‘You Learn How Scared You Can Get,’ Ex-Abductee Recalls

Confined to a dark, chilly basement room, offered a nighttime trip to the latrine only every few days, forced to endure the nearby sounds of artillery with no hope of fleeing, American humanitarian aid worker Kenneth Gluck never was certain that he would emerge alive.

The 39-year-old official of Doctors Without Borders said he discovered something about himself during his nearly four weeks as a captive in January and February: “You learn how scared you can actually get.”

But he vowed Monday during an interview with The Times that the experience of being kidnapped at gunpoint will not deter him or his Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization from helping endangered people in Chechnya and other ignored corners of the globe.

“I think it is important for people to know what humanitarian action is,” said Gluck, speaking from New York in one of the first interviews he has granted to a newspaper since his release three weeks ago. “The idea of independent humanitarian action is something that needs support in the world.”

The abduction of Gluck was a small note in the ongoing tragedy of Chechnya, a war-torn republic in the Caucasus region of Russia where tens of thousands of people have perished and more than a third of a million have been left homeless in two devastating wars between the Russian army and Chechen separatists since late 1994.

Thousands of kidnappings have been reported in Chechnya in the past decade. Many foreigners have been among the victims, although the rate of kidnapping is believed to have diminished since Russian troops entered Chechnya in September 1999 in the second phase of the conflict. Gluck was the first prominent American to be taken since Frederick C. Cuny, a well-known disaster-relief specialist who is believed to have been killed after being abducted in March 1995. His body has never been found.

Still struggling to understand who kidnapped him and why, Gluck has been in New York, catching up on his sleep, spending time with his parents and brother, and preparing to assume a new post in Amsterdam with Doctors Without Borders.

He declined to add to the speculation over whether his mysterious abductors were Russian agents, Chechen rebels or freelance criminals. He said his main concern now is that assistance suspended since his abduction be resumed as quickly as possible.

“We know that the humanitarian situation is still very bad. We know that some of the hospitals where we were working were really just marginally surviving,” he said.

Gluck had just completed a visit to a hospital in the Grozny suburb of Stariye Atagi on the afternoon of Jan. 9 and was traveling as part of a four-vehicle convoy heading back to his office in Nazran, Ingushetia, when the road was blocked by an unmarked car filled with gunmen. They seized him, firing shots into the air and at the wheels of the vehicles.

“I was certainly scared, I was certainly in fear of my life. But they seemed to try not to hurt anybody,” Gluck recalled.

The kidnappers seemed to be going straight for him, Gluck said, but on the other hand, one of the first things they did after covering his head and speeding away was to ask him who he was. They also confiscated his documents--including his two permits from Russian military authorities allowing him to work in Chechnya, he said.

They might have driven for an hour, he estimated. “When you’re blindfolded, you can’t see and you’re very scared. It is very hard to figure out,” he said. “Your sense of time is a little bit warped by the fear and the disorientation.”

Gluck spent most of his captivity in a house on a street where he could hear traffic moving outside and occasionally people shouting. At night, he was kept awake by his own anxiety and by the sounds of artillery nearby. He thought of trying to escape but never acted.

His one diversion was a 700-page tome on the history of the Arab people that he’d had with him when he was seized. “That book was a lifesaver . . . more important than medicines,” he said.

His cell was a small, locked basement room, kept perpetually dark, and his keeper was a man who fed him a diet consisting mostly of bread and soup, brought him a pitcher of water with which Gluck could wet his scalp every day or so, and heard Gluck’s repeated pleas to be let go.

The captor, who conversed with Gluck in Russian but never said his name, was not gruff. “He was generally fairly helpful--concerned about my health, concerned that I had enough to eat and so on,” Gluck said.

“Once every couple of days I was walked out to a latrine in the middle of the night. It was pretty much pitch black there. . . . Other than that, there was just a bucket in the house,” he said.

“When it was cold outside I was cold; when it was warm outside I was OK. But nothing terrible. . . . Compared to hostages that have been in the region, I was lucky,” said Gluck, alluding to the beatings, rapes, tortures, mutilations and killings that have been the reported fate of other kidnap victims in Chechnya in recent years.

Gluck said he felt his situation begin to improve after the first or second week. “They began to be reassuring. They’d say, ‘Look, we swear you are going home, don’t worry, you’re definitely going home, unhurt.’ . . . I think they were getting the message by then from somewhere.”

The “somewhere,” Gluck likes to think, was from his friends in the medical community in Chechnya--putting out the word as widely and broadly as possible that Gluck should not be harmed because of who he was and what his abduction could mean for the continuance of humanitarian aid.

But still he did not really believe he was safe one night when he was put in a car, again blindfolded, and during the ride was handed back his documents.

“I had been asking the kidnappers all along. I just said, ‘Return me to any hospital and they will make sure I get back safely.’ . . . I said any hospital or any head doctor--they all know me. . . . So they did--pushing me through the gate in the middle of the night of a surgeon whom we knew.”

Still blindfolded, a nervous Gluck heard a challenging voice asking him in Russian, “Kto ty takoy?” or “Who are you?”

“I did not know what to answer, and eventually he reached over and picked up my mask and that was a real joyous moment, seeing it was an old friend, someone who I had worked with, and he was just as shocked” as I was, Gluck said.

Gluck was back in Stariye Atagi, the same village from which he had been kidnapped, but this time he was free.

“I don’t like hanging around in basements for long periods of time,” he said wryly. “I probably knew that before, but I know it a lot better now.”