Iraq's Progress Is Shattered Hostage-Taking Threatens Rebuilding of the Country

The Herald › April 14, 2004

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Summary

JAPAN, Italy, America, Canada, Israel, France - it reads like a roll-call for a meeting at the United Nations. Instead, it is a list of countries whose citizens have become victims of the latest grisly development in Iraq: hostage-taking. Russia, China and Britain, which had been on the list, are now off. Such is the chaos and escalating violence in the country, however, that no-one can be certain who will be next.

Given their speedy release, it seems likely that the capture of the Chinese and Russian workers was a mistake. If there is a method in the kidnappers' madness it is to take hostages from those countries which have sent troops to Iraq in order to pressurise governments into bringing forces home. That has been the clear message from those who took the three Japanese hostages and the American. It is a brutal tactic that has an undeniable effect abroad. Seeing television and newspaper pictures of hostages blindfolded and terrified, held at gun and knife-point, brings the war into the front rooms of millions as never before and provokes a response that battle scenes do not. It might be considered part of a soldier's lot to enter terrifying situations, but laundry workers, lorry drivers and builders - just some of those seized - can barely have expected to meet this fate. They will have known that Iraq was never going to be the easiest of places to work (their wage packets must have reflected that fact), but they could not have anticipated the security situation deteriorating so fast and so spectacularly. There are simply not enough troops on the ground to maintain order and it is the weakest who are being picked off - among them hundreds of Iraqi civilians who are being held hostage by bandits for cash, not a political cause.

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Iraq's Progress Is Shattered Hostage-Taking Threatens Rebuilding of the Country

The taking of hostages is a tr...

See the full content of this document