Intelligence

Worried about the gap year? You should be

Times Online - Newspaper Edition

Matthew Scott never thought he’d be taken hostage travelling. But the risks are greater than many suspect. Margarette Driscoll reports
With all the resilience of youth, Matthew Scott returned home to London last week looking as if he had taken a stroll through Hyde Park. In fact, he had spent 12 days wandering alone in the Colombian rainforest without food and with only rainwater to drink after escaping from kidnappers.

James and Kate Scott, his ecstatically relieved parents, could hardly contain themselves. They had been through the nightmare that haunts every family as headstrong teenagers take off in their gap years to the ends of the earth.

For nearly two weeks they had believed their 19-year-old son was one of a group of hostages in the hands of gunmen somewhere in the vastness of South America, out of contact and beyond any help they could hope to bring.

Colombia is notoriously dangerous. During the mid-20th century it endured decades of bloody political strife known simply as la violencia. It later became infamous for its billionaire drug traffickers; and the cocaine profits stoked a civil war between Marxist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries, which has fuelled an epidemic of kidnappings.

Matthew’s parents had not wanted him to go. James Scott, a retired orthopaedic surgeon, said last week: “You could say he went without parental consent.” But, like tens of thousands of other youngsters on their gap years, Matthew thought foreign travel in remote areas was none too daunting.

His father was able to joke in the joy of reunion: “There are places you’d like your children to go. Obviously, I’d have preferred him to have gone to Croydon.” But what are parents to do? Indeed, should they do anything to rein in an adventurous spirit?

WHEN Matthew arrived in Colombia in May, he wanted to learn Spanish, polish his juggling and see a bit of the world. He went to the old city of Cali, where he studied Spanish and taught English.

At the end of his stint in Cali, Matthew was determined to see more of Colombia. Three weeks ago, he joined a group travelling to the Lost City, a spectacular 2,500-year-old ruin hidden in a forest in the Sierra Nevada — the “snowy mountains”.

This is an isolated, risky area, and he was apparently warned against going. But he was “very adventurous and impulsive”, said a friend in Colombia.

The warnings were vindicated in the most dramatic fashion. As Matthew and his 15-or-so companions slept in a cabin, a group of armed men burst in. They were from a small left-wing organisation that calls itself the National Liberation Army (ELN) The guerrillas lined the tourists up in the rain, stripped them of their valuables, then selected their hostages. Matthew was one of eight foreigners — two Britons, a German, a Spaniard and four Israelis — marched off into the trees.

In recent years, as kidnapping has become more urbanised in Colombia, the “quick-nap” has come into play. In this, the victim is grabbed for a few hours and released when either the family stumps up a few hundred dollars or the kidnappers have exhausted the victim’s debit cards.

Matthew’s kidnappers, however, followed the “traditional” tactic of taking their captives on a route march into the mountains and forests to evade capture. As they slogged through the sierra on the second day, Matthew saw a chance to escape. This time his impulsiveness helped him. “It was raining in the mountains, the visibility wasn’t good. The sides were very steep,” he said. “I jumped off a cliff very quickly. I was lucky not to have broken my arms and legs.”

For nearly two weeks he stumbled through the rainforest until he was found, skinny and dehydrated, by a group of Kogui Indians who gave him some soup, beans and oranges. A passing army patrol took him to hospital.

Remarkable though Matthew’s escape was, Mark Henderson, the other Briton, and six others were still held by the ELN. Matthew had struck up a friendship with Henderson, a 31-year-old television producer from North Yorkshire, in a Bogota backpacker hostel. They had intended to travel around Colombia together.

The Colombian government is offering a reward of more than £11,000 for information leading to the rescue of Henderson and other hostages, and the Colombian army has some 1,500 soldiers, two spy planes and nine helicopters scouring the zone. Advisers from the Metropolitan police and the Israeli security services have joined the search, but it is difficult work: the area encompasses mountain peaks, deep jungles and deserts.

SHOULD the hostages have made a rational assessment of the risks they ran and avoided the trip? Perhaps it is asking too much.

Although the world is portrayed in the media as increasingly dangerous, recent research for the Foreign Office showed that fewer than one in 10 people could name a single risk on trips abroad.

