PALESTINE:Freed BBC journalist Alan Johnston yesterday likened his four months of captivity in Gaza to a feeling of being "buried alive," and said a radio that picked up BBC programmes, including ones issuing calls for his release, had helped sustain him through "waves of depression".
"The last 16 weeks, of course, were just the very worst you can imagine of my life, like being buried alive, really, removed from the world," Johnston said in the coastal strip, immediately after he was freed by a group calling itself the Army of Islam.
Johnston, who turned 45 in captivity, said he had "dreamt many times of being free and always woke up back in that room. Now it really is over and it is indescribably good to be out." Looking gaunt but smiling broadly, Johnston made his first comments from the office of deposed Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza City and later in the day spoke to reporters at a news conference at the British consulate in Jerusalem.
He said he spent most of his time in captivity with one man, "a strange guy who barely spoke to me for days and would just glare at me and fly into rages at tiny things - a door slamming or whatever - and then at other times, once a fortnight, he would come across completely different and friendly, especially if he thought it might be coming to an end, the whole kidnapping."
At one point, Johnston said, the guard invited him to watch television, and he saw his father giving a press conference calling for his release.
Johnston said that after he got sick from the food he was initially being fed, his captors altered his diet and began feeding him eggs, bread and cheese. There was one 24-hour period, he said, when he was chained to a wall.
Asked about two video tapes of him that were released by his captors, Johnston said he had been forced to read prepared texts. In the second video tape, Johnston appeared with an explosive belt around his waist, but yesterday he said he did not know if the belt was real. "To be honest, they hold all the cards in that situation, those guys, and I just decided that nobody takes these kind of videos very seriously," he said.
Asked about the group that had held him, Johnston said they were focused less on the Palestinian conflict with Israel and were more angry with the West.
The messages of support he heard on BBC broadcasts, he said, were an immense source of comfort. He recalled hearing how technicians at the Glastonbury rock festival had downed their tools in an expression of solidarity and that actors opopular soap opera EastEnders had taken a two-minute break to demand his release. "I'm so immensely grateful for that, and I will be all my life," he said.
The Scottish journalist, who worked for the BBC in Gaza for three years, said there were times he was unsure he would survive.
During his first night in captivity, Johnston said the leader of the group that had abducted him appeared with his face covered in a red-and-white headscarf and told him he would not be harmed. But a short while later, he recalled, he was woken, and his captors "put a hood over my head again, and handcuffed me, and took me out into the night, and of course you really wonder how that might end". The only time his captors treated him violently, he said, was right at the end of his ordeal, as they drove him through Gaza to hand him over. During the ride, he said, they were "slamming my head".
Three weeks ago, while in captivity, Gaza descended into civil war as Hamas and Fatah forces battled each other, with the Islamic movement ultimately taking control of the entire strip. "There was something uniquely depressing . . . about being kidnapped and lying in your hideout when the forces of law and order are killing each other in a very intense way in the streets around instead of actually looking for you," he said.
But the Hamas takeover of Gaza ultimately led to his release. He said his captors suddenly lost confidence after Hamas took control of Gaza. "I'm pretty sure if Hamas hadn't come in and stuck the heat on in a big way, I'd still be in that room."
Johnston said he did not have any plans to return to Gaza in the immediate future. "I spent three years covering Gaza as a correspondent and I spent four months in solitary confinement there, and I feel - enough already with Gaza. You know, maybe I'll go back when it's a member of the EU."