Peru: Deja Vu all over again

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Four predictions about the hostage-taking at the Japanese embassy in Lima:

1) The Tupac Amaru guerrillas will not kill anybody. After the first 48 hours, hostage-takers rarely do.

2) Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori will not negotiate with the guerrillas. His whole reputation is founded on never yielding to their threats, never even talking to them.

3) The embassy will not be stormed. That would need the permission of the Japanese government, and Japan is chicken.

4) The world's media will wring every ounce of drama out of the affair, in conscious symbiosis with the guerrillas. But after a while. they will realize that the world isn't watching any more.

A large number of the captives in the Japanese embassy will probably be released in the next few days, simply to ease the burden on a mere dozen guerrillas of guarding and feeding hundreds of people. But they will hold onto enough high-profile hostages to keep the 'crisis' going, and its end is likely to be weeks or even months away.

When the end comes, however, it will probably come in almost complete obscurity. People will hear the news that the last hostages have been released, and be surprised that they hadn't been freed long ago. After all, the whole affair hadn't been mentioned in the media for weeks.

"Been there, seen that." Living in Peru, the Tupac Amaru guerrillas are caught in a kind of time-warp, and couldn't be expected to understand that this sort of thing no longer makes good television in the rest of the world. Besides, with their movement in terminal decline, what other options did they have? But the truth is that the novelty of mass hostage-taking has worn off.

In the 1970s, viewers could be persuaded to watch for days as the zoom lens focussed shakily on hijacked airliners parked on a desert airstrip or on shadowy figures moving behind the windows of some besieged building. It was new, it was shocking, it caught people's imagination. Which was, of course, precisely what the terrorists counted on.

That was then, but this is now. Is there anybody who thinks that the hostage-taking at the Japanese embassy in Peru is a new phenomenon? Is anybody shocked? Of course not. So after a few days while the media strive mightily to pull us into the story emotionally, the story will fade from the international media -- which is precisely what President Fujimori's people are counting on.

Anti-terrorist teams from all over the place are arriving in Lima on every inbound flight, balaclavas neatly packed in their carry-on luggage, but these specialized (and seriously underemployed) soldiers and policemen from practically every country with citizens among the hostages will not get any exercise in Peru.

Left to his own devices, Fujimori might well authorize an assault on the embassy compound after a few weeks had passed and the world's attention had drifted away, but Tokyo will not allow it. Somehow, the country that nurtured kamikazes 50 years ago has become the most timid of all the major powers, preferring always to buy its way out of trouble rather than fight its way out. We should probably be grateful for that, but it is a puzzle.

At any rate, the Japanese involvement precludes a violent end to the incident, with all the Action Men crashing in on the baddies just like in the commercials on kids' TV. Just as well, probably, since if that sort of thing goes wrong, a lot of people can get killed, and there are few other ways that this affair could produce many deaths.

On the other hand, no amount of pressure on President Fujimori to compromise with the guerrillas, from people whose countries have not been ruined by 15 years of rampant terrorism, is going to make him abandon the tough policies that have restored some kind of order to Peru (and put the leaders of both major guerrilla movements behind bars) since he came to power. He will not free duly convicted terrorists from prison, he will not change his government's economic policies, he will not pay them ransom.

So in the end, some formula will have to be found to let the guerrillas leave -- but leave without any of their demands being met. Just a plane to Cuba (which will need some arm-twisting before it lets them in), in return for the release of all the hostages.

By then, our attention will long since have drifted elsewhere -- which is precisely what should happen. To pay attention to this sort of thing is just to encourage it. But is there anything anybody could have done to prevent it from happening in the first place? Probably not.

"If you have a small group of people who are well-armed, well- trained and ideologically controlled, you can pull off a major attack like taking over Congress or killing a general or hijacking an airplane," said Enrique Obando, a leading expert on Peru's guerrillas. Obvious enough now -- but he said it exactly a year ago, after an earlier plot by the same Tupac Amaru outfit to seize Peru's Congress and hold the politicians hostage was thwarted by Peruvian police.

After a shoot-out in an affluent neighborhood not far from the Japanese embassy, the police captured weapons, documents, and uniforms assembled as part of a Tupac Amaru plan to attack Congress. "These types of attacks and kidnappings in exchange for their comrades in prison are easy enough to pull off," said Obando. "We were lucky this time that the police struck first."

So Tupac Amaru recycled the plan, and a year later put it into action at the Japanese ambassador's party. Deja vu all over again. It won't change anything, it won't get them anywhere (except Cuba), it won't even do the networks any good. This is an outrage that has passed its sell-by date.