| Author's Podcast
1 February, 2006 - American News is Comedy 2 February, 2006 - A Uniformly Uninformed Citizenry 7 February, 2006 - ... Nor Any Drop to Drink 8 February, 2006 - Reader Comments 10 February, 2006 - Lead by Example: OUR STORY 15 February, 2006 - Kidnap & Ransom: Perspective 23 February, 2006 - Kidnap & Ransom: Conclusion |
10 February 2006: The practice of kidnap-and-ransom is as old as the history of warfare itself. One of the scandals of the Crusade of 1248 A.D. was the difficulty of raising a ransom for King Louis IX of France. Moving to the modern era, Europe endured the kidnapping escapades of the terrorist organization the Red Brigades in Italy; in the Middle East, envoys like Terry Waite , who was held for five years, suffered the same fate. Today, as the Jill Carroll story holds the attention of the international press and a banner of her image is festooned in front of the city hall in Rome, kidnap does not always or necessarily mean that a ransom is possible. This tactic, this tool for financing conflicts, has now become a political tool of intimidation, as well. I mean to explore that with this project. But first, some background.
I've always maintained that some of the best writers I knew of had their grounding in journalism. Zola, Dickens and Twain immediately come to mind. In the final analysis, we call the pieces that we do "stories" because, if done well, a good work of journalism informs the reader by telling him/her a complete and nuanced story that illuminates the events. Yes, we mediate between you and reality, as I've written in an earlier post, but also, if we do it well, we reveal the truth behind and involved with the simple facts of an event. In that way, good journalism acts as a source of meaning, elevating the seeming chaos of events.
"Lead by example." As an editor and publisher, that phrase became part of my credo. If I wanted the journalists and writers who worked with me to produce the World's Magazine to invest time and passion into their work, I would have to do the same with my own. I would also have to exhibit this commitment by my choices in the kind of stories we ran and in the amount of time I devoted to those stories and which ones I encouraged. My first example was a piece I ran on Goodyear Tire's advertising in South America. That company actually had the audacity to run an advert with the tag-line, "Goodyear Tires: Strong as a Black man's lips!" I put their feet to the fire in a series of articles I wrote at G21. But I didn't stop there. I went after their advertising agency and every other company that advertised on the same Peruvian program. That brought in Quaker Oats, Cheesebrough-Ponds and a number of other supposedly respected corporations into the story. As part of the series, G21 wrote to each of the companies asking them to explain their positions. Some responded and we published their accounts. I continue to be proud of that effort.
Concurrently, we were running a series by another writer, a woman in South America who worked for a food aid agency. That series, begun in August, 1996, was about the kidnapping of Thomas Hargrove by the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) in Colombia. Tom's focus was rice for developing nations. He had served with the notorious Lt. Colonel John Paul Vann in Vietnam and seen the results of that focus on food aid. The issue of kidnap-and-ransom by terrorists was becoming the bane of many Westerners working for aid agencies in the 1990s but was getting nary a mention in the Mouthpiece Media at the time.
G21, meanwhile, continued to run our series throughout Tom's captivity. (You can't read the initial parts of the series, I'm sorry to report, because the author, who still works for an aid agency in a troubled region, requested that we pull it in the interests of the safety of her family.) After Tom's release, he not only wrote a book about his experience and eventual ransom but also, in gratitude, wrote a series of articles about his ordeal for G21. Tom was eventually called to appear before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, in 1998, about this growing phenomenon of kidnap-and-ransom (K & R) being used by narco-terrorists to fund their operations. His testimony was a nearly verbatim recitation of what he had written for G21.
This important story did not get a lot of notice outside of the U.S. government and from a few of our fellow journalists because G21 was not a "cool" Web site. What we were attempting to do, serious journalism, was not in vogue here on the Web. Perhaps it still isn't.
Part of my commitment to leading by example was to accept that only a few thousand people would value what we were about, we would get no corporate advertising, and we'd be considered that "hip little station at the far end of the FM dial," as one of my writers put it in a jocular e-mail.
Ten years later, it seems our magazine has come almost full circle. Our lead story of 16 January of this year was Natasha Tynes reporting on the kidnap Christian Science Monitor of journalist Jill Carroll in Iraq.
So the core of this project for the Huffington Post will not be simply my comments about the rest of the media. Though this is only another Blog, I believe the best thing I can do is use this opportunity to produce a Blog with a differenc e. The remainder of this project will be a serious investigation on how the K & R phenomenon has morphed over the years since G21 first began reporting about it. Kidnappings now are not always for ransom, they are also used by terrorists and narco-terrorists as political tools of intimidation and that is an issue that should be analyzed and explored.
