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Finding strength in forgiveness
Camilla Carr was held captive in Chechnya for more than a year. She talks to Pat Ashworth about forgiving her kidnappers
 Work of forgiveness: above: British charity workers Camilla Carr and Jon James |
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TEN YEARS after their release from captivity in Chechnya, Camilla Carr and Jonathan James have published the story of their kidnap and the 14 months of incarceration that followed. It is a harrowing account: Ms Carr suffered rape almost daily by one of her captors, and Mr James suffered the torment of being unable to intervene. The remarkable thing about the couple — who went to Grozny to work with children traumatised by war — is that even in the worst moments of their ordeal they managed to feel compassion for their captors, and to forgive them, not in retrospect, but as a survival technique in itself. Ms Carr writes: “I think our own prayers of love for our captors had the effect of changing the energy of a situation, perhaps even changing their mentality.” Neither Mr James nor Ms Carr follows a particular religion, although prayer was among the armoury of techniques that kept them going. Ms Carr describes the t’ai chi, yoga, qigong, Cherokee “dance of life” and “Zen way of looking at the world” as all tools of the mind to aid survival. Writing about the rape, she says: “I’m thinking that we always have a choice how to deal with every situation we face, and as much as possible I choose to find the positive within the negative. . . I ask for guidance, and feel powerful waves of energy pouring through my body, rejuvenating and cleansing.” Angry and weakened after months of assault, she succumbed to an infection and, at her lowest point, seized an opportunity to appeal to the man who was raping her, whom she and Mr James had christened Paunch. “I pray for help. Somehow Paunch has to understand what suffering he is causing. Let a miracle happen. And it does. . . I fumble through the dictionary. ‘No sex. No violence’. I point out the words. “His eye opens, and it looks like a light has been switched on in his mind. He apologises, saying that because I’m a ‘Western woman’, he thought I would not mind. Would not mind? What has created this type of thinking? Probably watching trashy American films and reading Russian pornographic magazines. Paunch never sexually harasses me again, and I forgive him, in his ignorance. At least he has had the courage to apologise, but I can never forgive the act of rape.” The couple endured frequent transfers to “safe” houses that ranged from an unlit concrete bunker and an overheated sauna to assorted bedrooms they grandly or ironically named the Pink Crystal Room or the King’s Chamber. Ms Carr had the misery of enduring menstruation in a culture where the subject is taboo to Chechen men: both she and Mr James endured rudimentary or non-existent sanitation, belladonna poisoning and other infections, along with the terrifying instability and fickleness of captors who were themselves damaged. Mr James suffered the mental torture of a mock execution.THE BOOK is illuminated with bizarre occurrences, surreal experiences, and small kindnesses. They describe bone-china cups, a fresh orange, a packet of washing powder, fried potatoes, and, one wonderful day, crystallised plums in syrup. Most surreal of all were the matching “His” and “Hers” towels they were given, each with a satin heart sewn into the corner. “Things like that appeal to me greatly,” she says. “I really love the surreal, and I didn’t want the book to be all dark.” |
 Ms Carr during a workshop at the Imperial War Museum | On the day of our interview, she has just finished an exhausting nine-day stint at the Imperial War Museum, where she has been running workshops as part of a project on survival tales. She is brightly dressed in striped leggings and emerald green clogs, and is barely recognisable from the grim pictures on the “proof of life” video that reached the world after the couple had been in captivity for a year. |
| Students in the museum atrium asked her to demonstrate one of the techniques she had used. She shows a simple “purification qigong” that visualises golden light slowly flowing through the fingertips and through the centre of the body, like sand through an egg-timer. She is supple and graceful, and the movement is fluid. “It’s using your own energy within your body, and giving you the power to think you can heal yourself. If you believe it you can also do it,” she says.
Writing the book in her head was a way of passing the time in captivity, and, although after their release publishers were eager for it, physical exhaustion, delays, and, later, illness in the form of cancer prevented that. “It’s now coming out because we’re both healthy, and can cope with talking again a lot about it,” she says.
I wonder if, as in the case of Terry Waite, she will always be identified with this single experience. Will she always be “Ms Carr, who survived a kidnap in Chechnya”?
“I guess it’s the most public thing that’s happened to me in my life; so I sense that that is what people will think straight away,” she says. “It doesn’t matter to me, really. Maybe it’s my raison d’être: we had to go through that experience and, again, we have a choice about how we deal with it afterwards.
“In a way I’ve woven it into my life; used it in different ways. I was very keen to make something creative and positive out of it; so I do talks and workshops in schools and that’s important to me. It’s a powerful message about conflict: that we don’t have to react in the same way that people react to us.” |
 Ms Carr and Mr James on their arrival in Grozny in May 1998 |
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The couple tell their story jointly in the book: Mr James’s passages are italicised to distinguish the two voices. As a practical and outdoor man, he found confinement hard. Even in the two months before the kidnap, Mr James found it frustrating that he and Ms Carr were accompanied everywhere by armed guards. “Just to be an ordinary prisoner would feel like luxury,” he says on one occasion.
There is an episode where Ms Carr and Mr James were asked to give a head massage to one of their captors, the mentally unstable HC. His hair was greasy and unkempt. Ms Carr writes, “I overcome my disgust at touching it, and massage his scalp and forehead, feeling enormous compassion and sadness. He thanks me quietly.” Mr James writes: “I channel as much love and healing as I can into this wounded being, asking his inner self to go a little more gently on us.”
Encouraging their captors to tell their stories enabled Ms Carr and Mr James to understand the depth of the men’s ignorance and the way they themselves had been traumatised by the Chechen situation. “Really important is reaching inside them to some place. . . You know they have the love as much as the fear and hate in them, but the sadness is so raw, they just couldn’t express their real emotions,” she says.
THE COUPLE married when they were released, and now live in Devon. They are part of the Forgiveness Project, a charitable organisation that explores forgiveness, reconciliation, and conflict resolution through human experience. Survivors’ stories, and in particular the powerful exhibition The F Word, help to open up dialogue and promote understanding.
“We’d already started our forgiveness project within captivity,” Ms Carr says. “Forgiveness is letting go. It’s a way of understanding. People have a very limited idea of forgiveness — it should be called something else perhaps.”
Love can “go through walls”; love, compassion, and understanding are the essence of all religions, she believes. In the book she writes: “As I grow older, I see the same teachings in all the religions I come across, only they are dressed in different clothes; some of these I wear more comfortably than others.”
She cannot teach people to forgive, she says: all she can do is tell her story and explain how it was for her. “I’d always stress that it’s worth going on the journey. You might feel unable to be with [the person you need to forgive], but I still believe in the power of talking to someone in your mind, and you can do that without them being there.
“In some very quiet space, just listen and see if you can hear words. Then, in your mind, say words you might not be able to say to their face. I have done this. It changes the situation when you meet the person again — quite strangely, it can work in a very subtle way.” |
 The pair photographed on their release after 14 months in captivity |
Mr James is now following his dream of eco-building, and Ms Carr is studying drama therapy, which she would like to use with traumatised and refugee children. She is also interested in working with soldiers on combat stress, but emphasises: “I think I’ll just see how my life unfolds. If it feels appropriate, if there’s a space.
“Words of my mother always come to mind. In the one letter that got through to us in captivity, she simply wrote, ‘All is well.’ That still makes me relax.”
The Sky is Always There by Camilla Carr and Jonathan James is published by Canterbury Press (£14.99 (CT Bookshop £13.50) 978-1-85311-856-2). To place an order for this book, email details to CT Bookshop |
