Held hostage for six days in the Afghan mountains

by Dick Klees*

Dutch journalist Joanie de Rijke was held hostage in November last year in the Sorobi district of Afghanistan. She was there reporting on Taliban fighters who had ambushed and killed ten French soldiers. From the moment she was captured, she believed she would be killed: "I'm going to be beheaded" was her first thought. Her ideas did not change much.

She had travelled to Afghanistan to report for the Dutch weekly, Revu, and Belgium's P-magazine. She has written a book, Held by the Taliban [not currently available in English], about her experiences as a hostage. She was held for just six days but, to her, it seemed an eternity.

Joanie de Rijke "I couldn't be sure whether the ransom would be paid, which meant I didn't know what was going to happen to me. To break the constant tension, you have to talk to each other. The situation was very tense. The whole atmosphere was very tense. The commander, one moment he was friendly to me and the next moment he went mad because - I don't know - of some news he got, and then he threatened to kill me. So, there was always tension. And to break that tension, you had to talk and laugh a bit. It was a matter of surviving."

Merchandise

The journalist had planned to give the other side to the story of the Taliban. That is what made her assigngment dangerous. She arranged a meeting with a Taliban commander, with the aim of interviewing him, but he took her hostage instead. The Taliban fighters immediately saw her as prey, "merchandise" as she puts it.

"They wanted publicity: they were proud of having hacked the ten French commandos to pieces. They wanted the world to know all about it. The reason the Taliban let me interview them was that they wanted to show off what they had done. They were very proud that they had killed ten French paratroopers. Normally, they cannot match the power of the coalition troops. And they were very proud and wanted to show off to the world. And that was the reason they let me interview them."

Blonde

Ms de Rijke does not think she, a blonde woman, was taking unnecessary risks.

"Looking back, I can't blame myself for anything. I weighed the risks long and hard. As for my hair, it was always stuffed under a veil."

The fact that hostages' lives are totally dependent on those holding them is pivotal to their relationship with their captors. There's often even a bond between hostages and their captors because of that power balance. This was experienced by Ms de Rijke:

"I can't be angry with them, because they let me live."

Raped

She is very clear in her book about the way she was treated. She was raped. Despite this, she does not hate her abductors.

"It's not black and white. It was the commander who raped me. I wanted to give vent to my hatred, to chop his head off and kick it off the cliff. He was schizophrenic: the following day, he said he was sorry. In that sort of situation - no matter how awful - you develop a bond with those people. You have to, if you want to survive. You could say the hatred and that bond go side by side.

"Just let me make one thing clear: I hate him for what he did to me. I hate him because he raped me. I was very, very mad and I wanted to kill him right away. But the day after it happened, he more or less asked me to forgive him. That was very confusing for me. It was a very schizophrenic situation because he had mood swings. I just had to cope with that. Normally you can show that you are angry but I couldn't of course. I had to get on with them. I just couldn't say to this commander what I was really thinking because then he would have killed me right away."

Ms de Rijke says that she was nevertheless shown respect.

"These things can exist side by side. That doesn't mean that I'm suffering from Stockholm syndrome."

Here, she is referring to the condition in which the hostage feels sympathy for the hostage taker.

Ransomed

Her terrifying ordeal lasted less than a week. In the end, she has the ransom paid by her employer, De Vrije Pers in Antwerp, to thank for still being alive. She now literally knows how much she is worth: 137,000 dollars, about 100,000 euros. If her captors had kept to their original demand of one million dollars, no one likes to think what the result would have been...

* RNW translation (mw)