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