Good v. Bad Hijackers

THE two airliner passengers walked hurriedly toward the pilot's cabin, one of them carrying a plastic flight bag. Pointing a rusty revolver at a cable and switch that protruded ominously from his satchel, one of them shouted to the captain: "Change course or I'll press the switch and the plane will blow up!" With a small compass that he carried in his pocket, the hijacker made sure that the plane was really changing direction.

Another skyjacking carried out by Palestinian guerrillas? Not quite. A few minutes after that scene occurred over Czechoslovakia last week, the Prague-bound BAC One-Eleven jetliner flown by Rumania's TAROM airlines landed at Munich international airport. As the hijackers stepped onto West German soil, they knelt on the runway to say a prayer of thanksgiving. While the airliner was refueling to resume its interrupted flight, another of the passengers, a 31-year-old East Berlin engineer who had had nothing to do with the hijacking, decided on the spur of the moment to capitalize on his good fortune and defect from the Communist world.

The hijackings of recent years have victimized mostly Western passengers and companies. Many of the pirates have been professed Communists or sympathizers bound for places like Cuba and North Korea, or Arab irregulars headed anywhere from Algiers to Damascus. But Communist airlines have not escaped the skyjackers. In the past year alone, at least ten East European craft have been commandeered by passengers and diverted to Western or neutral airports. No plane has yet been hijacked from the Soviet Union, however, probably because Russian crews have shown a willingness to use firearms to stop them. Nearly all of the hijackers have sought political asylum outside the Iron Curtain. In the midst of the search for ways to prevent sky piracy, their arrival has posed a painful question for non-Communist governments: Is there ever any legitimate excuse for hijacking an airliner?

Many of the East European refugees are fleeing harsh repression at home and can find no other way of getting to another country. So far, none has damaged an aircraft or injured any of its passengers. In comparing the successful Hungarian heist with the nightmare hijackings carried out by Palestinian commandos, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeititng editorialized: "The Palestinian extremists want to terrorize by taking hostages, while the young Poles, Czechs, East Germans or Hungarians want to shake from their shoes the dust of hermetically closed territories. This difference in motivation and mentality will have to be kept in mind."

For all that, however, there is little difference in method. Anti-Communist hijackers, like the pro-Communist or Arab variety, are generally armed, and thus they subject passengers and crew to some danger. Moreover, if the U.S. and other major victims are to secure worldwide cooperation in preventing hijackings, they can hardly expect to set a double standard.

Washington has chosen a middle course. U.S. delegates at a meeting of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) in Montreal last week proposed that countries that took no action against hijackers be subjected to an international air boycott. However. each country would have a choice of extraditing the hijacker or prosecuting him locally. President Nixon, who supervised the drafting of the plans, prefers extradition of U.S. hijackers, and for that reason has ordered the renegotiation of existing extradition treaties to include hijackers specifically. The U.S. is even willing to waive the death penalty, which skyjackers risk under American law, if they are caught in a country that does not impose capital punishment.

But the right to political asylum makes extradition a practical impossibility in many places; West Germany, for example, would be as loath to ship a Bulgarian hijacker back to Sofia as, say, Egypt would be to send a disaffected Israeli back to Jerusalem. The U.S. plan seeks to assure victim nations that hijackers would face the force of law somewhere. Perhaps the most blatant example of a hijacker who escaped punishment altogether occurred last January in Lebanon, where a 26-year-old Frenchman who took over a TWA jetliner to show sympathy for the Arab cause was treated to a free vacation, entertained at the homes of Lebanese Cabinet ministers, and generally feted as a hero.

Last week West Germany held its first trial involving East European refugee skyjackers. The defendants were eight Czechoslovaks who forced a national airliner to fly from near Karlovy Vary to Nuremberg. In their defense, they claimed that they were in imminent danger of arrest for anti-Soviet activities after the 1968 Russian invasion of their country. They found considerable sympathy: five got suspended sentences, while the three who carried weapons and gave orders were each sentenced to 30 months for "deprivation of liberty and coercion." The court president, in his opinion, expressed doubt that the three had been in as much danger of arrest as they claimed, leaving the impression that had their plight been more desperate, their sentences, too, would have been suspended.

The Hungarians, who arrived in Munich during the Czechoslovaks' trial, expected to be prosecuted, but they also anticipated light sentences. "Here we will have to be in jail for a while," said one. "In Hungary we were permanently un-free." Whatever their punishment, it will doubtless be a good deal more lenient than what their own government would prescribe. Last March, a young married couple in East Germany had occasion to contemplate the future of hijackers behind the Iron Curtain and decided it would be intolerable. Having failed to blast open two locked cockpit doors on the plane they were attempting to commandeer, they put their pistols into their mouths and fired.

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