by Jon Swain
I flew first to Paris. After a longish spell in the wilds of the East, there could be no more wonderful city to coax the exile back to Europe. The reunion with Jacqueline was magical. She threw her arms round me. The intervening sorrows dropped away and it was as it had always been. Spring had come to Paris; the city was bursting with light and love. Like young lovers, we wandered over the uneven cobbles, pausing every now and then for long, long kisses. There was so much to catch up on, not very much time in which to do it. One evening, we went back to the Rosebud, my favourite bar, for a sentimental drink. I had hardly sat at the bar when Gilles, the white-coated barman, leant across and gripped my hand like an old friend. ‘Comment va! Monsieur Jon? Ça fait bien longtemps, n’est ce pas?’ I felt humbled that Gilles had recognised me at all, after all my years abroad. It was gratifying to find that in that way the Parisian atmosphere had hardly changed in my absence.
After Paris, I did not feel the same joy of homecoming in London. In five years I had spent only a few weeks in England and felt utterly removed from it. I had been named 1975 Journalist of the Year for my coverage of Cambodia, the youngest person to receive the award. Edward Heath, the ex-prime minister made the presentation. Also recognised that year were two good friends, Martin Woollacott of the Guardian for international reporting, and John Edwards of the Daily Mail, who said of his life as a reporter ‘I’ve stood on so many doorsteps, I think of myself as a milk-bottle’. By contrast, I gave an incoherent little speech; the award evoked too many sad memories of a now distant war. It was nonetheless the highest accolade of the trade of journalism.
In the days that followed, I was homesick for the warm humanity of the streets of Asia; ennui weighed heavily on me and, as I joined the pressured throngs on the London Underground each day, I feared I would not get away again before I became tied down, crushed by what I dreaded most: a routine English existence. I did not want a settled life; in Indo-China I had grown accustomed to living on the edge of insecurity and it made me wary of the feel of permanence in London.
Before leaving Paris for London, I had explained to Jacqueline that we would soon be able to make up for all the lost time apart. What hollowness lay in those words, though I spoke them sincerely and directly. Out of the blue, in London, I was asked by the paper to carry out a reporting assignment behind the lines in Ethiopia. Since April, the Derg – Ethiopia’s military government – had been mobilising thousands of peasants, arming them with staves, axes and old-fashioned guns, and trucking them up to the border of the northern province of Eritrea to put down a rebellion there. My assignment was to cover the war from the rebel side.
I fell into the fatal trap of many foreign correspondents – not knowing how to turn down an assignment. The desire to cover stories is sometimes irresistibly powerful; this ruthlessness for ‘getting the story’ over and above all else, including love, has wrecked the personal lives of many colleagues; in my case, too, it was to have deep and lasting consequences.
After all the time apart, I had a genuine desire to be with Jacqueline; yet I obstinately felt as well that I wanted to satisfy my need to go to Ethiopia. It was a confusing time. Looking back, I suppose I wanted a change, but had not yet fathomed what that change should be. There was still a restlessness in my spirit, added to which I did not know how to say no to a challenge and the paper was insistent. Perhaps I was also feeling too insecure about my position on a famous newspaper to turn down such an important assignment, complex and dangerous though it was. I was carrying the burden of a much-coveted honour and feeling my way in a city I hardly knew, among unfamiliar colleagues with whom I had little in common. The impulse to go was strong. There was an irreconcilable conflict of interest in my life, another of those idiocies that had come to litter it.
In short, the same old demons plagued me. So I explained gently to Jacqueline that the assignment was a short one, for two or three weeks only, and afterwards we would be able to be together. I wanted to make things easy for her. I had hopes of us living together in Paris in the future. I tried to explain that the separations were peripheral to the core of our existence. What we had lived through together in Indo-China was the essential. It belonged uniquely to us and was strong enough to resist all barriers of time and place. She had been suffocated with grief when she left Indo-China. My return had begun to restore her joie de vivre and her face had an eager and expectant look once again. But now her expression saddened and she turned very quiet. I knew that I had hurt her. In the end she stifled her bitter disappointment, as she always had, and said she understood, though how could she? She promised to be supremely patient.
