Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Somali pirates and the morality of ransoms

The ransom paid to free Paul and Rachel Chandler has been widely criticised. But paying for hostages has a long history

Ransoming prisoners – a practice in the news now because of Paul and Rachel Chandler – has been so common in so many societies that it is odd that we now regard it as immoral. The payment of ransoms was central to medieval warfare: when King Henry V ordered a massacre of his prisoners at the battle of Agincourt in 1415, one objection was that it impoverished everyone who had hoped to profit by the prisoners he had taken.

Yet by 1500 the practice seems to have died out in European warfare. It lingered in the Mediterranean, where the ransoming of galley slaves continued for as long as maritime power depended on them. Even after that, Muslim pirates raided widely along the European coasts, as far north as Iceland. More than a million slaves were taken in this way between 1530 and 1780. All of them might be ransomed if they did not convert to Islam, and many were. That is the origin of the Roman Catholic redemptorist orders.

The nearest large-scale modern equivalent was the practice of the West German government, before the fall of communism, of buying out from Eastern Europe and from Russia (though not, of course, from East Germany) ethnic Germans who were entitled under the constitution to citizenship. Romania, for example, charged between 5,000 and 8,000DM for every ethnic German allowed to emigrate between 1978 and 1989.

The ransoming of slaves and prisoners of war can be distinguished from straightforward kidnapping for ransom, which seems always and everywhere to have been despised. But was it necessarily immoral?

The modern objection is that ransoming prisoners is wrong because it provides incentives to the kidnappers. This has been raised against governments and large companies paying, but also against the Christian campaigner Baroness Cox, who has bought (and brought) slaves out of captivity in the Sudan.

But this would appear incomprehensible in societies where slavery is taken for granted. The ransom price of a slave is only part of her value to her owner. None of the African slaves shipped to the Americas by Europeans were ever ransomed (and there were at least 10 times as many such victims as there were European victims of Muslim slave traders) but this did not stop the trade.

Clearly, a certain distinction of personality or wealth is needed to make you ransomable, and this is something that will disappear when mass slavery is the basis of the economy. Even in medieval times, it was only the nobles who could expect not to be slaughtered if they fell in battle. A conspicuous suit of armour not only saved you from sword cuts: it advertised that you would be more valuable alive than dead.

But it is precisely the fact that ransom is a mark of your individual worth that makes it so heartening for a prisoner, or a slave. The grimmest part of slavery is dehumanisation and the loss of personhood. This is, I think, the deepest reason why slaves and prisoners are in favour of being ransomed. But there is also a much less woolly reason. If a prisoner has no cash value, he might as well be dead, or worked to death.

Ransoms had always been paid by families – even if they happened to be families who owned large countries. Once European armies were professionalised, the fate of an individual soldier was of no concern to anyone but the state. After prisoners stopped being ransomed in Europe, it took about another three centuries before anyone began to consider ways of keeping them alive.

Source: The Guardian

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