Handcuffs, Hoods and the Menace of 16 Weeks in Hell ; ALAN JOHNSTON RELEASED

By DONALD MACINTYRE

If the face, pale with its lack of exposure to sunlight for three months, was more lined and gaunt, the body thinner, and the gait a little stiff, the consummate professionalism was undiminished. From the first moment he spoke at dawn to reporters in Ismail Haniyeh’s packed office in Gaza City, Alan Johnston described his 16-week ordeal at the hands of “unpredictable and dan-gerous” captors, not with detachment – that would have been impossible from a man of his emotional intelligence – but with all the objectivity that has made his reputation as a journalist in Gaza over the past three years.

In the first public sentences he uttered since he was grabbed from his car by gunmen on his way home on a quiet afternoon in Gaza City on 12 March, he said: “The last 16 weeks were by far the worst days of my life. It was like being buried alive, removed from the world. It was occasionally terrifying.”

Two hours earlier he had arrived, almost hidden from view by the armed black-tunicked men from the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades from the convoy which had sped him away, once released by his captors, to the Hamas house. Even then, there was no sign that his last journey before being freed had been the final chapter. His Army of Islam guard, “beside himself with anger”, had slapped him in the face as they drove along the dark and mostly deserted streets of Gaza City through Hamas checkpoints feared by the jittery captors to a handover he was still far from sure was going to happen.

But none of that could take away from the moment. After listening patiently to a speech of welcome from Mr Haniyeh, he spoke calmly of his elation at being liberated. He had dreamt repeatedly he said, of freedom. “And now it really is over, and it really is indescribably good…” It would be, as he would say later, “as extraordinary a fourth of July as I could imagine.”

From the outside it had looked in the previous 48 hours as if that moment might never come. Only on Monday as the men from the Hamas Executive Force visibly, and from the Qassam brigades, stealthily, prepared to take up their positions round the Dog-mush family neighbourhood of Sabra, Ahmed Youssef, senior aide to Mr Haniyeh, had warned that while Johnston’s safety had so far inhibited a military operation against the ultra-militant group run by Momtaz Dogmush this situation could not be allowed to continue. If “anything happened to Alan”, during such an operation, he added, he would be regarded as one of Hamas’s “martyrs”. It may be that Mr Youssef was merely applying rhetorical pressure to persuade the Army of Islam to give up their captive. But it seems the kidnappers were warned that if negotiations to end the standoff peacefully had failed, Hamas would have had no choice but to enter by storm.

Johnston had no idea of course that March afternoon, when the kidnappers’ car pulled alongside him in the side street near his office and then slewed across in front of his, what kind of abduction it was. The gunmen laughed as they grabbed his money – luckily for them he had just been to the bank – his watch and his passports. As he sat in the back of their car he thought it might be one of the minor kidnaps. It didn’t take long for the BBC man, having covered 27 kidnappings during his three years in Gaza, to realise that it was the one he had every reason to fear most – that of the same “Jihadi” group who had abducted two Fox TV employees the previous August. He knew that from the first evening in his first and only face-to-face encounter with the man he took to be the group’s leader – and whom he was to know only as Khaled – a man who was, he said yesterday “the mirror image” of those in the West who see everyone in the Arab or Muslim world as an enemy.

The man told him he would not be killed or tortured but Johnston’s belief in this message would be tested to the limit when he was woken at 3am that night, and handcuffed with a hood put over his head and taken outside. “Then you wonder what’s going to happen,” he recalled yesterday. From then on his solitary confinement was touched with a permanent air of menace, compounded early in his kidnap by two further torments – however minor he made them sound on the British consul-general’s lawn in Jerusalem yesterday.

One was that the notoriously hot and spicy Gazan food produced an allergic reaction which made him ill on two occasions. In that period, he said, he felt that his kidnappers “would be perfectly capable of watching television while I died”. And the other was being utterly cut off from the outside world for the first two weeks of his kidnap.

Both eased in time; the kidnappers allowed him to eat “simple food, bread, eggs, cheese potatoes” and he got a radio, which gave him access to the BBC World Service which allowed him at last to have an inkling of the support he was getting from viewers, listeners and colleagues from as far away as “Jakarta and Beijing”. He was especially cheered and astounded to hear that Palestinian journalists persistently demonstrating for his release had in week five of his incarceration clashed with police as they tried to storm the Gaza parliament building.

And there were still real low points to come. One was the 24- hour period when his kidnappers, enraged by a low point in the negotiations, chained him up by the hands and ankles.

Another was the videos; in the first he had to read a scripted denunciation of British and American policy in the region – “some of what it said was true, some of it untrue but none of it had the context it needed” – he tried to read one passage to make it obvious that they were not his words but was told to read it with more conviction.

Another low point was when he was told that he was going “back to Scotland” only to find that he was simply being moved to another place of confinement. Sitting in Mr Haniyeh’s office early yesterday morning, he said that he was still wondering if that too was just a dream.

The turning point came when Hamas took control of Gaza after five days of bloody infighting. For a surreal – and though he didn’t say so yesterday – a surely frightening five days, Johnston had remained in his confinement as the fighting raged round his prison, unable to discuss it with anyone and wondering if he was ever freed what kind of Gaza he would be freed into. “I have to say the kidnappers were much more nervous and … I began to feel that perhaps, if I was lucky, the end was coming. But even then, one of the worst moments was still to come: the video in which Johnston was forced to dress in an explosives belt which he said yesterday was “the real thing” though it seemed to him not to be primed with the necessary detonation mechanism.

Of the perpetrators of his “appalling” 16 weeks in solitary confinement, Johnston said: “They were often rude and unpleasant and they did threaten my life.” But he also said: “I was in Gaza for three years, and I know very well what Palestinian culture is, and the extraordinary warmth and hospitality – especially of Gaza.” And when he swiftly took off the scarf in Palestinian colours with the same grace with which he had allowed Mr Haniyeh to drape it round his shoulders moments earlier, it was not because he is not, “a friend of the Palestinian people”. Rather it was because he is a BBC man whose professionalism rejects labelling of any kind. “I knew that the handful of people that kidnapped me were a complete aberration,” he insisted. “My memories of Gaza will be very much of the best kind, despite what happened to me.”

(c) 2007 Independent, The; London (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.