Kidnap victims share painful memories

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The BBC's Alan Johnston, who was held captive by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip for four months, shares experiences of captivity with Ingrid Betancourt, the former Colombian presidential candidate who spent six years in the jungle.

In Paris's famous old city hall, the Hotel de Ville, in rooms overlooking the banks of the Seine, I waited for Ingrid Betancourt to arrive.Alan Johnston held in Gaza, meets Ingrid Betancourt, held in ColombiaOf course this was always going to be more than just another interview.

As I had prepared for it, the memories and emotions surrounding all that happened to me in Gaza had become vivid again.

The door opened, and in she came.

Like all of us, I had seen her many times on television.

But she was perhaps a little slighter than I expected, and there was a real warmth in her eyes of a kind that cameras do not capture.

Years of confinement

We embraced and then sat down and began to talk, one kidnap victim to another.

Straight away I said that, obviously, there was really no comparison between what we had been through.

Alan Johnston moments after his release in Gaza City in July 2007 I had been freed after less than four months. She had been held for six years.

During my captivity in Gaza I had listened to a report on the radio of the appalling jungle conditions that she and her fellow hostages were enduring.

I told her that I remembered lying on that thin mattress on the floor of my cell and thinking grimly to myself: "If any of us kidnap victims around the world deserve to go home, it is those Colombian hostages."

Sitting in front of me, in Paris, she replied: "We all deserved to go home."

Hostage club

And as we talked, I quickly felt the kind of connections that come easily between former hostages.

It has been said that we are members of a tiny club that nobody would ever want to join.

We share an experience of a particular kind of darkness, and fear, and inhumanity that changed each of our lives for ever.

Ingrid Betancourt embraces her family after her release in July 2008And certainly, during our captivity, Ingrid and I both felt a terrible guilt over the suffering we had caused our families on account of the risks that we had taken.

And again, her agonies were immeasurably worse than mine.

She said that she had come across a scrap of newspaper in her jungle prison.

Desperate for something to read, she had smoothed it out and saw an image of priests standing around a coffin.

It was her father's.

That was how she learnt that he had died soon after she was kidnapped.

Waiting game

And in our captivity, both of us experienced the process of coming to terms with the dreadful realisation that it might be a very long time before we would be free again.

Ingrid said she looked around and understood that her prison had become her world.

I remember a similar psychological moment, and then I knew that I needed to try to find the calmest way I could to wait, and wait… and wait… in the hope that the door might one day open.

I had not been praying myself before my abduction, and it did not seem right to start just because I was in trouble

We talked of the efforts we made to try to preserve our self respect.

And a major idea we both clung to was the notion that eventually our kidnapping might end, and if possible, we did not want to look back and be ashamed of the way we had behaved in captivity.

She said that, under the circumstances, we should forgive ourselves for any failings.

Strength of faith

But there was one great difference in the way we tried to deal with our incarceration.

I will always be grateful to the many people who were kind enough to pray for me when I was lost in Gaza.

But I had not been praying myself before my abduction, and it did not seem right to start just because I was in trouble.

More than that, in my cell, on the radio, I had heard of war and bloodshed in places like Congo.

And if God was not intervening on behalf of entirely innocent people there, who were suffering more than I was, I could not quite see why he might intercede for me.

Sharing experiences of how they survived despair in captivityBut in her captivity, Ingrid found her faith to be a vast source of strength.

She said that I had been asking the wrong questions of God.

He was not responsible for the ills of the world, she said… it was us. Mankind.

I would like to have talked for hours, but all too soon our interview was over.

Ingrid had to go on to a lunch being given by a gathering of Nobel Prize winners in honour of the Irish rock star, and anti-poverty activist, Bono.

That is the world in which she moves.

As she was preparing to leave, and we were saying goodbye, I said: "Stay out of trouble."

She smiled. "You too," she replied.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 20 December, 2008 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the <a class="inlineText" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3187926.stm">programme schedules </a>for World Service transmission times.