Since the FARC announced their plans to unilaterally release five hostages in order to honor former Senator Piedad Cordoba some have criticized the massive publicity for the rebel group that will undoubtedly follow.
But many clear-sighted people, including Ms. Cordoba herself, have said that, regardless of the publicity, what really matters is the freedom of the hostages.
Kidnapping can be defined as unlawfully withholding freedom from an individual. Kidnapping may be carried out for person reasons, for extortion, or for political reasons, which is what we are dealing with in this case.
Political kidnapping has a number of goals:
- To show that the enemy it is unable to guarantee the protection of its citizens
- To show that the enemy is unable to rescue its citizens, which is measured by the time the kidnappers are able to keep a victim under their control
- To demand concessions equivalent to the political value of the hostage.
Once a victim has been seized the kidnapping is already a success. Even if a victim is only held for a short time, the kidnappers have managed to destroy the sense of security of the individual and undermine those who should have protected them.
A rescue cannot restore the victim’s sense of freedom – their security has been breached, and that this fault can only be partly compensated for by freeing the victim as soon as possible. A rescue cannot be carried out without knowledge of the probable location of the victim, and each moment it takes to rescue them demonstrates the shortcomings of intelligence and of rescue teams. As you can’t rescue a victim who hasn’t been kidnapped, even the rescue itself demonstrates the triumph of the kidnappers.
Political kidnappers therefore have already gained a lot of power to achieve the outcome that they want, once the victim has been seized, as the kidnapping has taken place and is their victory.
They can then pursue their aims through negotiation, the controlled way to end the kidnapping, or through a unilateral release. The benefit of the latter option is that the kidnappers need not agree to scale down or cease the practice of kidnapping. Political kidnappers usually demonstrate this point by carrying out new abductions before, during, or after a unilateral release.
In the same way that the abduction of a person is a triumph for kidnapping, the mere announcement of a unilateral release and of its objective is a triumph for political kidnapping. The publicity is a secondary problem, however, and is almost irrelevant, as the release will always benefit the hostages and freedom itself more than anything else.