Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

An Admirable Code of Abduction Conduct

Kidnappings and abductions go on all over the world. Children are often subjected to being spirited away from their families identified as having the wherewithal to pay for their safe restoration to home and hearth. In areas of conflict there are attempts to kidnap soldiers to trade them for those taken into security by adversaries. In other areas of the world where terrorists hold nations to ransom, foreign aid workers and members of the news media are abducted.

Often enough children and women are abducted to be enslaved by unscrupulous and uncompassionate slavers. The children and women to be used as slaves for the production of goods, or farm labourers, or sex. Their lives are a living misery. International humanitarian aid groups try to locate and to ransom the children and the women, when and if possible, but most are never freed.

Young people, boys and girls, are abducted from their villages in Africa and Asia, never to see their families again. They are brutally inducted into a life of crime, or of warfare, given the tools of the trade and taught the way of life their captors have in store for them, as indentured slaves, as foot soldiers obeying commands to kill others, knowing no other way of life.

There are those who are abducted and sometimes imprisoned in dire, inhumane conditions for long periods of time, before being set free. Often enough, abductors choose to slaughter their hapless victims, symbolic of a cause. The drug trade has its own vicious code of vengeance against dealers invading their territory; capturing, torturing and murdering their victims.

Islamist terrorists abduct international messengers of various humanitarian intervention agencies, to hold them for ransom, or for exchange of those of their jihadist-tribe held in incarceration. Some of these abductees are released speedily once ransom has been paid, others are kept for indefinite periods of time in the most squalid and inhumane conditions before and if they are finally released.

In Greece, things are done differently. Shipping magnate Pericles Panagopoulos (what a wondrous name) was abducted on January 12 by three gunmen armed with Kalashnikovs who blocked his car with their van as he attempted to leave his home. They chose their victim judiciously, his status as one of the country's wealthiest men marking him as a rich, ripe target.

After his release, once a ransom of an estimated $49-million to $162-million was paid by his family, Mr. Panagopoulus described his captors as civil and respectful to him. They took extremely good care of him; upon learning of several serious medical conditions he suffered, supplying him with the requisite pharmaceuticals.

Finally, with the ransom in hand, his kidnappers, whose faces were always well hidden with hoods in his presence, said to him: "Thanks very much, you're free to go grandpappy", as they released him. And all is well that ends well.

It is only money, after all that has been lost, and not a human life.

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