For 15 months -- 462 days, to be exact -- Australian photojournalist Nigel Brennan and Canadian journalist Amanda Lindhout were held hostage in Somalia.
Now, Mr Brennan and other Australian kidnap victims, a kidnap-and-ransom consultant, and a kidnap researcher have sat down to talk with SBS' Insight program about the whole issue.
Ron Sutton has the story.
Nigel Brennan had joined Amanda Lindhout, a former girlfriend, on a trip to Somalia to report on the humanitarian crisis in the war-torn country as freelance journalists.
Just four days into their trip, they were kidnapped as, Mr Brennan says, they were heading to a camp for internally displaced people.
He says he was treated fairly well at first, then, after a brief dash for freedom ended in their recapture, he was kept chained and tortured, both mentally and physically.
His message, now, if it can be honed to a single one?
If your loved one is kidnapped overseas, do not leave it to your government to set him or her free.
"The problem with my case, particularly, was you were dealing with two different governments -- obviously, the Australian and Canadian governments -- and both countries had different outcomes (in mind). The Canadian government had been telling the Canadian family that they would get us out for free, it was just going to take some time to wear down the kidnappers to release us, possibly one or two years. The difficulty with the Australian government, too, is that you had different organisations like DFAT (the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) and the Australian Federal Police. I think, with the Australian Federal Police, what they were trying to do was get a conviction, because a crime had been committed to an Australian citizen. Getting me out was a bonus."
Nigel Brennan stresses he is not criticising what the Australian government departments and agencies did.
He says there were people within those organisations he describes as fantastic.
But Mr Brennan says his ordeal, finally leading to his release in November of 2009, taught him about the need for other, specialised help.
"When I was first taken, the average time for a kidnapping in Somalia was about 90 days and $54,000. So the fact that I stayed for 462 days and the ransom was closer to $658,000, had the government not got involved at the start and a kidnap-and-ransom company like AKE or Aegis or one of those other organisations, I could have very likely been out within a hundred days for a hell of a lot cheaper."
Mr Brennan's sister, Nicky Bonney, became the main contact person with the kidnappers, negotiating the ransom and the pair's release.
In the end, then-Greens leader Bob Brown and philanthropist Dick Smith helped pay the ransom, but that came after Ms Bonney turned to kidnap-and-ransom specialists for help.
She says the government had implemented a strategy of not talking with the kidnappers' negotiator after she started out having almost weekly exchanges with him.
And Ms Bonney says the family, like the government, had taken the approach on moral grounds that no ransom would be paid.
"I believe, in hindsight, it's completely naive. And as time went on and we researched more, we found that to be the case, that, if there was no ransom paid, we weren't going to be getting him home."
Ms Bonney has told Insight that, after a year of letting Australian Federal Police in Kenya handle negotiations and strategies, she and the family decided to change direction.
"As soon as we engaged a risk-management group, our lives changed -- dramatically. A, we had control, for the first time ever. B, we had constant feedback as to the process of how it would go, what the expectations were, and we could almost tick off on a chart when those expectations were met, in regards to that negotiation."
Kidnap-and-ransom specialists have told the program that, with Australians increasingly travelling out in the world, the number of incidents involving Australians is increasing.
They say many cases go unreported to the government, making it hard to know the exact number, but one estimates a dozen to 20 calls for help now happen in a year.
University of Canberra professor Mark Turner, who has researched kidnappings in the southern Philippines, says there are reasons a government tries to avoid paying.
"If the government does start paying ransoms, it does send out a signal, and maybe it's also a market signal. And, also, you have the question of, 'Should government be paying what are essentially criminals to perpetrate their (acts) ... and be successful in their acts?'"
However, at the same time, Nigel Brennan says he still believes an early offer of payment by his father was instrumental in how reasonably he was originally treated.
"Dad had actually put $20,000 on the table,* I think, in the first week or two weeks, and his whole reasoning behind that was, 'If they don't have a value, then there's no reason to keep the hostages alive.' I actually feel that that, in my respect, actually made my treatment at the start much better, compared to Amanda's family, who, for 12 months, had said to the kidnappers, 'We have no money, we have no money,' so, physically, she was treated much worse than I was."
And the Insight program 'Kidnapped for Ransom' airs on Tuesday night (Sept 10) at 8:30 and again on Wednesday (Sept 11) at 1pm on SBS One.
