"It had taken months of work persuading the rebels to agree to take me into Ethiopia's arid, mountainous north. All the while, I had monitored the rebels' radio, with its burst of AK-47 fire for a signature tune. There were reports of set-piece battles, with fantastic claims of casualties in the tens of thousands, and now Mengistu Haile Mariam's regime, four months after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, was imploding."
"A convoy formed, and from then on we moved mainly at night. By dawn, we halted and we rested, with the vehicles camouflaged under the spreading flat branches of a grove of acacia trees or among the rocks of a kopje."
"I already believed that the rebels' cause was worthy, and their story romantic. They were fighting to overthrow a tyrant, Mengistu Haile Mariam. A gang of ten students from Addis Ababa University had taken to the bush sixteen years before. They were inspired by Marx, the Black Panthers and Orde Wingate, the British guerrilla-warfare expert who had led the Second World War invasion against the Italian fascists in Abyssinia and restored the emperor to his throne ... Over time, the gang had swelled into a combined army of a hundred thousand, complete with commando and tank units."

"The city was a fragment of what it had been but the atmosphere was electric. The militias had liberated the nation not only from dictatorship but also from modern civilization. A Dionysian orgy of destruction was now taking place across Mogadishu in which everything was smashed within the space of hours:  priceless Muslim artefacts from the museum and the mosques, hospital equipment, factory plants, power cables, computers, libraries, telephone exchanges. The Somalis thoroughly enjoyed themselves and I got a contact high off them. On days like this in the news business I grew to understand how easy it must be for normally ordinary people to want to participate in riots and football match hooliganism."
"A queue of civilians was huddled at a roadblock before a group of rebels. As each person was waved through, another came forward and began uttering a litany of names ... people were reciting their clan family trees. The genealogies tumbled back generation after generation to a founding ancestor. It was like a DNA helix, or a fingerprint, or an encyclopedia of peace treaties and blood debts left to fester down the torrid centuries. I was thinking how poetic this idea was, when bang!, a gunman shot one of the civilians, who fell with blood gushing from his head and was pushed aside onto a heap of corpses. 'Wrong clan', said my flaming-haired friend. 'He should have borrowed the ancestors of friend."

"Serbs trying to argue why they had to murder Muslims would appeal to me as a European. 'We Europeans must defend ourselves against the East', they would say. Or: 'They breed so much faster than we Europeans. Unless we fight we will be overwhelmed'. The idea that I had anything in common with Serbs was frankly preposterous. Yet I identified with their plight on a level that was more profound than I liked. Was it that the job was getting to me? Had I become inured to suffering in Africa? Or was it due to an involuntary impulse, one that caused me great shame, that these were white people? Trapped in my skin, I was a stateless colonial, a freebooting hack. Was the Africa I missed my home, or was this Europe my home, or at least the only one I deserved?"

"We said farewell to our Tutsi escorts and made our way to the football stadium which was under UNAMIR guard. Hundreds of Tutsis were camped on the pitch, huddled beneath plastic sheeting slung over the goal posts. As we watched, mortar bombs rained down into the field, into the body of a Ghanaian UN soldier, into a family of Tutsis. Over at UNAMIR headquarters, it was sheer panic. The Hutu extremists had disarmed and then butchered ten Belgian blue helmets guarding the woman prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a Hutu who was murdered for being too moderate. She was Africa's second ever female prime minister. She was also pregnant. Her killers disembowelled her. UNAMIR headquarters had listened in on the walkie-talkie network as the European soldiers pleaded for help and screamed before they died too. Belgian forces  stayed long enough to evacuate the expatriates along with a French force that flew in for the job."

"Whenever I see a news headline to this day I half feel I should board the next flight into the heart of it. I'd love to get all charged up again and I could write the story with my eyes closed. I'm sure the sense that I'm missing out while others get in on a great story will never completely pass. I can turn on the radio years later and hear voices I knew back then and wonder how they can go on doing it. Are they brave professionals or numbed-out news junkies? The sight of people committing acts of unspeakable brutality against others fills a hole in some of us. The activity is made respectable by being paid a salary to do it, but there is a cost."
"And so several years later I am thirty-five and getting drunk with JC, a veteran  correspondent of the Middle East. JC drains his glass and flings open the lid of a big trunk stuffed with mementos, trophies and files. He rummages about and pulls out a single document. 'Look', he says, jabbing his finger at the page, a pay slip from his Spanish newspaper. It reads:
27 muertas ..............7,000 pesetas
38 muertas .............. 7.000 pesetas
However many dead there were, we still got paid the same. It wasn't about the money, but on the other hand we had sold part of our souls. Forgotten incidents of history become our unforgettable days. Our faraway readers threw out yesterday's papers and a decade later I look at my scrapbooks and understand that all the staccato newsbreaks, the hard news leads, my newsprint words yellowing with age are simply the tear sheets of my own memory."

The Zanzibar Chest, Aidan Hartley