research ourselves and have come up with our own top 10 list of countries where you are most likely to be kidnapped.
10. Colombia
We start the list of the top ten countries where you are most likely to be kidnapped with Colombia. The U.S. government rates Haiti as “Critical” in the threat categories of Crime and Political Violence. Haiti is unique in the Caribbean for its relative lack of tourism, scarcity of foreign investment, and inferior infrastructure. As a result, traditional tourist-oriented crimes, such as pickpocketing and purse snatching, are less reported than in other countries in the region.
The most frequently reported crimes against Americans in Port-au-Prince are carjackings, kidnappings, and robberies. Home invasions also remain an item of concern in some parts of Port-au-Prince. Kidnapping and other crimes increase during holiday seasons and before school sessions begin due to the belief that people are in possession of more cash for gifts and school fees.
Crimes against persons, including gender-based violence, remain a serious problem. Reliable statistics are difficult to come by; Haitian National Police (HNP) numbers indicating a modest drop in crime during 2012 were undercut by those from other security entities operating in-country that continued to show a steady rise since 2010. Haiti’s perennially weak judiciary exacerbates an already unsteady security environment.
9. Haiti
We continue the list of top ten countries with highest kidnapping rates with Haiti. The U.S. government rates Haiti as “Critical” in the threat categories of Crime and Political Violence. Haiti is unique in the Caribbean for its relative lack of tourism, scarcity of foreign investment, and inferior infrastructure. As a result, traditional tourist-oriented crimes, such as pickpocketing and purse snatching, are less reported than in other countries in the region.
The most frequently reported crimes against Americans in Port-au-Prince are carjackings, kidnappings, and robberies. Home invasions also remain an item of concern in some parts of Port-au-Prince. Kidnapping and other crimes increase during holiday seasons and before school sessions begin due to the belief that people are in possession of more cash for gifts and school fees.
Crimes against persons, including gender-based violence, remain a serious problem. Reliable statistics are difficult to come by; Haitian National Police (HNP) numbers indicating a modest drop in crime during 2012 were undercut by those from other security entities operating in-country that continued to show a steady rise since 2010. Haiti’s perennially weak judiciary exacerbates an already unsteady security environment.
8. Mexico
The latest public security report, (pdf, Spanish link) released by Mexico’s statistics bureau (INEGI) earlier this week, reveals the extent of the country’s rampant and virtually unpunished kidnapping problem. According to the report (p.21), a mind-boggling 105,682 kidnappings were committed in Mexico last year, of which an incredibly small 1,317 were reported to local or federal authorities. In other words, 99% of kidnappings in Mexico flew under the radar last year.
Many kidnappings are drug-related, and therefore often kept from authorities because victims involved in the drug trade want to avoid backlash or crackdowns on other offenses. But a good deal of the 100,000+ abductions went unreported on suspicion that nothing would be done, or worse, that more harm would come to the involved parties, according to local digital news site Animal Politico (link in Spanish). A survey taken by INEGI and included in the statistics bureau’s report found that millions of crime victims simply considered reporting crimes “a waste of time.”
Mexico’s local police are famously negligent when it comes to identifying, pursuing and reporting crimes. A study in 2011 (link in Spanish) found that Mexican police investigated a mere 4.5% of crimes. Even when detained, criminals are rarely convicted because of the country’s broken justice system—one which the US has been trying (and failing) to help Mexico with for years. Only 31% of those arrested on drug charges between 2006 and 2011 were actually convicted, according to a report (link in Spanish) released by Mexico’s attorney general’s office last year.
Mexico’s government is equally ineffective with murders, disappearances and other serious crimes. Less than 20% of roughly 4,000 disappearances in 2012 were reported, and 98% of murders last year went unsolved. The federal government only investigated 6% of all crimes in Mexico last year.
7. Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka faces a high degree of criminal activity around the country, especially in Colombo, its largest city and administrative capital of the Western Province. The majority of crimes are against Americans and other Westerners and are of petty variety (pickpockets, theft from hotel rooms, etc.). Many of these crimes are preventable if the traveler takes appropriate safeguards. Unfortunately, criminal threats run the spectrum, including murder, kidnapping, sexual harassment/assault, drug crimes, burglaries, counterfeiting (U.S. and Sri Lankan currency), and credit card fraud. Street hustlers or “touts” are common around the hotels, shopping centers, and tourist sites. American businesses have reported instances of threats and intimidation over business dealings and labor disputes.
6. India
Kidnapping in the India has just increased by rate of around 50% in the past few years. The children, the young guys and the girls, the rich companies’ employees are the greatest at risk of the kidnappings. Several highly publicized abductions and rape incidents involving tourists last year made headlines. One involved a 30-year-old American tourist who was offered a ride back to her hotel by three men. Instead, the men took her to a secluded spot and raped her. Poverty and inequality appear to be the biggest drivers of kidnapping and crime. The country’s poorer states, like Bihar, regularly account for a large share of kidnaps. Several larger criminal organizations and rebel groups also use abductions to augment their revenue streams.
5. Kyrgyzstan
They call it ala kachuu, or “grab and run.” In Kyrgyzstan, as many as 40% of ethnic Kyrgyz women are married after being kidnapped by the men who become their husbands, according to a local NGO. Two-thirds of these bride kidnappings are non-consensual—in some cases, a “kidnapping” is part of a planned elopment—and while the practice has been illegal since 1994, authorities largely look the other way. Typically, a would-be groom gathers a group of young men, and together they drive around looking for a woman he wants to marry. The unsuspecting woman is often literally dragged off the street, bundled into the car and taken straight to the man’s house—where frequently the family will have already started making preparations for the wedding.
Once the girls are inside the kidnapper’s home, female elders play a key role in persuading her to accept the marriage. They try to cover the girl’s head with a white scarf, symbolizing that she is ready to wed her kidnapper. After hours of struggle, around 84% of kidnapped women end up agreeing to the nuptials. (The rest manage to get back home.) The kidnapee’s parents often also pressure the girl, as once she has entered her kidnapper’s home she is considered to be no longer pure, making it shameful for her to return home. In order to avoid disgrace, many women tend to remain with their kidnappers.
At one time, the majority of marriages among Kyrgyz women were arranged by parents. Today, bride kidnapping is frighteningly common, and—although some kidnappings do create happy couples—marriages resulting from such incidents are also thought to cause significantly higher rates of domestic abuse, divorce, and suicide. Photographer Noriko Hayashi spent months visiting villages throughout Kyrgyzstan, and was sometimes able to witness and document the practice.
4. Nigeria
There is somewhat a tremendous increase in the kidnapping rate in the Nigeria for the past decade. More than around 1,800 people are just kidnapped annually so just making it kidnapping country more than the new cottage country. The global business is just far more in the developed countries and the Nigeria is just catching up fast. Kidnapping in the Nigeria does not only put the rich at the risk but also the poor, the old, the traders as well according to motive of the kidnappers. There is just need to have strict law enforcement and also check to eliminate the crime.
3. Iraq
Hostage-taking has become a particularly effective tactic. Terrorists crave an audience. With the spread of terrorism in the late twentieth century, audiences became inured to violence. Suicide bombings which might once have garnered headlines and commentary for a week now pass with bare mention. For a bombing or slaughter to win significant public attention, it must either target children—the Palestine Liberation Organization’s slaughter of school children in Ma’alot in 1974, or Chechen Jihadists seizure of a Beslan school thirty years later—or result in several thousand casualties, such as occurred in the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998 and on 9-11.
Kidnapping can bypass this dynamic by drawing out media attention and by allowing reporters to personalize the victim and humanize their story. For journalists, an assassination or bombing is anti-climatic; the press only begins its coverage after the operation has ended. But uncertainty about whether a hostage remains alive creates the suspense necessary for a good news story.
