PARIS, FRANCE (ANS) -- Ingrid Betancourt, the French Colombian Presidential political candidate who was held captive by FARC guerillas for more than six years, recently reflected on her captivity and the role that her faith played in helping her to cope.

Ingrid Betancourt with Alan Johnston in Paris (photo via BBC website)

She revealed her thoughts in an interview with Alan Johnston of the BBC, who was himself held captive four months last year in Gaza by a group called the Army of Islam.

While Johnston waited to meet Betancourt in a room overlooking the banks of the Seine, in Paris's famous old city hall, the Hotel de Ville, he compared their experiences.

He says he considered the length of their captivity and the conditions under which they were held. He recalled how in their very different prisons, half a world apart, their guards gave them both battered old radios.

"Through the BBC's broadcasts, in my cell, I had followed Ingrid's story. And later I learned that, in her jungle hideout, she had followed mine," Johnston writes on the BBC website.

"When Ingrid opened the door in Paris and walked in we embraced, and then sat down and began to talk -- one kidnap victim to another.

"Almost straight away I told her that of course my experience could hardly be compared to hers. I was freed in less than four months, and she was forced to endure all those years under much harsher conditions."

But they also differed in one major way.

"I am grateful to the many people who I know were kind enough to pray for me when I was lost in Gaza. But actually, I was not praying myself," Johnston said.

"I would hear on the radio of war and bloodshed in places like DR Congo, and I felt that if God was not intervening to spare the innocent there, I could not see quite why He might intervene for me."

Johnston said he struggles to believe that God closely manages our individual lives.

But Ingrid's faith seems to have been a huge factor in her survival, he said.

"She said that I had simply not asked the right questions about God, and that it was our connection with Him that made us human. He was not creating the ills of the world, she said. Mankind had been given free will, and it was to blame. She said that not to believe, and to be cynical, was to take the easy path in life."

Betancourt talked too of forgiveness, Johnston said.

She was forgiving her captors, she said. "With some of them it was easy, but with others that was not the case," Johnston writes.

"She spent huge amounts of time in chains, and when I mentioned the noise that they make when you move, tears came to her eyes again. Some things, she said, she was not ready to talk about.

"And of whatever physical abuse she may have suffered she said: 'I have thought lots about all of this, and I've decided that there are things that will never be brought to the surface -- that have to stay in the jungle.'"

But she was delighted to remember that moment when the Colombian army managed to set her free, Johnston said she recalled.

"Oh my God! I tell you, it was a physical reaction! It was a physical sensation and it was so overwhelming that I screamed!"

It was "a long, long, long scream," Betancourt said.

Johnston asked Betancpurt what she had learned about human nature in captivity.

"I learned everything about human nature," she said. "I learned for example how weak we are in front of group pressure -- how we can even see people saying exactly the opposite of what they feel because they are afraid."

Johnston said he remembered his time in Gaza mostly as a vast psychological battle. It was a constant effort to try, as he used to say to myself, to keep his mind in the right place.

Betancourt has talked of the same struggle as being the fight to keep her "head above water."

Johnston said that it seemed that for both of them there was a critical point at which they accepted that they might not be freed for a very long time. Then they tried to adapt psychologically to that dreadful reality.

"Once I admitted that I was there for a long time, then I began to look at my surroundings in another way," Betancourt said. "Like, 'this is my world and I'm going to be here for a long time'."

Then, they agreed, came the fight to try to hold on to their self-respect.

"I told her I used to think to myself that one day my kidnapping might end, and that I must attempt to do my best -- if at all possible -- not to behave in a way that I would be ashamed of late," Johnston said.

"Yes!" she replied. "That's the point, that was exactly…That was always my perspective.

"I wanted to think, one day I will see this like my past and I don't want to be ashamed and I don't want my children to be ashamed of me. That was very important."

** Michael Ireland, Chief Correspondent of ANS, is an international British freelance journalist who was formerly a reporter with a London (United Kingdom) newspaper and has been a frequent contributor to UCB Europe, a British Christian radio station. Michael has traveled to Albania and the former Yugoslavia, Holland, Germany and the former Czechoslovakia, Israel,and Canada. He has reported for ANS from Jordan, China, Russia, Jamaica, Mexico, and Nicaragua. Michael's involvement with ASSIST News Service is a sponsored ministry department -- Michael Ireland Media Missionary (MIMM) -- of A.C.T. International at: Artists in Christian Testimony (A.C.T.) International.