Terry Waite is a humanitarian and author well known for his work as a hostage negotiator. From 1987 to 1991, he was held hostage in Lebanon. He currently serves as the co-founder of Y Care International, a relief and development agency of the YMCA.
My negotiating style was a highly risky one, which worked in certain situations and which wouldn't work in others. I'm doubtful it would work in certain hostage situations today.
First of all, I sought face-to-face relationships with hostage takers. That is a difficult and dangerous thing to do, because you're dealing with people who are highly volatile, and who may, if they so choose, keep you or kill you. So there's risk involved and a certain degree of difficulty in actually making the contact and getting to the right people.
If that first step could be achieved, the second step was to try and build a relationship of trust between oneself as a humanitarian negotiator and the individual or group with whom you were speaking. Again, that requires a degree of skill, an ability to listen, to understand people of different religious backgrounds, different ethnic backgrounds and different cultural backgrounds. But it's essential that trust is built if you're going to move the process forward. Therefore, it demands not only an academic skill--it also requires a personal ability to be able to form trust with people.
If you can build up a relationship of trust, it is important to get in so far as it is possible to the root issue. Why is it that you're behaving how you're behaving? What are your demands?
Now here, I put restrictions on myself because of my own beliefs. First of all, I would not submit to blackmail. In other words, I would not pay, for example, money for the release of hostages because I believe it simply leads to further hostage taking. Second, I would not act in ways that contravened the law, because again, I believe that law should be upheld, and one shouldn't break it.
Then I would go to the next stage and attempt to find a nonviolent, face-saving way out of the problem.
In Lebanon, it was possible for me to meet face-to-face with the capturers of Western hostages, and I was the only person from the West to be able to do that. I was beginning to move the process forward, but I think it collapsed as a result of Iran-Contra, when [the people who took me hostage] wrongly believed that I was not in fact a humanitarian, but was in fact an agent of government. They captured me and subjected me to interrogation.
At the end of the first year, they were convinced that I was a humanitarian and were about to let me go, but something intervened; I'm not sure what it was. I was in captivity for five years. Had I been an agent of government in that situation, had I not been able to demonstrate my credentials as a humanitarian, I would be dead now.
--Excerpted from an interview with Kat Noel