June 6, 1996, Seattle Times, Americans Still Held Hostage, But Few Know Of Cases, by Robin Wright, Los Angeles Times,

June 6, 1996, Seattle Times, Americans Still Held Hostage, But Few Know Of Cases, by Robin Wright, Los Angeles Times,

THE LOVED ONES of U.S. citizens taken hostage abroad in the 1990s have a big complaint: few people seem to care now that most cases aren't political in nature.

WASHINGTON - Mark Rich, Dave Mankins and Rick Tenenoff are virtually unknown, and yet they have been held hostage abroad longer than any other Americans.

The missionaries were working with the Kuna ethnic group in Panama on Jan. 31, 1993, when 75 Colombian guerrillas raided the area and took them to Colombia.

"At the three-year anniversary of their abduction in January we held a remembrance. We contacted all the networks, but we couldn't get one of them to pay attention. It was a nonstory," said Scott Ross, spokesman for New Tribes Mission, the Protestant evangelical group that sent the three to Panama.

The U.S. government also has been of little help, Ross and relatives of other hostages complain.

"The public may believe that if an American is kidnapped, you can go to the embassy and get help. That may be true of State Department and military folks, but for private individuals, it's up to that person, his family or his employer to work through the situation," Ross said.

Kidnappings become 'banal'?

Members of Florida-based New Tribes have felt helpless in dealing with the crisis - a common reaction among the colleagues and loved ones of hostages taken in the 1990s.

Donald Hutchings, a psychologist from Spokane, was trekking in India's Kashmir region when he disappeared last July 4. Recent reports that he had been killed have not been confirmed, leaving his friends and family in doubt.

The current hostage sagas are occurring in a different world, experts say. "One of the questions you have to ask is whether hostage-taking has become banal. Maybe terrorism itself has become ordinary, a part of the political landscape," said Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert at Kroll Associates, an international security firm.

The January 1994 abductions of two other New Tribes missionaries in Colombia received scant national attention. Seventeen months later, the bodies of Timothy Van Dyke of Towanda, Pa., and Steve Welsh of North Platte, Neb., were found after a battle between rebels and Colombian troops attempting a rescue.

Another change is the lack of a significant foreign-policy dimension. From 1979 to 1991, U.S. hostages in Beirut and Tehran were pawns in international diplomacy.

Today most targets are taken simply for the money. The Revolutionary Armed Forces, or FARC, Colombia's oldest and largest rebel group, demanded $5 million for the three New Tribes missionaries.

But U.S. policy is to make no concessions to terrorists. That offers little solace for current hostages but keeps others from being abducted, officials maintain.

"The most important lesson we learned from Ollie North's shenanigans is that it never pays to give in or to feel you can do a deal with the captors. It only raises the price of hostages," a senior U.S. official said, referring to the 1980s Iran-contra scandal where the U.S. negotiated an arms-for-hostages swap with Iran.

New Tribes won't pay ransom

Only a handful of groups - Colombia's FARC and National Liberation Army, India's Al Faran, the Philippines' New People's Army and Abu Sayyaf group and Turkey's Kurdistan Workers Party - are tied to the majority of kidnappings.

But the new environment offers limited options to end hostage abductions altogether. Rescue is often out of the question, a senior counterterrorism official said. In Colombia, for example, FARC rebels have pledged to kill hostages if rescues are attempted; in the case of Welsh and Van Dyke, they kept their word.

For the U.S. government, the prime option is to do nothing about the abductions. But that course is so painful that, although they rarely admit it, the employers or families of several Americans held in Colombia have paid the ransoms, according to counterterrorism experts. Most feel they have no choice.

The New Tribes Mission, however, has held out. "We have 3,500 missionaries around the world. If we paid once, we'd be paying ransoms all over the world," Ross said.

In desperation, the mission has resorted to dropping leaflets over key locations where FARC operates. And just before Easter this year, the wives of Rich, Mankins and Tenenoff went back to Colombia to campaign for their release. The only thing either action produced was word that the men were still alive.