Few people who saw the pictures Wednesday of the four kidnapped Frenchmen being reunited with their families after three years of incarceration in Niger will not have been moved by the wonderful joy at the ending of a nightmare. When they stepped from their plane at a military airfield outside Paris, the quartet were probably amazed to find French President Francois Hollande also waiting on the tarmac to greet them. The unpopular socialist government appeared determined to milk the homecoming for all its political worth. The four had been accompanied on their flight home by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. It was probably a surreal ending to an horrific experience that began in September 2010, when the men were seized from a Niger uranium mine by gunmen linked to Al-Qaeda. The French minister of defense insisted after their liberation that force had not been used, nor had any ransom been paid. However, it was not clear what therefore had prompted the abductors to let their victims go. There are apparently reliable reports that $26 million was in fact paid to release the men. It is said that the sum may not have been handed over directly but was passed to the criminals “through channels”. If this turns out to be true, it is the very worst of outcomes. It may seem cold-blooded to say that money should not have changed hands, that in effect the kidnappers should have been told to keep their hostages. But the harsh reality is that the joy that was felt this week by these four men and their families will be the misery of others at some future date. The simple fact is that the kidnappers will have learnt that their loathsome crime pays. Other Frenchmen are now at risk. The same ghastly ordeal is almost certain to befall further luckless individuals simply because they hold a French passport. Some nations, such as Great Britain, operate a clear policy which says that the government in London will not pay or support the private payment of any ransom. Indeed, there are believed to have been some cases where British officials actually sought to disrupt a private ransom payment. At the height of the Lebanese civil war, when a handful of Britons was kidnapped and threatened with execution unless various demands were met, a British official briefed a journalist to the effect that unless the kidnappers could be persuaded to make an unconditional release, their victims were effectively “dead men”. Moreover, there is another disturbing element to paying ransoms. This is the sum of money itself. If the French did indeed come up with $26 million for the liberty of the four uranium miners, that sum is going to buy an awful lot of arms and influence, especially in countries as economically challenged as Mali and Niger. It is also going to attract the attention of other criminal gangs who will see that kidnapping Frenchmen is a relatively easy and painless way to make money. On top of all this, the French would appear to have paid off some of the same Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) bigots whom their soldiers drove out of Mali at the beginning of the year. Paying ransoms is a short-term end to heartache, but a long-term guarantee that that heartache will occur again.