My talk of togetherness turned out to be another false dream. Hardly had I arrived in Ethiopia, when I was kidnapped by guerrillas. I was held captive in the desert for the next three months on suspicion of being an ‘imperialist spy’. In terms of human experience, I had faced a lot, but Ethiopia was the most dismal time in my life, worse than facing death on the muddy banks of the Mekong a year before. Even today I feel faintly sick as I relive the misery of my capture.
In the years following my captivity, the kidnapping of journalists became a vogue, especially in the Middle East. I was never in the dire situation of those who were held hostage and disappeared in the ‘Black Hole’ of Beirut in the 1980s to be released years later. But I have always felt a bond with them and a mutual understanding at having – briefly – faced a common, though lesser, fate. I look back on the whole distasteful interlude with weary bleakness and shudder at my decision to go.
However, Ethiopia was one of the few countries outside Asia which fascinated me; otherwise I would have been much more wary of going. It was the country of Rider Haggard, and of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. I had first come across it in a bizarre and romantic way while working for AFP in Paris some years before. Bill Smith, a distinguished Ghanaian who had once worked with Kwame Nkrumah before he was deposed and who was now on AFP’s Africa desk, entranced me with descriptions of the beauty of the Ethiopian women he had met in Addis Ababa while covering Organisation of African Unity (OAU) summits. One day, in Paris, one of those Ethiopians walked into the office. Bill introduced me to her. She was Tabotu Wolde Michael, a beautiful minor member of the deposed Ethiopian royal family. When I met her she was in Paris at a silky tongued French official’s invitation.
While accompanying President Georges Pompidou on his recent visit to Ethiopia, the official had spotted Tabotu at Addis Ababa’s television studios. She was more than just another beautiful nana to be bedded. She was intelligent, the first woman in Africa to be a television news presenter, yet she had never set foot outside the African continent. The Frenchman persuaded her to join a journalist-training scheme in Paris sponsored by the French government. His intentions were more lecherous than journalistic, as Tabotu found out soon enough; on her first day in Paris, he tried to put his hand up her skirt and from then on she kept her distance.
Tabotu was tall, olive-skinned, with tousled black hair – a wild but sophisticated beauty. We became friends. I remember taking her to dinner at La Coupole, where she walked through the crowded restaurant with the splendour of a princess. Her poise turned every male head and as she passed the diners fell silent.
I saw her again in Addis. She was now married and had just had her first baby. Otherwise, she was the same self-assured talkative Tabotu. Taking a risk, too, in those suspicion-ridden anti-Western days, for she invited me to dinner at home with her husband. I spent a few days in Addis, discreetly gathering as much information about the military situation as I could from diplomats and fellow-journalists. Then, sufficiently briefed, I headed north at the start of my assignment. As a precaution, I hid my Eritrean guerrilla accreditation under the carpet of my room – number 123 – at the Ras Hotel, together with a list of possibly compromising contacts. I fully expected to be back after four days. For all I know, nearly twenty years later the papers are still there.
On the third day, I was travelling in a decrepit Bedford bus through the n
orthern part of Tigre province, which, according to legend, was once the heart of the Queen of Sheba’s kingdom. All the way from Axum, the bus had been swaying perilously through a desolate landscape of bare, eroded mountains and huge granite rocks. It was top-heavy, overfilled with peasants and an indescribable collection of belongings stuffed into every nook and cranny. It seemed at times as if it would plunge over the side, as the driver, desperately manipulating wheel and gears, threw it round hairpin bends. The collective faith of the passengers must have kept it on the winding mountain road and by mid-morning, the roughest part of the journey was over. With Mkele, my destination, a couple of hours away, I nodded off to sleep.
