Freed Gaza journalist speaks out

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/5298916.stm

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One of the two foreign journalists kidnapped fro two weeks in Gaza has spoken to the BBC about his ordeal. Olaf Wiig, a New Zealander and a freelance cameraman for Fox News, described what happened on the day he and correspondent Steve Centanni, an American, were kidnapped.

OLAF WIIG: We were just on our way home when we came up behind another car that was travelling slow and then came to a halt and the next minute four men with Kalashnikov and 9mm pistols came out of the car.

It happened very quickly but the correspondent was very quickly removed from the car with a pistol to his head. The security guard jumped out of the car and I was left sitting in the car by myself while a chap with a 9 mm pistol was trying to encourage me to get out.

We ended up in the back of a pick-up truck and were driven across Gaza City.

QUESTION: Did they say anything to you as to why they had taken you?

OW: Immediately Steve, my correspondent, asked, where are we going, why did you take us? And the only response we got was the gunman immediately to my left said, you are going to hell.

Q: What did they do with you then?

The Stockholm syndrome is incredibly strong, you start to sympathise with your captors... Olaf Wiig OW: We then went through a whole process of being handed along through various intermediaries.

I suspect that the very first people who took us, I'm pretty sure that they were just hired guns really - we didn't see them again after that point. We were quickly handed off to another group; bound and gagged; all of our personal possessions taken off us - by this stage blindfolded so we couldn't see anything anyway and eventually shifted to, what I believe, was the ground floor of a mosque.

Q: And how did they treat you when they got there?

OW: Initially sort of roughly and harshly - you know this is a well-practised technique. A lot of the people who might be carrying out these sorts of actions have been in Israeli jails and they know the sort of process they go through to demoralise them.

So they remove anything that's personal to you - take off jewellery and watches - get you as quickly as possible out of the clothes that you came in and into sort of generic clothes, so that by the end of it you're sitting completely depersonalised and I think that's all about knocking the spirit.

Q: But did things improve?

OW: Yes, things steadily improved and with every little thing, any hardship they removed, goodwill increases.

The Stockholm syndrome is incredibly strong, you do start to sympathise with your captors because that made life better for you and you don't want to end up going back the other way and for the hand-restraints to be put back on; for you to be blindfolded again, so you do what's asked of you.

Q: Do you sympathise with them now?

OW: To a certain extent I do, you can't help being with these people for two weeks and to actually end up knowing them reasonably well.

When I left the main English speaker that was looking after us, when I left, I gave him a hug goodbye - I was happy to leave and I said, thank you for looking after us.

Q: Are you any clearer as to why they took you?

OW: I think there's a lot of really complex negotiations going on. We still really don't know who it was who took us.

I think that probably that the intermediary person - the first person that we were handed over to - I think that probably that's more or less a sort of a Mafia-style operation.

Olaf Wiig (R) says the story of Gaza's people needs to be told

I think that it was probably them who ordered the capture and it was them who - their interest in it, I believe, was a political power and/or money motive.

But they immediately handed us off, for the day-to-day care, to a Jihadi group. That is something unique in Gaza - there's been plenty of kidnappings but the motive for it is usually quite clear and the duration people are kept in the past has been very short.

This is a whole new thing; one, that it went on for so long and two, that at least part of the operation was a Jihadist group.

Q: Jihadists who wanted publicity?

OW: I believe that's what they wanted. I believe that.

Q: And yet you don't know who it is?

OW: I think for the Jihadists what they wanted was the ability to make a video; they wanted to announce their arrival with a little bit of a splash and the perfect way of doing that is to emulate people ... like [radical Iraqi Shia cleric] Moqtada Sadr.

Q: Of course you were involved in that video, how did you feel about making it?

OW: When they announced to us that they wanted to make a video, my initial reaction was to tell them, you know as far as we're concerned that has a lot of bad karma because we have sat and we've watched these videos and we know what the last frame is - that's us with our heads sitting on the floor. And straightaway they said, don't be ridiculous this is Palestine, this is not Iraq. But it's still not comforting.

Q: So they went ahead and made this video and they forced you to say certain things?

OW: Yes.

Q: Did you think that you were going to get out alive at that stage?

I didn't need a second invitation - I leapt out of the car and ran down the drive Olaf Wiig

OW: I'd been told - early on - that because I'm a New Zealander that they understood that there was no bad feeling between the Muslim world and New Zealand and therefore I would be freed but they made direct threats to me about the safety of my colleague and had told me that they considered him a very dangerous man and that they were going to kill him.

And from time-to-time I thought that they'd just given up on both of us and they were going to kill the both of us.

Q: When did you realise that both you and Steve Centanni, who was of course an American, that you were both safe?

OW: Not until we pulled up in front of the hotel that we'd been staying in and the passenger in front of our car, who was actually one of the guards who had been looking after us, said to me, " Yacob Yala." Yacob was the name that we'd adopted and yala mean come on. I looked out the window and I saw the front gates of the hotel and I knew that they had been true to their word and we really were going to go.

I didn't need a second invitation - I leapt out of the car and ran down the drive.

Q: Why did they release you though - was it a direct result of negotiations?

OW: You know the truthful answer to that is that I don't think anybody will know exactly why they released us.

It must have been the result of negotiations - they must have at some level got what they wanted because at about 3 o'clock late at night on the evening before or early in the morning of the day we were released, we were woken up and there was sort of jubilation and they said, today you go free, and so something must have happened.

Q: Olaf, you make your living as a freelance cameraman in Gaza, are you going to go back?

OW: Well that's the point, if I don't go back to Gaza then I've got to think of something else to do for a living. I'm going to have to ask myself some very serious questions in a short while and the danger is that for freelance journalists and broadcasters alike, that Gaza has always been a difficult story to tell.

It's dangerous there for various reasons and for a lot of people now - for a lot of networks - probably Gaza is now a no-go area and I think for the people of Gaza that's just such a tragedy because their story needs to be told and the best way of telling that is to have international journalists walking the streets and being able to tell the story of everyday people in Gaza and the minute that story is not being told, then I think that's a great tragedy.