By Elliot Brennan
Rushing to fit lone wolf attacks into prevailing narratives is a mistake.
At 2.10 am Tuesday morning a police tactical response team charged the Sydney café at the center of a hostage crisis that had begun on Monday morning. The gunman, Man Haron Monis, had begun shooting. Two hostages were killed and three hospitalized with gunshot wounds. Monis was shot dead by police. After a 16-hour ordeal that had grabbed global media attention, Sydney’s hostage siege was over. Its impact will continue to resonate for some time yet. While details continue to emerge, here’s a look at what went right.
The Australian government had a moment of clarity and, in the midst of the hostage crisis, somehow managed to downplay the siege. In a press conference a few hours after the siege began, Prime Minister Tony Abbott was small on details, instead allowing authorities to lead the flow of information to press. What he did stress was important: “We don’t know if it is politically motivated.” In relation to the threat of copycats he would later say that “There was nothing consistent about this individual [Monis] except that he was consistently weird, I don’t think anyone would want to emulate that.” His response starved the incident of its attention-seeking intent.
Next to the government’s response, the media coverage was, at least on the crucial operation points, excellent. Despite attempts by Monis to get his message out via media, his communication was muted. He took to YouTube instead, uploading messages spoken by hostages; law enforcement followed by deleting the videos within 30 minutes. When he called 2GB, a popular radio show, he wasn’t put to air. Again the media showed restraint.
The importance of this was explained by terrorism expert Adam Dolnik: “From a negotiating perspective, when people commit to something very publicly they have a much greater internal need to be consistent with what they’ve said.” This public commitment then makes negotiation much more difficult by increasing the need for face-saving mechanisms in the negotiating process.
Read the full story at The Diplomat