Ambassadors in the front line
Sir: Because I am the wife of a British Ambassador now serving in a country where kidnapping is a possibility I was interested in the article by N. Pelham Wright in your issue of 27 March. But it neither asked nor tried to answer an important question which troubles me and many other wives in my position.
My husband has already given me explicit instructions on the steps I am to take should he be kidnapped, as I suspect Geoffrey Jackson gave his wife. These in- clude—are in fact based on—the order that under no circumstances is any ransom to be paid for his release for the obvious reason that such payment would encourage potential kidnappers to endanger the lives of other innocent men. If he is murdered, as others have been, I have no more right to bitterness than any wife whose hus- band is killed in action in a war. This is war and guerrillas whose ransom price is the freedom of justly convicted criminals or pub- licly proved militants who aim to plunge their country into bloody revolution are the enemies of society.
I have no quarrel with these principles nor argument against their enforcement. But where does my and the world's compassion lie if we are ever accredited to a country where innocent men and women are imprisoned without trial and brutally tortured not for what they do but for what they think; and where justice is a cari- cature twisted two serve theusts of the ruling poer? All the world knows that both Russia and Brazil are such countries; there are prob- ably others where liberal men are neither so articulate nor perhaps so courageous or where censorship is manipulated so that the suffering prisoners do not catch the attention of the international press. (Is George Jackson without rele- vance in this context?) So far Rus- sia has had no openly acknow- ledged kidnapping, but Brazil was the cradle of the whole conception. Why?
The Pope himself has publicly condemned the secret prisons of Brazil where unconvicted men and women, priests and nuns are enduring God knows what agonies of pain and fear at the hands of their torturers. They suffer in the knowledge that their innocence is no shield because they will never be allowed a just public trial and they will never escape unless inter- national publicity forces the hand of the Brazilian government. Their 'crimes' are often so trivial (when admitted) that one is struck dumb; the London Times of 26 March reports from Rio de Janeiro the case of a housewife tortured to death at the Barns Banco head- quarters of the military police be- cause she had an argument with the wife of a police officer. The Times continues: 'The report of her death appears as one of the rare accounts of tortures published • by the Jornal do Brasil.' If the ransom price for a kid- napped Ambassador is the freedom of these helpless tortured men and women—a freedom which it is im- possible for them to gain in any other way—should that price be paid? To what extent are the gov- ernments of those countries where kidnappers work directly respon- sible for such desperate measures? What lip-service should the world pay to these governments who like Pontius Pilate wash their hands of all responsibility?
I am sorry I cannot sign my name to this letter although I am well aware that the omission de- tracts from its force. But even in our country (though, thank God, far less than in any other country in the world) a man in public ser- vicemust walk delicately.. The Foreign Office condemns and the epress often misrepresents the public xpression of his private opinions and even more so those of his wife. KpostiAble damqge to a husband's
career is the price paid for an out spoken wife the loving wife will remain silent—or anonymous.
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