Achille Lauro hijack

One day, soon I hope, I shall talk about a great man who died only two weeks ago, but it happened just when hurricane Gloria was hurtling up the east coast and headed for us at the eastern end of Long Island and Gloria obliterated from the telly and the front pages the memory of almost everything else. That's the luck, or ill-luck, of the breaking news.

I remember the gifted, but obnoxious, son of Winston Churchill, Randolph, once saying that every journalist cherished a secret wish not to write a front-page story, so much as to become a front-page story. He said 'the only time it will happen to me is the day after I die'. Well, he failed, even then. He died the day of Robert Kennedy's assassination.

Every one of us, great or small, is the victim of what someone has called the 'velocity' of the news, but now also with television it's the visual jolt of the news that matters most – inevitably. Cameras were designed to take pictures and the most hypnotic pictures, the ones most likely to grab the attention of a viewer are pictures that crackle with action – fires, floods, shootings. Flame and violence are what ambitious TV cameramen track down like hungry wolves.

What this does to us, the simple, comfortable people sitting before the screen in the domestic twilight is to rearrange drastically our memory bank. So, if you challenge me – who am supposed to keep up with all sorts of knotty problems of government and social life – if you challenge me to call off quickly the main news stories of the past few months, the political stories and problems will be recalled later as second thoughts. Up at the front of the mind, of the memory, are the famine in Ethiopia, then the kidnapping of the TWA plane, then it was the Mexican earthquake, the hurricane Gloria, then the Israeli air strike against the PLO's headquarters in Tunisia, then the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship and then the hijackers' surrender.

The television networks would certainly have been scolded if they had not this past week given as much as 15 or 20 minutes of their nightly half-hour news programmes to the Italian hijacking. We took it in, we fretted, if we were the relatives of anyone aboard, we agonised and on the box we were seen agonising. Only much later, taking a walk or in the reaches of the night, did we ask ourselves, are there still famished people in Ethiopia? Did they finally find alive or dead that nine-year-old boy buried beneath the Mexican rubble?

I had to rustle through many pages of the paper the other morning to find a small item. The grandfather's corpse had been found. Hope was dim for the boy.

So, now the media obsession was, quite rightly, with the Italian ship and the hundreds of people aboard. And, I suppose, we all saw the sad tableaux of every American family that had or might have had a relative aboard and then, as usual, heads of state and government, presidents and prime ministers, got out statements of horror as routinely as they get out assurances after a summit or mini summit meeting that they had cordial and useful talks.

There seem to me to be two related considerations that make it very hard to do much about hijackings and kidnappings. The first is that the new terrorist, unlike other criminals, is usually a fanatic, most often a religious fanatic, who is willing, even eager, to die for, or even by, his action. The second consideration is that a government's promise to do something vigorous to fight terrorism is immediately nullified by the knowledge that if you do that, you're practically condemning your own trapped nationals to death.

The daughter of an American woman caught on the Italian ship put her finger and her heart on the root of the matter in a single sentence. She said, 'I'm absolutely against negotiating with terrorists. Always have been, but it's my Mom who's out there.' Her mother was in the hands of pirates.

By the way, I think it's the first time we've heard the word in connection with hijacking. It recalls the heroic, no-nonsense days to which so many rousing movies have paid tribute, when the good guys sailed out to leap aboard the pirate ship and throttle the bad guys. Even then, I just now remember such regulation bravery was not always possible.

Two hundred years ago, the new republic, the United States of America, had a big problem with the Barbary pirates, the piratical states of Morocco, Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis. The United States, just created as a new republican paradise conveniently remote from old, warring Europe, decided not to have a standing army and navy, but American merchant men sailed through the Mediterranean, as most other nations did, and the pirates had a field day seizing American vessels and unloading their cargoes.

So, what did President Jefferson do? He did the only practical thing. He made large annual payments to the Barbary pirates, please to lay off American ships. But there came a day when a ship, wryly named The George Washington, arrived in Algiers simply to deliver the annual payment, but the Algerians said, 'Once you've done that you will take on a load of gifts for the Sultan of Turkey and sail off to deliver them to him and, by the way, you had better pull down those ridiculous stars and stripes and fly our Algerian flag.' Talk about humiliation.

Then Tripoli, which had unloaded American ships and allowed them to sail home, now declared war and seized any and all American ships within raiding distance. Jefferson was obliged to mobilise a scratch navy with brigs and schooners and men of war left over from the War of Independence. And for the next four years, they raided harbours, set up blockades, captured the Algerian flagship and fought bravely enough to force a treaty which ended all future payments, restored American property and so on.

The other, so-called Barbarian states caved in because, to the great pain of Mr Jefferson, it became clear that an American squadron of men of war would have to stay more or less permanently in the Mediterranean to protect American shipping. In a word, it was pirates who forced the United States to abandon its proud boast of having no standing military forces. Pirates, by remote control, created first the United States marine corps and then a navy.

So, it wasn't easy in Jefferson's time and he was dealing with pirate ships full of nothing but pirates. Now we had a pirate ship full of tourists and the possibilities of taking forceful action were drastically limited from the start. And will be again.

I don't think we should be too gung-ho about our ability to act tough in these cases, for, in this case, luck played a decisive part. The hijackers were few and inept. They gave up. They happened to take a plane and a series of quick telephone calls between the Egyptian government, the Italian government and the White House was all that was needed to intercept the hijackers' plane and force it down at a NATO base.

It seems to me that despite all the preliminary bluster, someone is always going to have to negotiate. The alternative is one that no president or prime minister dare adopt, which is to say, 'Go ahead! Kill all the victims, the hostages, all our nationals'.

It's always dangerous to guess what the United States, I mean its government, is likely to do in these hijackings. It dare not ever encourage the PLO and the splinter groups and the other powerful fringe lunatics by condemning Israel for retaliating against terrorism, but we've got to the point where we have to wonder which was the primary offence? Which violent act justifies retaliation? In short, how and when will the cycle of reprisal and retaliation end?

After the Israeli air raid into Tunisia, it was dreadfully plain to the State Department that the bombing of Yasser Arafat's headquarters and home would not look like retaliation to the Arabs, but a first strike. President Reagan, however, was satisfied that is was justified. Over at the State Department there were gasps of disbelief at such a sudden justifying line. Secretary of State George Shultz had to echo the same line the next evening, though he didn't enjoy it. By which time, and as so often happens, the White House press secretary appeared to imply that the president didn't exactly mean what he'd said. He deplored violence, even by way of retaliation, but Israel had just cause.

That produced a phone call from Mr Shultz to his boss. 'Maybe,' he suggested, 'the Israeli raid was understandable, but it should not be condoned.' Mr Shultz, as bad luck would have it, had been having lunch with six foreign ministers from the Persian Gulf states. The State Department winced again when Prime Minister Peres flatly declared, 'It was an act of self-defence. Period.' Then came the hijacking of the cruise ship.

It drove home, like nothing before, the maddening suspicion that from now on any Israeli attack on any Arab stronghold or splinter terrorist group will be taken by much of the Arab world as an attack condoned, if not supported, by the United States and I believe that, at some point, the United States will have to disembarrass itself of this assumption.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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