Word: ransoms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...block the legislation required to implement it. The reason: a new Soviet decree that requires Soviet Jews to pay exorbitant exit fees in order to emigrate to Israel. According to many irate Congressmen, the levies, which Russian Jews cannot afford to pay, constitute a Soviet stratagem to extract ransom money from Western, notably American Jewry. That now appears to be a miscalculation on Moscow's part, and one that could cost the Soviet dear...
International Jewish leaders, meeting in emergency session in London earlier this month, unanimously refused to pay a penny of ransom, rejecting "the right of any government to turn people into chattels that can be bought and sold." The Israeli Parliament called the levies "an insult to humanity." In Russia, too, Jewish leaders are determined that no ransom shall be paid, hoping that U.S. trade boycotts of the U.S.S.R. will instead persuade the Kremlin to rescind the decree...
...kidnaping of its ambassador to Guatemala, Count Karl von Spreti; he was summarily executed when a one-month-old Guatemalan government that was determined to strike a tough law-and-order posture refused to release 22 jailed Guatemalan terrorists and to allow Germany to pay a $700,000 ransom...
...Argentina. Last March, Buenos Aires did not allow Fiat to negotiate with the guerrillas who had kidnaped Oberdan Sallustro, the boss of its operations in Argentina; Sallustro was shot dead. But the government raised no objection last week when the Dutch electronics firm, Philips, paid a reported $500,000 ransom for the release of its Argentine manager, Jan Johannes van de Panne, who was kidnaped by some 35 guerrillas as he drove to his plant outside Buenos Aires. Evidently the regime has taken a second look at the advice offered by former President Pedro Aramburu before he was kidnaped...
...they answered threats to hostages by releasing prisoners. "We believe that blackmail leads only to more blackmail," says an Israeli foreign-ministry official. "If we release 250 prisoners today that will only encourage the terrorists to demand more prisoners tomorrow. And what would stop them from asking for political ransom? They could kidnap Israelis somewhere in the world and demand that we get out of the Golan Heights or the West Bank...