My hapless African rebel

A funny thing happened on my way to civil war in Ethiopia -- I met Reagan, and I would never see guerrilla rebels the same way again.

By Nick Wadhams

Read more: Politics, News, Africa

June 16, 2007 | My low-boil panic began in January, two weeks before I planned to travel to Ethiopia and write some stories that I fancied would expose the human rights' abuses and true, nasty nature of America's stalwart ally in Africa. I had just quit my job at the Associated Press and moved to Nairobi, Kenya. After eight years of reporting in Russia, Denver and at the United Nations, I wanted to focus on the continent to which most of the world turned a nonchalant eye. I had won a grant with my wife, Zoe, also a journalist, to begin in Ethiopia.

Terrified that we would land in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital, without anyone to meet, I pumped everyone I knew for contacts. A fellow journalist passed me the e-mail address of an Ethiopian she once interviewed. She described the man, incongruously named Reagan, an ethnic Somali, as a critic of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi's regime.

My friend had met Reagan in an Addis Ababa cafe, where she had gone to gather quotes for her own story about Ethiopians' dissatisfaction with their government. Nobody in the cafe would talk to her -- they were frightened of a foreign reporter -- until Reagan approached and gladly offered to speak to her. That should have been a sign. But I was desperate. At most, I figured I would get in, get a little advice, get out and never see him again.

It didn't turn out that way. This bizarre man would be my introduction to the miasma of conspiracy and paranoia at the heart of the Ethiopian government's war with its own people. He would reveal to me a rebel group that has been both deadly and comically hapless.

I e-mailed Reagan and explained that I wanted to visit the eastern region of Ogaden, near the border with Somalia, where Reagan was from. I wanted to meet members of the Ogaden National Liberation Front. The Ogaden is technically a part of Ethiopia, but its people are ethnic Somalis. The Ogaden rebel group wants unity neither with Ethiopia nor Somalia. It wants independence for a barren waste of scrubland, which is said to sit on massive oil reserves but whose dominant inhabitants are camels and the nomads who herd them.

My story had gained a certain urgency when Ethiopia invaded Somalia on Christmas Eve. Some said it was a U.S.-style preemptive strike to head off possible acts of terror, and a repeat of the 1977-78 war, in which Somalia invaded Ethiopia and ended up wrecking its own military in the process.

Prime Minister Meles used the specter of the ONLF as one of his excuses for invading Somalia. Much later, the ONLF demonstrated how active it had become by killing more than 70 people, including several Chinese oil workers, at a facility in Ogaden. But now the rebel group was obscure to me, just one of the many rebel groups harassing Meles' flanks.

Reagan fired off two e-mails in quick succession.

A Yahoo! account, some bad grammar and a dollop of intrigue. If only Reagan knew how masterfully he had set the bait for me. His only flaw seemed to be a somewhat hazy grasp of minor details. He sent me many more e-mails asking when I would arrive in Addis Ababa or if I was already there. I attributed his incessant queries to his shoddy English.

After much negotiation and several more e-mails, I arranged my first encounter with Reagan at my Addis Ababa hotel. As I sat in the lobby, a young man came in, looked right at me and went to the front desk. That can't possibly be Reagan, I thought. This guy was tall and dressed in a black business suit. He walked with a man's purposeful gait but his face was that of a child.

The Reagan in my mind had gravitas, like the couple of other Ethiopian intellectuals and dissidents I had interviewed during my first 24 hours in the country. This guy swaggered in the manner of a hungry young seaman loading cannons on the lower decks of a man-of-war.

I heard him ask for me at the desk. The receptionist nodded coolly in my direction.

The receptionist and I were old pals. We had just squabbled about acquiring a SIM card for my cellphone. In Ethiopia, foreigners can't just go and buy a SIM card. Cellphones are considered potentially dangerous weapons if placed in the wrong hands. In 2005, the government had banned text messages, an edict that remains in effect because Meles says he believes his opponents will use SMS (Short Message Service) to incite genocide.

Buying a cellphone in Ethiopia requires that you pay someone in a position of authority to get one for you. That meant getting a hotel staffer to go wait in line for a couple of hours at the local telecommunications office.

"How long you are staying in Ethiopia?" the receptionist had asked me earlier that day.

"Not sure. Maybe a few weeks."

"OK, so when you leave, you give us SIM card, right?"

"Umm ... why? I'm buying the SIM card."

"Yes, but when you leave Ethiopia you don't need SIM card anymore. It shut down after three weeks if you not use. So you give us."

"I'll sell it to you, but I'm not just going to give you something I paid $50 for."

"But you are leaving Ethiopia. You no use SIM card anymore. You give us."

The man approached me and smiled. Reagan. I looked him over. He was young, around 30, terribly thin, with buck teeth that emerged when he smiled as if his lips were retreating in fear of being torn to ribbons. His black hair was close-cropped but thick. His suit and faux-leather shoes suggested that he did not live in poverty.

Reagan was also extremely jittery, so much so that his eyes looked ready to roll back in his head. This was not just from the common fear nurtured by the Ethiopian police state. Those teeth of his bore the rusty stains of habitual use of khat, a leafy stimulant that, when chewed, creates a mildly transcendental state you might think you'd get after chugging 35 cups of coffee. Because it was about 3 p.m., just the time for khat, I gathered that he was well within its thrall.

Reagan shook my hand and suggested that we leave the hotel. It was frequented by foreigners and the Ethiopian security apparatus might be listening. A more private place was just around the corner. "Around the corner" is different for a nomad than for your average American. An hourlong walk later, we arrived at the Lalibella, a new hotel whose decorators had managed to evoke 1970s-era Soviet apartment block chic. We chose a corner table and sat down. Reagan ordered a gargantuan plate of spaghetti but picked at it like a man who had long ago become accustomed to very small meals.

Next page: Feeling paranoid, I decided to dig into Reagan's past