The Extraordinary Story: “I was a war reporter in Ethiopia. Then I became the enemy”
Why was The Economist’s correspondent expelled from the country?
The Extraordinary Story Long reads and life from 1843 magazine, delivered every Sunday | | |
Last July, I travelled to Amhara hoping to interview soldiers wounded in Ethiopia’s civil war in the northern region of Tigray. I was accompanied by a young Ethiopian journalist, who was also translating for me. A group of federal police officers stopped us outside a hospital and threw us in the back of an open-top jeep. While the vehicle wound its way toward a police station, four or five officers stood over us as we knelt or sat on our haunches. Bystanders jeered from both sides of the street. The man driving the car behind us stared at me, then made a gesture of slitting his throat. When the police started beating us, my Ethiopian colleague got the worst of it: his mouth filled with blood from the blows. I was hit in the head at least twice with a rifle butt. I made a pleading motion for the officers to stop; they laughed. That was a turning point for me. In the grips of civil war, an already brutal authoritarian regime was taking a darker turn. Anyone could become the enemy. Including me. | | | |
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