6 Alan Johnston

KIDNAPPED BBC JOURNALIST

Despite 114 days in captivity in Gaza, the journalist showed amazing self-reliance, dignity and humility

In the modern world, most of us are owned. The building societies own our houses. Our employers own our days. Our aspirations are held in check by the fact that our children's futures take precedence over our own. But there is a part of us that cannot be contained: our minds. A cell door can thud for the night, metal bars can block our windows, and yet there is a space inside each of our heads that no one else can reach unless we hand them the key. We can capture a body, maim it, even kill it. But we can never possess a person's spirit in quite the same way. No Scot demonstrated that more eloquently in 2007 than BBC journalist Alan Johnston, who spent 114 days in captivity after being kidnapped in Gaza by the Army of Islam.

Our minds are a kind of infinity, a resource whose limits often remain untested. But those who are tested raise the benchmark of what the rest of us aspire to. Johnston's kidnap, he acknowledged afterwards, was a constant battle, but a psychological battle. "The only thing I could control," he said when the ordeal was over, "was my state of mind."

Johnston's journalism over the years was hallmarked by his humanity and he never lost that. Asked if he hated his captors, he said: "I felt if I gave way to hating these guys, that's a hugely powerful emotion to release into your head and it's not about control." The year before his kidnap, he had written down his thoughts on reporting for journalism students. "So much of the job," he wrote, "is about trying to find the imagination within yourself to try to see, to really see, the world through the eyes of the people in the story."

Once, he continued, he went to an abandoned block of flats with another journalist and stood in a room that had been hit by a shell. The other journalist wanted to know what kind of shell it had been. Johnston's interest was different, and telling. "If you looked around the room for a minute you could see the life that used to go on in it. You could see the books the family used to read, and the sort of pictures they liked to hang on the walls and, from photographs, you could see they had three kids and that the oldest girl had graduated from university. Of course, their story – what had happened to them, what they were and what they had lost – was what the war was all about. It did not really matter whether it was a bazooka or a rocket that had turned their world upside down."

Johnston knew that important details are sometimes overlooked, dismissed or ignored. And so if we looked for small clues about his life, what might we notice? Perhaps the fact that after 114 days in captivity, when Johnston went to Spain for two weeks to recuperate, he chose to go alone. Or the fact that he saw a psychologist twice – once for two hours immediately after his ordeal and one follow-up meeting. Before the kidnap, Johnston had been the last international correspondent working in Gaza in a period of danger. He had only two weeks left of his contract but had decided to stick it out. These things suggest an incredible level of self-reliance. Perhaps the psychologists didn't need to help him sort his mind out because his mind is the one thing that was wholly in his own possession.

Once freed, in July, Johnston acted with dignity and humility. Often, we associate strength of character with volume, but Johnston showed us that strength of character can be quiet, thoughtful and self-deprecating. He had promised himself that, if freed, he would re-think his life. For the moment, he is happy to stay in Britain and take a desk job at the BBC. Perhaps true strength is knowing when you have nothing left to prove.

In captivity, Johnston used to listen to the radio and hear tales of the campaign for his release mounted by strangers all over the world. Collectively, people rose up to say that those who tell the world what is happening in danger zones should not themselves become instruments of war. "The amazing side of what people can be was being illustrated again and again," he said.

What "people can be" is sometimes related to external factors: what they earn, what status they have. Johnston reminded us that the most important factor of "what we can be" is internal. He showed us what we can be as individuals, and the potential of what we can be together.

Catherine Deveney