Terrorists and their sponsors have long exploited hostage-taking for political and diplomat gain. Hostage-taking rose to prominence with the 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran by radicals loyal to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. For 444 days, Khomeini’s followers held 52 American diplomats. While Washington did not offer concessions, the crisis brought immediate political benefit. They not only disrupted the bilateral rapprochement which had started three days earlier when the U.S. National Security Advisor met with Islamic Republic moderates in Algiers, but also used the crisis to purge the revolutionary movement of moderates.
Once the Islamic Republic released its hostages, the Western media ended its constant coverage of events in Iran and the grievances of the new government. The horrific deaths generated by the Iran-Iraq War received scant exposure in the West, nor did the various bombings, purges, and economic depression which marked the first year of the theocracy’s rule. The Islamic Re public reversed this neglect, though, when its terrorists proxies in Lebanon begin kidnapping Americans. As Tehran positioned itself as a channel for the release of the hostages, Washington again examined its bilateral problems with Iran. Tehran sought to leverage the hostages for diplomatic and material gain, although the affair ended badly in what became known as the Iran-Contra affair after Iranian authorities leaked word of the secret contacts to a Syrian newspaper.
Syrian president Hafez al-Assad followed the Iranian lead by using hostages seized by in Lebanon to bolster his own diplomatic position vis-à-vis the United States. After a U.S. investigation linked the Syrian government to the April 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Assad organized the release of the acting president of the American University of Beirut who had been kidnapped the previous year by a Syrian-backed group. The White House publicly thanked the Syrian government, rewarding its duplicitous behavior.
Assad likewise exploited the 1985 Syrian-orchestrated release of captured of U.S. Navy pilot Lieutenant Robert Goodman and passengers taken hostage on TWA flight 847 in order to paint himself as a rational peace-maker, rather than as a terror sponsor. His involvement in the release of hostages for whose seizure he was in part responsible enabled him to undercut diplomatic and perhaps military consequences for Syrian complicity in the 1983 U.S. Marine barracks bombing in Beirut and the TWA hijacking.
While many terrorists are backed by states, radical Islamism has changed the dynamics of terrorism. While some states still furnish jihadists and groups like al-Qaeda with aid, state sponsors of terrorism are less able to restrain Islamist groups to narrow diplomatic goals. “There is no truce in Jihad against the enemies of Allah,” Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing, declared. Jihadists have broader ideological goals that preclude compromise. Hostages become not pawns in a diplomatic struggle, but rather chits with which terrorists can both shock the outside world and appeal to their own constituency.
Whereas liberation movement terrorists seized hostages, they did not always seek to humiliate them. Islamist terrorists, however, humiliate those they perceive to be enemies as defined by their own intolerant definition of human worth.
ISIS emerged a decade ago as a small Iraqi affiliate of Al Qaeda, one that specialized in suicide bombings and inciting Iraq’s Sunni Muslim minority against the country’s Shiite majority. The network regenerated after 2011 amidst Iraq’s growing violence and the depravities of Syria’s civil war. This year,ISIS has conquered cities, oil fields, and swaths of territory in both Syria and Iraq. The movement draws its strength from Sunni Arab communities bitterly opposed to the Shiite-led government in Baghdad and the Alawite-dominated regime in Damascus, led by Bashar al-Assad. They are now kidnapping Western human rights workers as well as journalists and holding them ransom. When the government fails to pay, they do a public beheading.
2. Somalia
Poverty is stark in Somalia. The country doesn’t have a government strong enough to stop the crime. Those two things have helped make kidnapping foreigners and seizing foreign ships common in and around this anarchic state.
Somalia and neighboring Kenya rank ninth in the world for kidnapping threats, according to the British-based company AKE, which tracks threats across the world. (Somali waters, where piracy has been a persistent problem, rank fifth.) Between October and December 2011, an average of two people were kidnapped a month and held for an average of 90 days, according to AKE data.
