WAR: REDEMPTION OF THE HOSTAGES

Viacheslav Izmailov

Concept: Negotiator as the one who brings the captive from the world of the dead and takes him back to the world of the living

In the Russian army the concept of a war-captive is close to the notion of a “traitor”. This is always a person who finds himself in the whirlwind of interests – official interests, army interests, his family economic capacities, the interests of the insurgents. There in the middle of the same whirlwind steps in the Negotiator. Who has only one distinct value for orientation – human life. Sometimes the Negotiator can witness how the circumstances of the captivity start to draw lines between the people back at home. He can see mothers, e.g., arguing between themselves whose son should be let free first, depending on the year of him being captured. The Negotiator witnesses how on his return the captive is treated by the officers in the army and by prosecution back at home. The ex-captive is an outcast in the eyes of the authorities and his own subordinates. His name is notorious. To those on the other side of the front-line, to the enemy, he is also a nobody, a scapegoat.

There are situations in which the Negotiator is being placed in the position of God. He can choose only one out of a row of many. What’s more, to liberate this one captive, he would have to wait and be very careful during the negotiations with the other side. To be able to seize a moment, to “say his word” and to catch the prisoner out from the flow of speech of those who hold his fate in their hands. E.g. they may speak about some famous media-personae who got captured and can not be released straight away, and the Negotiator can ask just for somebody, anybody: as a sign of a good will. That one chosen out of twenty will later happen to be a sick little soldier. Virtually no one – at least in the eyes of the army. “Why didn’t you take an officer?” – the army man would ask. “Because this one would not have survived” would be the answer of the Negotiator. All lives are valuable. But there are some most quiet, unremarkable, modest that within the captivity carry the worst of burdens. And once the Negotiator gets someone like this he feels himself responsible to take him through the animosity of the authorities, to bring him back to life, i.e. to return him literally from the “land of the dead” to the land of the living.