A hostage crisis develops when one or more terrorists or criminals hold people against their will and try to hold off the authorities by force, threatening to kill the hostages if provoked or attacked.
Typically, the party of the hostage-taker(s) will issue demands to the forces keeping them surrounded. In a planned hostage crisis, there is often a list of political or religious demands, often including the release of imprisoned friends or allies. In cases where the hostage situation was improvised as a desperate attempt to avoid capture, the demands usually revolve around exchanging the lives of the hostages for transport to safety.
Journalists sometimes use the alternative term siege to describe these incidents. However, events like the Waco Siege are not necessarily hostage crises, because third parties are not being held or threatened.
Famous quotes containing the words hostage and/or crisis:
“Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary.... He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“What happens in a strike happens not to one person alone.... It is a crisis with meaning and potency for all and prophetic of a future. The elements in crisis are the same, there is a fermentation that is identical. The elements are these: a body of men, women and children, hungry; an organization of feudal employers out to break the back of unionization; and the government Labor Board sent to “negotiate” between this hunger and this greed.”
—Meridel Le Sueur (b. 1900)