My neighbour woke me. The bus had halted at a bend in the road. A group of armed men were running towards it across the open ground. I could not tell whether they were shiftas (Ethiopian bandits) or guerrillas fighting the military government. Whoever they were, they spelt trouble. I felt a spasm of fear, a feeling that I was once again standing on the edge, looking down into the yawning abyss of death.
They barked orders. The passengers got out of the bus. As we stepped down into the harsh sunlight, an Ethiopian who had been sitting next to me whispered: ‘Don’t worry. These are good people and will not harm you.’ I did not reply. As the only European, I was an inevitable target. At best, I would be taken prisoner. At worst, I would be shot. In the seconds that followed, I racked my brain for a solution. There was no way out. The passengers gathered sheepishly in a clearing by the side of the road. I mingled with them, summoning my courage to appear unconcerned. The gang leader looked us over. His eyes settled on me. He looked boyish, not much more than twenty. His AK47 rifle was pointing threateningly at my chest and in English called me over. Slowly, I moved towards him. As I stepped away from the safety of the crowd, and walked across the stony ground, the guns of his men, dark-faced, hostile and silent, followed me.
No one in the circle of passengers behind me moved or spoke. Their stillness was no security either. An almost unendurable mood of tension hung over them. Everyone was a silent onlooker to the possible killing of a foreigner. Standing in front of the guerrilla chief, I made a big effort and held out my hand. I looked into his eyes and introduced myself. There was a moment of hesitation; then he took my hand suspiciously in his. ‘We are fighters of the Tigre People’s Liberation Front,’ he said in excellent English. ‘We are going to hold you for questioning for two or three days.’
It was useless to protest or offer resistance. My friendly and unruffled manner in those first critical moments had done much to break the ice. I had disarmed the guerrillas, but my apprehension remained. As the wasted days stretched into wasted weeks of captivity, it never left me.
The guerrillas marched me away across rough country. We moved through the hot hills in a long line, the leader, Shawit, setting a cracking pace in his khaki shorts and sandals. I stumbled along in the middle, prodded with a rifle, a guerrilla at the back carrying my luggage.
That evening, the first of three months of captivity, we halted at a village. The peasants stared from the open doors of their rough stone huts. The children huddled together, afraid to approach the first European they had seen. There was no comfort in their dark faces, but no hostility either; only a shy curiosity.
Now the questioning began. The guerillas searched my body and my luggage, confiscating my passport and personal documents attesting to my being a staff correspondent of the Sunday Times. ‘How do we know these aren’t forged?’ one man, bearded like Che Guevara, asked. ‘We’re not racists. But we have to be careful of foreigners like you in this area. We know some of them are spies of imperialism employed by the CIA and British Intelligence to inform on us. If you’re innocent, you have nothing to fear.’
I protested vigorously – but politely – at being kidnapped, explaining why I was in this northern part of Tigre province not far from the border with Eritrea. I had been sent out specially from England by the Sunday Times to report on the progress of the peasant army sent to attack Eritrea, units of which were reportedly camped near the border. I explained that, hoping to see them, I had joined the local bus from Axum to Mkele. I sensed that they did not really believe my story. ‘If you really are a journalist,’ they finally said, ‘we’ll hear it on the BBC.’
In the event, it turned out that my assignment was already dead news. The great peasant march I had been sent to write about was over, destroyed two weeks earlier at Zalembesa, a boulder-strewn plain a day’s march from where I was. It had been a colossal slaughter, I gathered. The Ethiopian army had brought up the peasants in commandeered trucks and buses. It had issued them with flintlocks, ammunition, spears, staves and some food and told them that, once inside Eritrea, they could plunder, rape and steal. At dawn the guerrillas on the heights fired down onto the crowded camp with mortars, rockets and automatic rifles. The mass of barefooted tribesmen rose in an angry swarm and, taking up their weapons, swept forward. The Eritrean guns cut them down like swathes of corn under a sickle.
