Wednesday, 4/30/97 Hostage-holding terrorists deserve little
sympathy Government sends clear message that terrorism will not be
tolerated, especially when innocent victims’ lives in jeopardy
By Howard Kleinberg Immediately upon seeing, via history’s first
live telecast of an assault on hostage-holding terrorists, that all
14 guerrillas died in the bloody climax, I recognized that soon the
emphasis would turn from the brilliant rescue to whether or not the
rebels were summarily executed. It did not take long to percolate.
As expected, the focus has shifted to the probability that many of
the hostage-holders were killed by Peruvian assault forces for no
reason other than they held 72 terrorized people against their will
for 126 days. By Monday of this week, the 14 Tupac Amaru rebels no
longer were well-trained, fanatical guerrillas who held daily
military drills and who had booby-trapped the rooms and hallways of
the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima, which they had taken
by force months earlier. They were, according to the Bolivian
ambassador held during the ordeal, "four adults and 10 children."
Immediately, one would consider such a statement as the onset of
"Stockholm syndrome," which is when hostages begin to relate to
their captors. It would seem that the Bolivian was so taken, but
Peru’s deputy energy minister wasn’t. He talked about the rebels’
hate and resentment. "They were headed for the grave," he told
reporters, "and they were taking us with them." Newspapers and TV
screens are becoming saturated with stories and film of grieving
parents contending that their now-dead rebel children, ignorant
peasants from the Peruvian jungles, were pawns at the hands of
Nestor Cerpa and the three other experienced terrorists. Two
families claimed their children had been kidnapped years earlier by
Tupac Amaru guerrillas. Carried to its extreme, one might begin to
believe that 82, rather than 72, hostages were held by four Tupac
Amaru rebels. I choose not to. I choose to wave off the
sympathy-provoking articles and interviews. I choose to see the 14
as one, a trained unit, that on Dec. 17 invaded the Japanese
ambassador’s residence, fully armed, and initially held hundreds of
party guests prisoner and continued to hold 72 for months while
their victims’ families lived lives of despair, not knowing if ever
they’d see their loved ones again. The message sent by the Peruvian
government was clear: terrorism will not be tolerated. The penalty
for terrorism is immediate death. Arguments will persist that the
terrorists were entitled to a trial and that the government should
not have gotten down to the terrorists’ level in dispensing street
justice. But we have reached a point in this planet’s history where
terrorism is becoming so widespread that it needs to be dealt with
harshly because harshness is something terrorists can understand.
There was other criticism suggesting that keeping some of the
rebels alive might have afforded Peru the opportunity to accumulate
information about other rebel activities. Peru is a nation that has
been besieged by vicious, bloody rebel activity for several
decades. It knows all it needs to know about rebel activity. What
it really needs to do is rid itself – by any means possible – of
the oft-murderous rebels who attack villages and shoot or hack
innocent people to death. We probably will never know how many
rebels were killed by the first blast from the tunnel below where
they were playing indoor soccer, and we won’t know for sure how
many threw down their arms and pleaded, in vain, for mercy. One can
only say, and hope that present and future terrorists hear it, that
none of this would have happened had not the 14 armed guerrillas –
regardless of age, regardless of level of education – terrorized
innocent people for 126 days. Kleinberg, a former editor of the
Miami News, is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. His e-mail address
is hkmiami@aol.com.