photo
SHARE | PRINT | TEXT SIZE: ＋ － | RSS

My Kidnap Ordeal

By Alan Johnston

British journalist Alan Johnston had worked with the BBC for 16 years and had been their correspondent in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. In March 2007, as he was nearing the end of his three-year posting in Gaza, he was seized by militants at gunpoint and dragged into a life-changing ordeal. In the excerpts below he recounts the experience of his captivity and his eventual release 114 days later.

Gaza [© Mikkel Ostergaard/Panos Pictures]

It had begun out in the spring sunshine, on the streets of Gaza City. A saloon car had suddenly surged past mine, and then pulled up, forcing me to stop. A young man emerged from the passenger side and pointed a pistol at me. I had reported many times on the kidnapping of foreigners in Gaza. Now, as I always feared it might, my turn had come.

A hood had been shoved over my face, but through it I could see the sun flickering between the tower blocks. I could tell that we were heading south and east, toward the city's rougher neighborhoods.

Alan found himself alone in a small, bare room, captive of a group called the Army of Islam.

In that room, on the roof of an apartment block, there was just a narrow, sagging bed and two plastic chairs. I could only tell the time by the passage of the sun, and the five calls to prayer from nearby mosques.

I had had to throw away my disposable contact lenses on the first day, and my eyes are very weak. And so, in this blurred, empty room I began to try to come to terms with the disaster that had engulfed me. I paced backwards and forwards across the cell. Five strides, then a turn, and five strides back. Mile, after mile, after mile.

Imagine yourself in that room. Imagine pacing, or just sitting for three hours, for five hours, for 10 hours. After you had done 12 hours, you would still have four or five more before you could hope to fall asleep.

And you would know that the next day would be the same, and the next, and the one after that, and so on, and on, and on.

As one empty day slid slowly into another, the seriousness of my situation became more and more apparent.

In those first, terrible days--the hardest that I have ever known--I worried very much about the impact my abduction would have on my elderly parents and my sister at home in Scotland. One of my lowest moments came during a power cut. I lay in a dwindling pool of candlelight, listening to the shouting, rowing neighbors and occasional gunshots that are all part of the noisy clamor of Gaza's poorer neighborhoods.

I felt very, very far from home, trapped, and aghast at how dire my situation was.

A Mental Lifeboat

I was sure that if I was to be put to death, the act would be videotaped in the style of Jihadi executions in Iraq.

If that was to be the last image my family and the world were to have of me, if at all possible I did not want it to be one of a weeping, pleading, broken man.

So, through that long night, I lay listening to every sound that might signal the coming of my assassins, and tried to gather the strength that I would need if the worst were to happen. But at last the silence was broken by the dawn call to prayer. The night was over. Somehow I felt that the danger had passed, and I fell asleep.

As the weeks drifted by, and I paced through my wasteland of time, my thoughts often ranged back across my life. I filled many empty hours reflecting on periods in my childhood and phases of my career.

I tried to work out the roots of certain aspects of my character. And I thought hard again about why one or two particularly important relationships in my past had worked, but then eventually lost their way. But much of my mental energy went into the huge effort to confront my many anxieties, the struggle as I saw it, to keep my mind in the right place.

I told myself that in my captivity there was only one thing that I might be able to control--my state of mind. And I struggled to persuade myself that bouts of depression did nothing to change the hard realities of my situation, they only weakened me.

Alan Johnston is embraced by colleagues at the moment of his release [© AFP]

I tried to strangle damaging, negative thoughts almost as they emerged, before they could take hold and drive me down. And positive thoughts had to be encouraged.

The fact was that I had not been killed, and I was not being beaten around. I was being fed reasonably, and I decided that my conditions could have been much, much worse. I felt that I would not be able to pick up a book again about the Holocaust without feeling a sense of shame, if I were somehow to break down mentally under the very, very, very much easier circumstances of my captivity.

I thought too that, unfortunately, every day around the world, people are being told that they have cancer, and that they only have a year or two to live. But the vast majority of them find the strength to face the end of their lives with dignity and courage.

I told myself that it would be shameful if I could not conduct myself with some grace in the face of my much lesser challenge.

And in its search for inspiration, my mind took me down what may sound to you like some rather strange paths. But for me, as impressive as any story of endurance, is that of the explorer, Ernest Shackleton.

After his ship was crushed by the Antarctic ice nearly a century ago, he took a tiny lifeboat and set out across the great wastes of the stormy Southern Ocean. He aimed for an almost unimaginably small island far beyond his horizon, and eventually he reached it. And in my prison, I felt that I needed some kind of mental lifeboat, to help me cross the great ocean of time that lay before me, aiming for that almost unimaginable moment far beyond my horizon when I might somehow go free. And so I took all the positive thoughts I could muster and lashed them together in my mind, like planks in a psychological raft that I hoped would buoy me up.

In this way, I fought what was the psychological battle of my life. God knows, it was hard, and lonely, and there were many dark passages when I edged close to despair. But I was always in the fight, and there was no collapse.

Eventually Gaza's violent politics suddenly shifted against my kidnappers. The powerful Hamas and Fatah factions began a fight to the death.

Under increasing pressure from Hamas, the group that was holding Alan decided to free him. After a hair-raising night journey through the embattled streets of Gaza, Alan found himself suddenly released.

Days later, I was back in Scotland, taking that road that I know so well--heading at last for the hills of Argyll, and my family. And there, in our house by the sea--in that beautiful, peaceful place--all that happened to me in Gaza began to slide into the past.

And the kidnap's legacy is not all bad. With its locks and chains, its solitary confinement and moments of terror, it was a kind of dark education. I lived through things which before I would have struggled to imagine, and maybe, in the end, I will be stronger for that. I have gained too a deeper sense of the value of freedom. Perhaps only if you have ever been some kind of prisoner can you truly understand its worth.

Even now, more than three months after I was freed, it can still seem faintly magical to do the simplest things, like walk down a street in the sunshine, or sit in a cafe with a newspaper. And in my captivity in Gaza, I learned again that oldest of lessons. That in life, all that really, really matters, are the people you love.

Read the full account of Alan Johnston's kidnap ordeal on the BBC website at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7048652.stm

TOP