Vincent Cochetel recounts a harrowing tale of torture and endurance

Professionally, it was a wonderful time for Vincent Cochetel. As the head of UNHCR’s office in the northern Caucasus region, Cochetel was trying to help tens of thousands of persons displaced by the conflict in Chechnya, Ossetia and Ingushetia and loving every minute.

“It was a fascinating melting pot of peoples, ideas and work,” he says. “In the morning you might meet a president to discuss strategy and a few hours later be splashing through the mud to help a destitute family.”

He was separated from his wife and two young daughters for the first time, and like many humanitarian workers disliked that part of the job. But he had been involved as a ‘militant activist’ on behalf of the downtrodden since he was eight years old when he had fasted for the safety of Spanish priests gaoled during the Franco regime and awaiting execution.

Gunmen come calling

The Caucasus region was already a dangerous place when Cochetel arrived and he was under no illusions. Like other organizations UNHCR hired armed guards and armored vehicles. In their daily routine, Cochetel and his colleagues used decoy cars and never followed a regular routine in an attempt to deceive would-be kidnappers or killers.

But as he unlocked the door to his seventh floor apartment in a crumbling Soviet-era tower block in the city of Vladikavkaz at 10 p.m. on the night of January 29, 1998 three gunmen, each armed with two pistols and their faces covered in heavy balaclavas, rushed from the darkness.

Cochetel was forced to kneel on the floor of his tiny kitchen, a gun jammed into his neck. “I was just waiting for the shot,” he said. “I remembered a scene from the movie The Killing Fields (set during the genocide in Cambodia) when people were being murdered and I thought I don’t want to die like that, like a dog.”

The Frenchman, who was born in the provincial city of Tours in 1961, was not executed as he expected, but for the next 317 days he was held prisoner in appalling conditions.

He was stuffed into the boot of a car for three days, was regularly beaten, manacled virtually the whole period of his imprisonment and underwent several mock executions. One attempt to free him in April, 1998 backfired at the last minute and for nine months he was kept in a series of cellars and saw natural daylight only once during that entire period.

He survived mostly on a thin gruel of hot water, occasionally spiced with a potato, carrot or onion. On one occasion he was given a chicken leg and the next day, in what his guards thought was a huge joke, the bare bone of the same chicken leg to eat. His captors told him he was being held for ransom, mentioning sums ranging from 1.5 to six million dollars.

Held in a car boot

His first days in captivity were almost his last. He was bundled into a car after leaving his apartment and one kidnapper “tried to knock me out by smashing his pistol into my neck. He had probably seen too many bad movies,” Cochetel said. He was then stuffed into the rear of the car for three days.

“I concentrated on breathing and not panicking and protecting myself from the cold,” he said recently. When he complained at one point that he was freezing in the sub-zero temperatures, his captors started the car engine but that attempt at would-be kindness backfired when Cochetel almost suffocated in the deadly fumes.

He was moved from North Ossetia to neighboring Chechnya and remembers that when he reached there, “it was the first time I had been to Chechnya and not feared being kidnapped. I was already kidnapped.”

He realized something else, too. His captivity would be a long one. “Other colleagues had been kidnapped and the average time they had been held was 3½ months,” he said. “I knew I had to be patient.”

During his first month in Chechnya he was interrogated at least 10 times, one hour a day. He adopted a survival routine. In the series of dank, dark cellars he would call home for 10 months he was always chained to his metal bed by handcuffs and a one meter long cable. That allowed him to walk exactly four steps. “I always dreamed of making that additional fifth step,” he said.

He exercised twice a day, 1½ hours each time, running in place, doing press ups and strengthening his stomach muscles. He was given a chunk of Georgian bread and would only eat it after exercising “as a reward to myself.” Even in the darkness, he deliberately established a routine, carefully putting on his glasses each ‘morning’ (he never knew whether it really was morning or the middle of the night) as an indication that his day ‘had started.’

He squatted for hours on his bed simply listening, to footsteps, to the birds in the morning and frogs at night.

He heard children going to school, and those times were among his worst moments. “The children became a symbol of everything I had lost and a symbol of the real world,” he said. “It was terribly depressing.”

There were other bad moments, too. Two of his guards at one point thanked him for the assistance UNHCR had provided when they were displaced persons. That seemingly kind remark sent him into a tailspin, leaving him wondering about the rationale for his humanitarian work.

In October last year, several young, drunk guards staged one of several mock executions, firing their weapons around his head.

“I broke down a couple of times, but never in front of them,” he said. “I did it under my blanket. My blanket was my hidden garden. At times there was a very thin line between being sane and being crazy.”

Escape attempts

He tried to unpick the lock of his handcuffs. “In the movies they do it in one minute. I pulled some wire from my mattress and it took me 15 days to open the cuffs, but I still couldn’t escape from the cellar.” On another occasion he tried to unpick the metal cable tying him to the bed. He was discovered on each occasion and beaten.

Cochetel’s release came amidst a blizzard of gunfire on December 12 last year. He was driven to a rendezvous, handcuffed and blindfolded, where he changed cars and captors.

Shooting erupted. One of Cochetel’s guards in the rear seat slumped over the prisoner, possibly dead. The Frenchman crawled or was pushed – he doesn’t remember – out of the vehicle and sheltered near its rear wheel. Shouts in Russian “Where is the hostage?” and “On the floor” mingled with the cacophony of machine-gun, pistol, rifle and grenade fire and shouts in the Chechen language.

He was eventually dragged and pushed into another vehicle and thrown on the floor where he felt a military helmet. “I knew then, for the first time, I was on the right side,” he said. His captors and Chechen fighters did not wear helmets. He had been rescued by Russian special forces, one of whom politely apologized, “I am sorry, I don’t have a key for your handcuffs.”

Cochetel, 23 kilograms lighter and sporting a huge black beard which he said had “acted as my calendar during my captivity,” was whisked to Moscow after a blizzard of celebratory vodkas with his rescuers and then on to Geneva for a short reunion with his family. There was one final bureaucratic hitch in Moscow. His flight home was delayed for more than two hours because he did not have an exit visa from Russia.

Four days before Cochetel’s release four foreign hostages had been brutally murdered in Chechnya and one of Cochetel’s first reactions after his release was guilt. “Why did I survive and other hostages didn’t?” he asks now. He was always a worrier, always planning ahead for the next work assignment or the next holiday. “Now I have learned that the future is the next hour.” He reads, watches a rerun of the world cup soccer final won by France, talks with friends (including former hostages) and finds the greatest pleasure in doing simple things such as taking his girls to school or standing in the rain.

But he continues to fight the demons of his captivity. He cannot go near an underground parking lot or into a cellar to pick out a good bottle of wine. He misses his three-hour daily workouts but says he needs to find “a different way to keep fit” and get rid of some accumulated violence.

Above all, he wants to fade from the international spotlight. “I want to become a full family man again with my wife, Florence and daughters Sarah and Salomé, and resume my work. I would like to become anonymous and get on with my life.”

Source: Refugees Magazine issue 114 (1999)