Resentment is rife at the end of the earth

Devotees of extreme tourism are drawn to such desolate beauty. Its first white visitor was the late Wilfred Thesiger - perhaps the world's last great explorer - who mounted an expedition to the area in the 1930s. His legendary sang-froid was challenged by a distinctive earring worn by his local Danakil scout - a sign that he had killed 10 men. Not content with murdering strangers, they would also castrate them, collecting the severed genitalia as trophies. Being drawn to savagery, Thesiger attributed this symbolic show of virility to a sort of extreme Darwinism whereby only the fittest can survive in such a hostile climate. Today's visitors generally receive a more hospitable welcome from the local tribesmen, who regard them as a useful source of income beyond camel-herding and salt-trading.

Just why a group of armed men descended on the compound in Hamedela last Thursday and kidnapped at gunpoint the two women and three men remains unclear. My own brief experience as a hostage in the Horn of Africa suggests we may never know the whole story. Truth is often an early casualty in countries where communication is poor, the press bridled and deviousness regarded as a virtue.

It may or may not be relevant that the party was staying close to the border with Eritrea. Long before this former province of Ethiopia finally broke away in 1993, I inquired of a foreign student in Byres Road whether he was Ethiopian. "No, lady, I am Eritrean," was his curt reply. Like Ethiopia, Eritrea is part-Muslim, part-Christian but its culture and the architecture of the capital, Asmara, owe much to its former Italian colonial rulers. And despite their abject poverty, Eritreans are fiercely independent. Following forced annexation by Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie in 1962, a civil war lasting more than three decades drained both sides of manpower and desperately needed resources, leaving a still unresolved border dispute and two countries both dependent on food aid. But while Ethiopia's infant mortality (at one time 25%) is falling and literacy rising, Eritrea's development has stalled. This is a source of smouldering resentment in the region for which the British kidnap victims may be paying the price.

Some of this resentment is justified because, regardless of ample evidence to the contrary, for far too long the west, and the US in particular, simplistically has regarded Meles Zenawi's Ethiopian government as "the good guys" of the Horn and everyone else as dangerous militants or basket cases. This view has been reflected in the vast quantity of aid that has flowed into Ethiopia since Mengistu Haile Miriam's venal and ineffectual Marxist junta was finally toppled in 1991. By chance, I was in Addis Ababa on the eve of the coup. Nobody had a good word for Mengistu, who had emptied the treasury with disastrous Soviet-inspired economic policies and enervating military campaigns, and looked the other way as around one million of his people died in a famine that left the word Ethiopia synonymous with a skeletal child.

When I arrived in the capital, a giant sign atop an office block in Revolution Square proclaimed: "Long Live Socialism." By the time I left a fortnight later, it had been replaced by the Mercedes-Benz logo. Here was a country in transition all right but where was it going? In the early years, faith in the Zenawi government looked justified. A former Marxist-Leninist, he became a champion of parliamentary democracy and free-market economics. There was progress in health, education and economic development. There was even heady talk of the country's agri-economy one day feeding Ethiopia's burgeoning population (currently 75 million and rising by two million a year).

Zenawi was a shoo-in for Tony Blair's Africa Commission. But the resounding referendum result that swept Eritrea to independence in 1993, leaving Ethiopia landlocked, raised fears that the country faced disintegration, with the Oromo and the Tigrayans following suit. In recent years, dissidents alleged to have links with breakaway groups have disappeared. Independent newspapers and critical websites have been forced to close and mobile-phone networks are perpetually plagued by "technical difficulties". There are serious doubts about the conduct of elections that gave Zenawi a third term in 2005. Meanwhile, throughout sub-Saharan Africa, grotesque poverty provides an ideal recruiting ground for a new generation of suicide bombers on a scale that could dwarf the current bloodletting in the Middle East.

This leaves the west stuck with a dilemma in the Horn. While Congress and Britain's International Development Secretary, Hilary Benn, decry Zenawi's human rights record, the Ethiopian Prime Minister has been playing his trump card by posing as George Bush's number one African ally in the "war on terror". Like American encouragement of Israel's war against Hizbollah in Lebanon last summer, Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia in December to oust the Islamist militants who had taken over Mogadishu, was enthusiastically backed by the Pentagon. And who was backing the Islamists? In all probability, Eritrea, which takes us back to Afar.

I still flinch on hearing about British hostages disappearing in the Horn of Africa because in February 1994, that's what happened to me during a fact-finding mission to northern Somalia, formerly British Somaliland. Caught far from our base at night by a posse of armed men, who spoke no English, first came the sickening realisation that we were pawns in a game in which we had no control over the moves or the rules. Which game?

Like the captives in Afar, we were in the dark. Were they simply bandits looking for money, valuables or ransom money? Or was this a serious attempt by a radical Islamic group to destabilise the government? The Eritrean army has been implicated in the latest abductions but in the saga of African tribal and ethnic politics, there are many subplots. In our case, we seemed to have landed a walk-on role in one of them but we never really got to the bottom of it. It may be the same for these captives. A gun pointed at your head has a powerful concentrating effect on the mind. I prayed silently and fervently.

Having decided politeness might pay, we shared our boiled sweets with our captors. A certain grim humour developed. "We should have brought the Scrabble," someone ventured. "We may be here long enough to make our own set," came the reply. Then a brooding silence descended. In the event, our ordeal ended the following day with a shoot-out in which, more by luck than judgment, nobody was hurt. We must wish the captives of Afar a similarly happy return from the end of the world.