Kidnapping aid workers has only worsened the challenges for aid agencies trying to deliver food to starving Somalis. Three years ago, the British think tank Overseas Development Institute calculated that 41 out of every 1,000 United Nations workers in Somalia were attacked in some way, including kidnapping and other threats.
Somalis get kidnapped too, said Abdi Samatar, a geography professor at the University of Minnesota. Those cases just don’t get the same attention as ones involving foreigners.
Kidnappings can sometimes turn deadly: David Tebbutt, a 58-year-old Briton, was shot to death by Somali gunmen in a Kenyan coastal resort. Marie Dedieu, a 66-year-old Frenchwoman living in Kenya, died after being abducted and taken to Somalia.
1. Afghanistan
200,000. It’s what a Westerner goes for in Kandahar Province. That, at least, was what my traveling companion, an opium smuggler and mid-ranking member of the Afghan Border Police, admitted to me after a few rounds of cheap whiskey once we had crossed back over into Pakistan. Last year, I spent eleven days living as his guest in the border town of Spin Boldak, in Kandahar Province. During that visit, a group of criminals, hearing about me, offered my host $200,000 to kidnap me. He’s just some kid, my host told them in return, and besides, he’s our guest.
As we mark the 300th day of captivity of French journalists Stéphane Taponier and Hervé Ghesquière and their three Afghan colleagues, Mohamed Reza, Ghulam, and Satar, I recall those times in Afghanistan when, faced with a moment of danger, my heart dropped through my stomach and I thought myself: “What was I thinking? Nothing could have possibly been worth what’s about to happen to me.”
Working in a war zone entails the risk of death or injury, but the most frightening scenario is surely being kidnapped, for the drawn-out anguish it would cause one’s loved ones. In the case of Taponier and Ghesquière, who were kidnapped in Kapisa Province in December 2009, their friends and family have mobilized a publicity campaign with the cooperation of French media, intended to pressure their kidnappers and the French government into negotiating their release.
As with most other things in Afghanistan, the security conditions for journalists there have gotten worse in recent years. Every time I return I find new places, formerly safe, where now even veteran journalists hesitate to go — this summer, it was parts of Ghor, Kunduz, and Baghlan provinces. Of course journalists aren’t the only ones in danger, as there are thousands of aid workers, diplomats, journalists, and contractors, who face the same risks, not to mention an entire country of innocents who were not given any choice in the matter.
Much of the threat is simply criminal. There is a burgeoning kidnapping industry in Afghanistan, part of the conflict economy that has been fed by tens of billions of dollars the international forces and community have pumped into the country since 2001. Most kidnappings end either in the payment of a ransom or the death of the hostage, and ransoms for foreigners can approach half a million dollars — though it’s wealthy Afghans who are most often the victims.
These kidnapping gangs often have links with those in positions of power. There are currently two parliamentary candidates in Kabul, both infamous former jihadi commanders, who have well-known connections to kidnapping groups (one of them looks very likely to win a seat.) The Canadian journalist
Melissa Fung was kidnapped by one such a group of criminals and held for 28 days.
Holding an abducted foreigner hostage can be quite difficult, however, as, unlike in the case of Afghans, significant military and political pressure will be brought to bear by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the Afghan government to find and free them. Petty criminals will therefore sell a kidnap victim up the chain to groups with the muscle to hang on to them, often meaning they are transferred across the border to Pakistan, and into the hands of the Taliban.
The other cause of the rising threat to journalists has been the growing fragmentation of the insurgency. This is partly because the expansion of the Taliban has resulted in the inclusion of all sorts of diverse groups in the insurgency, some little more than bandits who use the name ‘Taliban’ as a cover for their money-making activities. No one really knows who is who anymore. When eight foreign aid workers were murdered in cold blood in Badakhshan in August, their killings were in fact denounced by the local Taliban spokesman.
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