Blacklist these states
The latest terrorist atrocity at Athens airport provides further tragic evidence of the need for resolute international action to deal with hijackers. It is quite clear that there are plenty of volunteers willing to sacrifice innocent lives in their efforts to obtain their revolutionary purposes by violence. The vulnerability of aircraft to grenades and guns, together with their ability to fly hijackers wherever they want to go, has brought about a new crime, which is a kind of political piracy of the air. It is not likely that security measures, however stringent, will invariably be able to detect and prevent determined and able men and women (and possibly children) from smuggling explosive devices and arms on board scheduled aircraft. Once a hijacker and his weapons are on board, then that aircraft, its crew and passengers, are at his mercy.
Not unnaturally, airport authorities and their superiors have been anxious to act so as to save innocent lives; and this has often meant complying with hijackers' demands. Aircraft are thus refuelled and thereby enabled to fly on to some destination or other where the hijackers believe they will be favourably treated because of the race or creed of the governing regime. The day before Arab gunmen shot indiscriminately at passengers in Athens airport, Yasser Arafat, the El Fatah leader, and Angela Davis, the black American militant who was acquitted of murder, conspiracy and kidnapping last year, were feted among the honoured guests at the 10th World Youth Festival in East Berlin. Leila Khaled moves around scot-free as a heroine of our time. It is unlikely that any revolutionary hijacker would be unable to find some airport where he would believe he would receive lenient treatment, if not a hero's welcome. The world tolerates a good deal of violence; and when the violence is only threatened, and its revolutionary purpose is itself applauded, hijackers will not lack for sanctuary, and hijacking will in consequence continue.
It is up to the great majority of states whose interests are opposed to anarchist hijackers to use their power to make life difficult not only for hijackers themselves, but for states who provide them with sanctuary. With hijackers there is no problem at all about determining their guilt. Their motives are best disregarded. Is there any overwhelming practical reason why it should not be internationally agreed that all hijackers should be returned to the nation whose aircraft was hijacked, for punishment according to the laws of that nation? There will be those who will say that it would be monstrous, say, to return to the Soviet Union someone who had escaped from a communist tyranny by hijacking a Russian aircraft, just as there will be others who would think it monstrous to hand over Arab hijackers of an Israeli plane to the Israelis, or Jewish hijackers to the Arabs, or Japanese hijackers to the Japanese. But hijacking will not be stamped out by soft measures and hard cases, only by the certainty of apprehension and severe punishment by the nation whose aircraft has been attacked. Nations which refuse to join in some such international agreement should be blacklisted, their own aircraft refused landing rights and no signatory country's aircraft should call at their airports. Meanwhile, with international agreement ineffective, airline pilots and ground staff should now combine to enforce their own black list.
