Hope in captivity: How kidnapped journalists coped

Snatched suddenly into captivity, Western journalists kidnapped in the Middle East and elsewhere often develop survival techniques ranging fromprayer tocalisthenics, say some who have been released. It is likely, they add, that Jill Carroll has found her own way of braving her ordeal.

"You force yourself to remain positive, calm, and focused," says Micah Garen, a freelance American filmmaker held in Iraq by a Shiite Muslim group for 10 days in 2004. "Most people who go through something like this are surprised they can find the courage and dignity to cope."

There has been no news of Ms. Carroll's whereabouts since her kidnappers released a video 10 days ago showing her looking tired but unhurt. Her captors accompanied the video with a message implying they would kill her unless all female Iraqi prisoners in US custody were released within 72 hours. A reporter on assignment for the Monitor, Carroll was seized by unknown gunmen on Jan. 7. Her interpreter, Allan Enwiyah, was killed.

Each hostage's experience is personal and unique, so it's hard to deduce from their stories the conditions under which Carroll is being held.

But reporters who have undergone varying periods of captivity - in conditions ranging from thatched huts in jungle clearings where they were allowed to wander to cramped, dark cellars where they were kept chained and blindfolded - say they overcame bouts of fear and desperation by deliberate effort.

"I was always trying to be combative, to stand up to them [her kidnappers], not to be submissive but to be strong," recalls Giuliana Sgrena, an Italian journalist held hostage in Baghdad for a month in 2005.

Ms. Sgrena said her goal was "to keep my dignity. I was thinking of people who had resisted bad situations before me, people like Nelson Mandela," in prison for 27 years. "When he left he had a lot of dignity."

Comparing his situation with those even less fortunate also helped Roger Auque, a French reporter held in Lebanon by Hizbullah for a year in 1987. "I thought a lot about the people who were deported during World War II," he says. "It helped me be stronger, knowing others had suffered more than I."

Others say that they simply accepted their situation and clung to the hope that they would be freed. "I had no stratagems, no tricks," explains Florence Aubenas, a French reporter who was released in June 2005 after nearly six months in captivity. "You are simply obliged to put up with it, you have no choice."

Ms. Aubenas says she was fortified by a clear sense of why she had gone to Baghdad despite the risk of being kidnapped.

"I wasn't there for the glory, or more money, or because I had to be there," she says. "I went because dangerous places are the last places journalists should shut the door on.

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