The Hijackee Syndrome

The four hijackers have been captured and are standing near the ramp in handcuffs, shouting the familiar slogans of the Cretin Liberation Movement. The hostages--just released after five harrowing days aboard the airliner--are distressed, but not because of their ordeal. "They were very courteous, very humanitarian, " says Marta Dome of her captors. "Once they let me go to the bathroom. "Declares Bertha Nation, who was slapped around: "Any fair-minded American would have to admit that the Cretin people have been driven to this." Egret Birdsnoot has no hard feelings about his injury: "It was just a tap on the head. They had to keep order and prevent panic, and they did. Very impressive fellows." Marta and Bertha kiss each of the hijackers goodbye. Egret shakes hands and promises to bone up on the ideals of the Cretin movement.

These fictional passengers are afflicted by the hijackee syndrome. Unlike the passenger-victims who react with understandable outrage at being kidnaped, bullied and threatened, there always seem to be those who emerge from the shattering experience burbling warm praise for the captors. In fact, says Psychiatrist David G. Hubbard, director of the Aberrant Behavior Center in Dallas, "It is as common as dirt."

Entebbe Too. So it seems. "The hijackers were very kind. We could do anything on the plane, even chat with them," said Febe Poblete, 20, a native of Manila who was skyjacked by Filipinos last April on a flight out of Hong Kong. Said a stewardess on the same flight: "The leader kissed us before we left. I already miss him." A French woman, released by the skyjackers of the Air France jet just before the Israeli rescue at Entebbe thought the terrorists had been "wonderful." In another skyjacking, a steward liked his Arab captors so much that he accepted an invitation to stay on as a guest of a hijacker. Later, the steward changed his mind.

Last month's hijacking of a TWA jet by Croatian terrorists produced a blizzard of passenger testimonials to the humanitarianism, calmness and intelligence of the captors. "I realized there was a lot to admire in all of them," said Los Angeles TV Consultant Rudy Bretz. "They were idealists who proved that they had a just cause." Even the pilot was so pleased with the performance of the lone female hijacker, Julienne Busic, in preventing panic, that he gave her a big hug as police took her away.

Some psychologists think that hijackers cash in on widespread hostility to authority. Once the air passenger believes he will not be killed, says Dr. Hubbard, he can view his captor as a dashing desperado lashing out against the Establishment. Also, victims sometimes see the hijacking as a free ticket to adventure and personal publicity. Says Hubbard: "Passengers know that the game, correctly played, will make them celebrities among their circle of friends. For a moment, too, they can run away from wives, mortgages, the Internal Revenue Service and the church appeal."

But deeper fears also aid hijackers.

Paradoxically, says Syracuse University Psycholinguist Murray Miron (who specializes in what psychologists call "threat analysis,") a hijacker builds admiration through sheer menace. "Someone who holds your life in his hands rewards you every time he doesn't kill you," says Miron. Even so little a "reward" as permitting the passengers to light up a cigarette or go to the bathroom acts as a subtle link to the captor. In "media crimes," says Miron, the reinforcement is all the stronger: hijackers scare the wits out of passengers with death threats, then switch to courteous behavior in hopes of getting a good press.

"Because the hijacker doesn't use all the force available to him, people are grateful," says Hubbard. "The fact that he has no right to use the force doesn't come through, because people are so damned scared they are not thinking."

Deflected Anger. For many passengers, an immediate feeling of rage toward the captors--let alone any display of it--is simply too threatening. One way out is to deflect the anger onto other passengers. During the Croatian hijacking, a group of hostages heatedly denounced a fellow passenger who complained about the seizure of the plane. Another way is to learn to love the hijacker. A hijacker may be startled to find stewardesses flirting, businessmen shooting him admiring glances and other passengers announcing sudden conversion to whatever cause produced the hijack. The next step, says University of Chicago Psychiatrist Lawrence Freedman, is often the "coalescing of the aggressors and hostages" into a united group deploring the intransigence of outside authorities who refuse to meet the hijackers' demands.

Freudians call it "identification with the aggressor," a survival mechanism that goes back to childhood. The theory: the first time a child meets aggressive behavior in his parents, he understands that he can neither overthrow them nor do without their protection. So he tries to like the parents more, follow their orders and imitate their aggressive behavior.

These actions underline a familiar logic:

If you can't beat them, join them. "It's not a very complex mechanism," says Dr. Hubbard. "You can find it with little boys in the third grade all over the world --a class bully who threatens everyone and suddenly finds everyone following him around worshiping him and doing his bidding. A skyjacker doesn't have to be any smarter than a nine-year-old who knows how to use bluff." The good news is that no psychiatrist has reported long-term psychic damage to hijack victims.

A week or so after the ordeal, submerged anger usually appears, and they begin to realize that those huggable, kissable idealists were simply thugs.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.