OUR STORY
In the film "Proof of Life," South American drug-dealers kidnapped Peter Bowman, a U.S. engineer who worked for an oil company. The first call his wife, Alice Bowman, made was not to the U.S. State Department, but to her husband's company, which immediately contacted its insurance provider's kidnap and ransom negotiator, Terry Throne, played by Russell Crowe. What viewers may not realize is that such a scenario is becoming more and more common in real life.See also: http://www.chubb.com/businesses/csi/chubb868.pdfAccording to a report released in December 2003 by the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs in Washington, there has been a rise in the kidnapping of Americans abroad since 2000. The State Department reported 25 kidnappings last year, 22 in 2001 and 16 in 2000. The State Department says most kidnappings go unreported because victims and their families often wish to avoid public exposure. Or in some cases, kidnappers threaten their victims if they go to the authorities.
Insurance companies have picked up on the trend and are offering K&R coverage -- kidnap and ransom insurance -- as extra protection for their corporate clients and wealthy individuals who frequently travel abroad.
According Greg Bangs, a ransom product manager at the Chubb Group in New Jersey, up to 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies had purchased K&R policies for their globetrotting executives by December 2003.
While standard policies generally cover the most obvious expenses of a kidnapping, such as ransom reimbursement, hostage negotiation fees, counseling fees and medical coverage for the victims, corporate policies also pay for interpreters, travel expenses, lost salary and the cost of hiring a replacement. Some policies even cover the victim's financial losses, like the failure to exercise stock options. For an additional cost, insurance companies will pay for the victim's cosmetic surgery if the victim's physical appearance has been altered by torture.
According to Chubb, sales of K&R insurance policies have jumped sharply since Sept. 11, 2001. Applications for K&R insurance are up 20 percent from two years ago due to an increase in terrorism awareness, Bangs said. Corporate policies range between $1,500 and $5,000 a year for $1 million of coverage. - Colombia News Service
Firstly, and most importantly, kidnap and ransom insurers are actually interested in minimising the risks of their policyholders in order to reduce the likelihood that they will have to pay-out. In order to do this, underwriters add incentives and penalties for 'good' and 'bad' behaviour - as is true in homeowner's insurance, where coverage may make policyholders less concerned about burglary, as they know they can recoup the costs. To counter this, underwriters offer lower premiums to those willing to act to reduce their risks by, for example, fitting locks to windows.K&R insurers have adopted similar mechanisms to encourage the responsible, low-risk behaviour of their policyholders. The pricing structure of premiums alters according to the amount of effort that the policyholder is prepared to make to reduce their risk.
Secondly, and related to this, many of the largest underwriters exclusively secure the services of a particular security consultant for their policy-holders in order to ensure that they are taking their security policy seriously. In this sense, the K&R insurance industry has contributed towards an accumulation of expert professional knowledge about economic kidnapping and helped to promote methods that lower the policyholder's susceptibility to the risk of kidnapping.
Thirdly, when a kidnapping does occur, there are safeguards in place to minimise the amount of money that will be paid out. The total amount that a person or organisation can be insured for is relative to a policyholder's ability to pay, and this means that the insurance policy recovers the amount that would have been paid without insurance cover. - by Rachel Briggs, manager of the Centre's Security Programme, was published on lloyds.com, the site of Lloyds of London
As noted in his congressional testimony, Tom Hargrove and his wife began working with support groups for the families of kidnapped Americans abroad. When he and I last communicated he was also acting as a consultant to insurance agencies on this issue of kidnap-and-ransom. Though many international insurers take the issue seriously and every foreign service includes the issue on their lists of countries they advise their nationals not to visit, the media coverage of this issue is often wanting until some high-profile individual is taken hostage.
In this series, we'll follow the money first, the money for insurers, for security agencies and for the terrorists who make it a practice as a means of pursuing their aims. Then, we'll take the story to the ground, where any good story exists. I hope you'll come back next week to read the rest of this investigation.
Thanks for dropping by.
Go to First Post - AMERICAN NEWS IS COMEDY
Go to the Second Post - A Uniformly Uninformed Citizenry
Go to the Third Post - ... Nor Any Drop to Drink
Go to the Fourth Post - Reader Comments
Go o the Sixth Post - Kidnap & Ransom: Perspective
Go to Final Post - Kidnap & Ransom: Conclusion
© 2006, Rod Amis.
E-mail your comments to rod@g21.net.
