Then the value placed on life by the great Life-Giver will prevail—bringing into reality the longed-for condition where “death will be no more.”—Rev. 21:1-5; 2 Pet. 3:13.