WHEN continental Europeans are
kidnapped, their countries’ spook and diplomats constantly communicate with
relatives and captors. Despite official denials, they also reportedly pay
multimillion-dollar ransoms with taxpayers’ money. By contrast, the American
and British governments refuse to pay ransoms, saying that to do so encourages
more kidnappings—as it appears to. The UN estimates that Islamic State (IS)
earned $35m-45m from abductions in the year to last October.
However, a strict no-concessions
policy is tough for your citizens if they get kidnapped. According to an
analysis by the New York Times of a group of 23 prisoners held by IS,
six of the seven who came from the United States or Britain were killed
(including the American Peter Kassig, above), and the last is still captive. Of
the remaining 16, 15 survived and were released for a fee.
The parents of three American
journalists have complained about their government’s handling of their cases.
They say they were not informed about efforts to free the hostages, that
different agencies gave them conflicting advice, and that they were threatened
with prosecution for offering a ransom themselves. The government has now
reviewed its hostage policy, and on June 24th Barack Obama announced the results.
He will set up a “fusion cell” including people from the Justice, Defense and
State Departments, and appoint a “family engagement coordinator” to give
relatives a single point of contact. He also made it clear that no private
citizen will be prosecuted for paying a ransom, and that officials are free to
communicate with kidnappers and intermediaries.
But on the central question—whether
Uncle Sam will pay ransoms—Mr Obama was firm. American officials cannot fund
the groups they want to destroy. He claimed
that kidnappers specifically avoid
taking American (and British) hostages because they do not expect a return on
the investment.
There is some empirical support for
that theory. In a forthcoming study of over 1,000 kidnappings by terrorists in
2001-13, Patrick Brandt, Justin George and Todd Sandler of the University of
Texas at Dallas found that the number of Americans and Britons abducted each
year stayed constant, whereas the totals for countries known to meet captors’ demands
rose steeply. They estimate that if a non-paying government started offering
ransoms, the number of its citizens taken hostage would jump by at least 30%.
However, proof is elusive. Most
kidnappings are never made public. Differences in abduction rates could simply
be because fewer Americans are travelling to lawless regions. American captives
may be more valuable as propaganda tools than as revenue sources—and killing
them in horrible ways can increase the ransoms other governments are willing to
pay. Besides, can extremists, surrounded by chaos, select victims by expected
financial return? “They get taken in a combat zone because they’re there and
have a Western appearance,” says Adam Dolnik of the University of Wollongong in
Australia. “Then the kidnappers figure out who they have, and what they can
get.”
Edited from The Economist