“The more we travel, the further we go, the more blasé we seem to become,” said Rachel Briggs, author of a study on travel risk for the Foreign Policy Centre. “Post-September 11 we are all aware of terrorism, but the more we concentrate on that the more the risks of crime like kidnapping are obscured. But in certain parts of the world it is a real danger. There are more than 3,000 kidnaps a year in Colombia alone.” Other hotspots include the Philippines, former Soviet republics and South Africa.

A generation ago, the youngest backpackers facing these dangers were mainly in their twenties, travelling post- university. Now they are barely out of school and perhaps travelling for the first time on their own. What can be done to prepare them?

Objective, a personal security company (www.objectivegapyear.com), runs gap-year travel courses for youngsters booked in by anxious parents. The courses, taught by former SAS men at £150 a time, cover how to cope with a rip-tide or a snake bite — but they concentrate on how to stay out of trouble.

“It’s all about avoidance and planning,” said Louise Bowman-Shaw, the organiser. Her advice in the worst-case scenario — being taken hostage — is to underreact:

“Comply with anything you are told to do. Don’t try to be a hero. Try to strike up some rapport with your captor; it’s much harder to kill someone you like. It might be the first time they’ve ever kidnapped someone and they’ll be jumpy. Don’t panic them into killing you because you’re being a pain.”

DAVID HUTCHINSON, a 60-year-old retired banker, knows how to survive. He lived in Bogota for many years before he was kidnapped last March. As he arrived at his apartment block he was grabbed, tied up and drugged by members of Farc, the largest Marxist guerilla group. It was the last time he saw home for 10 months.

He was kept with a group of fellow captives high in the mountains outside Bogota. It rained every day and they feared catching pneumonia. Hutchinson contracted leishmaniasis, a fly-borne parasite similar to leprosy that ate away at one of his legs. “If you’re going to survive you need to be patient and fatalistic,” he said. “You have to eat a bit every day, wash, don’t let yourself get into a depressive state. You have to learn to live with fear.”

He was afraid of being rescued; several captives were executed recently when the army tried to raid a guerrilla camp. He sat it out while the kidnappers negotiated a ransom with his family. “It’s a long, drawn-out process,” he said. “You need a tough negotiator on your side. In our case it was a priest. There’s no way my wife could have coped. They ask for $2m. You say they can have 17/6d and two green stamps. They say, ‘We won’t even bury him for that’. And so it goes on . . .”

Hutchinson will not say what ransom was finally paid, but it wiped him out financially. “These are not romantic peasants, they are very nasty people,” he says. “I worked all my life, and everything I saved has gone.”

The aftermath was almost as traumatic as the original ordeal. Hutchinson did not feel safe again for months after his release. “You go to cross a road and you can’t do it,” he says. “You stand on the pavement with the cars going by and turn to jelly and burst into tears. But slowly it passes. Every day you get a little better.”

Tom Hart Dyke, a botanist captured as he recorded rare species of orchid on the Colombia-Panama border in March 2000, says what kept him going was the companionship of his fellow captive, Paul Winder, with whom he later wrote The Cloud Garden, a book about their ordeal.

“We’d only known each other three weeks but we bonded,” he said. “We had a couple of chances to escape but we both had to agree to do it. In our situation if one had escaped, the other would have had a bad time. It’s very difficult and we are thinking of poor Mark Henderson’s parents. I’m sure it will be all right in the end, but it will take time. They have to be strong.”

Sometimes, it is not all right in the end. Nev Pope’s 25-year-old son Jason, a geologist, was taken hostage five years ago in Angola. He has not been heard of again.

She has set up Mamma (murdered, abandoned, missing, maimed, abducted) which aims to provide practical and spiritual support to people whose loved ones have been injured or killed abroad.

“A lot of people feel they are going mad,” she said. “Where do you turn for help? If you go for bereavement counselling you're admitting they're dead. If you don't, are you keeping a false hope alive? How do you cope with weeks or months with no news?

With luck, Matthew Scott, being so briefly a captive, should escape the worst of the psychological traumas.

Returning to his family’s ivy-clad home in Clapham, south London, on Friday night, he said: “I still feel as though I'm walking on air. I have a hammock in my bedroom and right now all I want to do is lie in it and listen to music and perhaps invite some of my friends around. I think perhaps they (his family) all worry too much about me at times.”

Additional reporting: Rachel Dobson

September 28, 2003 at 11:58 AM in Current Terrorism | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home