RP rebels's demand

RP rebels's demand

I refer to the article in The Jakarta Post on Sept. 2, 2000
titled RP rebels demand $10m for release of U.S. hostage.

Although this article is just one of the reports on the
Philippine hostage crisis, it also touches on another subject:
the value of human life.

Abu Sayyaf's gang of terrorists obviously has a down-to-earth
view of this: an American is worth 10 Western Europeans, i.e.
US$10 million, compared to $1 million for a European and $500,000
for a Malaysian. The article keeps from us the going
price for a Philippine hostage's head. It is not really
surprising that one terrorist can set a flat-rate price tag on a
human life.

But let's try and see how other, more formal groups in today's
society view this question:

Gentlemen of the media: The same article carries a short
reference to the abduction of 50 schoolchildren and teachers in
March (two teachers were beheaded!) by the same terrorist group.
I don't recall reports on this story coming anywhere close to the
current (Euro-American) abduction.

Another example: Six bodies found in a mass grave in Visegrad
(Bosnia) received due attention from the media. At the same time
(two days later), the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK),
quietly invited (by mail, not media, in an apparent effort not to
raise dust) relatives of several thousand Serbs, Rumanians and
Turks abducted by extremist Albanian groups, to come and
identify 180 bodies UNMIK managed to uncover. Has anybody heard
anything about this?

NATO: Even today, they claim that their war against Yugoslavia
was a "Zero casualties war". The fact that 1,500 people, mostly
civilians, were killed in this war, probably implies that the
victims were not human (just a bunch of Yugoslavs) and, thus,
don't count in terms of casualties.

The international community (a new, but well-accepted
euphemism for big Western powers): They managed to gather a
respectful force to punish one man, Slobodan Milosevic ("This is
not a war against Yugoslav people but against Milosevic" --
J.Solana, NATO secretary-general), for the alleged massacre of 30
or so people (at least this is the figure the International Court
for former Yugoslavia indicted him for). At the same time,
millions were slaughtered across the globe (Rwanda and
elsewhere), or driven beyond the edge of existence by means of
sanctions, embargoes and similar "humanitarian" measures (500,000
children in Iraq only!), imposed by the very same "international
community". This is an entity that claims high moral ground for
itself, but at the same time has reinvented the "pariah status",
not for one segment of a society (like it used to be in India)
but all the nations of the world.

To conclude: From the beginning of the story, is Abu Sayyaf
really an exception, or is he just catching up with
"globalization" and all the "benefits" and "moral standards" the
leaders of this process demonstrate?

BRANIMIR SALEVIC

Jakarta