Op-Ed: Terrorist hostages – Has France stopped paying ransoms?

Saturday’s execution of a Frenchman held hostage by al-Qaida seems to indicate a change in the way France deals with hostage situations. Often accused in the past of paying for the release of hostages, has France abandoned that policy?

French President Nicolas Sarkozy confirmed this morning that Michel Germaneau, a 78-year-old retired engineer and humanitarian worker kidnapped by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Niger on April 19th, had been executed by his captors. Calling the killing “barbaric and odious”, he promised to punish the kidnappers and asked his countrymen to avoid that area of Africa. The way this kidnapping ended, however, may be a sign that ransom paying has become a thing of the past under the Presidency of M Sakozy. In what remain vague circumstances, one - or possibly two - raids were carried out at the end of last week by Mauritanean and French troops to try and free him, but to no avail as the hostage was nowhere to be found. The raids resulted in the deaths of 6 al-Qaeda fighters and they took place just two days before the final ultimatum contained in the kidnappers’ demands issued a couple of weeks earlier. An AQIM statement said that Germaneau had been executed in reprisal for the military attack on them. France has carefully avoided the use of force in the past to try and free hostages. Negotiations were often protracted and were aimed at pushing back deadlines set by kidnappers, both in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as in African countries, where French nationals being taken hostage is not a rare event. Just as often, hostages were subsequently freed against what are commonly believed to have been ransom payments. This time however, things turned out differently. During this affair, French authorities variously and unexpectedly pessimistically announced that negotiations were at an impasse, that no ransom demand had been made, and that some of the kidnappers’ demands, such as the freeing of al-Qaida prisoners, were “unacceptable.” France has however obtained the release of hostages in exchange for the freeing of terrorists in the past, as was the case in the Pierre Camatte affair, which saw four terrorists exchanged for his liberation. I recently reported in an article here on Digital Journal how French commandos freed a family which had been taken hostage on their boat by Somalian pirates last year. The attempt to free them at all costs was so risky that the father was killed by a stray French bullet. That rescue, and M Sarkozy’s decision to allow the operation to proceed, also showed that France’s so-called willingness to pay ransoms did not play a role. The speed at which the operation was mounted meant that negotiation was out of the question. French FARC hostage Ingrid Betancourt was also released without a ransom being paid in 2008 in a daring and risky rescue mission carried out by Colombian security forces with the agreement of M Sarkozy after over 6 years in captivity. There has also been a very important piece of news with all this in mind. The French government intends to introduce a law obliging freed hostages to pay the costs of the operations mounted to free them if they are captured in areas which the government has declared to be dangerous. The law would probably have no problem getting through because French popular opinion, unlike that prevailing during the Iraq War when journalists Florence Aubenas, Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbruno were kidnapped in Iraq, is no longer willing to tolerate what is considered to be reckless behavior by journalists and humanitarian workers in combat and other zones at risk. The journalists were freed after months of negotiations which led to ransom payments of $15 million for Aubenas and $15 million for both Chesnot and Malbrunot, according to The Times. The British government, which has a policy of never paying for the release of hostages, was furious. The French denied ever paying anything. Whereas public campaigns of support for Aubenas, Chesnat and Malbrunot were everywhere to be seen, including the official hanging of banners depicting their faces on the walls of City Hall in Paris, the two unlucky French journalists captured in Afghanistan 6 months ago, Hervé Ghesquière and Stéphane Taponnier, have been roundly criticized by a growing minority of their countrymen for their “recklessness”, and what used to be weekly yellow-ribbon style press reminders of the length of time spent in captivity by hostages have now become monthly, if that. All of this may well mean that M Sarkozy has decided that the political price to pay for the long wait times involved in ransom paying may no longer be worth it, particularly for civilians. He seems to want to resolve these situations quickly and efficiently in a sort of “Either it works or it doesn’t” manner. After all, past events have shown that, in this type of situation, a French President is in a lose-lose position; If a hostage is freed via the payment of a ransom, the President is attacked by half the population and some foreign allies for “caving in to terrorist blackmail” and if the negotiations fail, he is accused of having “botched the job.” But, and whatever his good and bad points, Nicolas Sarkozy is not known for sitting around and doing nothing. He may have decided that because whatever he does will likely attract flak, the best thing to do is to get the whole thing over with as soon as possible and move on to other things. Not only that, running a Hostage Crisis Room for months on end costs a lot of money, money which France’s Diplomatic Service no longer has, unlike 20 years ago.