In a callous attempt to drive the rabble forward, the army behind opened fire on the fleeing remnants. By four in the afternoon, the plain was still. Guerrillas picked their way among the bodies of the dead and wounded, collecting weapons. ‘You could not see the ground. You could only see dead bodies,’ one said. For days afterwards, vultures pecked at the human flesh and hyenas gnawed on the bones. More than 1000 tribesmen were killed and hundreds were taken prisoner. The guerrillas’ superiority in weapons had turned a battle into a massacre.
We moved again at night. Under guard, I was marched through a region of huge boulders and giddying cliffs. At three in the morning I was bundled into a peasant hut and given a mattress. The guerrillas stretched out on the ground around me, rifles at their sides.
Lying on the dirty mattress, I grasped the reality of my captivity. I tried to imagine what was going on in the Sunday Times office in London. By now, surely, they would realise I was missing and raise the alarm. In due course, the bus passengers would be bound to report that a white man had been taken into the bush at gunpoint. With luck, the connection would be made. Before leaving Addis Ababa, I had told the British embassy I was travelling north and would be back four days later. So I was confident that, one way or another, word would get back that I had been kidnapped. I reasoned that my disappearance would be reported on the BBC World Service, which would convince the guerrillas of my bona fides and lead to my release. Until that moment, it was vital I develop a bond of trust with my captors so that they would find it morally repugnant to kill me. I was wretchedly aware that these guerrilla boys wielded the power of life and death over me, so I was determined not to become an encumbrance. I knew I was expendable, as are all prisoners of hard-pressed guerrilla forces in a war.
To keep up my spirits, I thought of the fall of Phnom Penh and of how Pran had so brilliantly saved us by talking the Khmer Rouge into releasing us. There, on the banks of the Mekong, he had established a human link with the murderous guerrillas and I resolved to do the same.
Before I closed my eyes that night, I thought with emotion and remorse of Jacqueline, waiting for me in a studio in the rue Serpente on the Left Bank. I was supposed to be a stable factor in her life and I had vanished without trace. I spent the most comfortless night of my existence.
I awoke at dawn to an unfamiliar world of braying donkeys, yapping dogs, a peasant family watching me with fierce excitement. Hordes of near-naked children stared open-mouthed as I emerged, and then scampered into their huts. The sharp eyes of the guerrillas were on me too, so I put on a big show of enthusiasm for this second day of my captivity that, inwardly, I did not feel. This place, a collection of stone hovels, deep inside a guerrilla-held zone, was to be my home for the first three days. A woman gave me a cup of hot sweet tea. I sat on the ground and drank it. Then the questioning began again. ‘Who are you? Why did you come to Tigre? Which political party do you belong to in England? What do you think of the Derg? Why does the British government suppo
rt it?’
My answers were noted on a piece of paper. There was no respite. In the intervals between the questions I played with the children. It was important, too, I felt, to build up confidence between myself and this family in whose home I was a prisoner. They would surely stop anything bad happening to me.
Perhaps my best friend at this time was a precocious little girl of nine. Her mother liked me too and worried about my well-being. Instead of injera, the local food, a pancake which you tore off in chunks in your hand and dipped into a community saucepan of spicy gravy which I found difficult to stomach, she found me some macaroni, a legacy of Italian colonialism. ‘Stay a while,’ she said, ‘and you can marry my daughter.’ Indignant, the child did not give it a second thought: ‘I don’t want to marry him. I want to marry a man who’s black like me,’ the child replied.
Only now did I appreciate how harsh the life of these peasants was. The nearest clinic and educational services were at least two days’ walk away; the nearest well three miles. I watched the women come back from it every day, bent double under the burden of their pitchers, and marvelled at their stamina.
Each family farmed a tiny plot of land. The soil was stony, the water scarce, and the farmers had to give half their grain to the church and the state. The only freedom these villagers had in their lives was to breed. Even then, one out of every three of their children died in infancy from disease or malnutrition. Little wonder that the guerrillas exercised such a strong influence over peasants who worked so exhaustingly hard. More than that, I did not comprehend how people could survive amid such want.
