Hi Mattias (Editor In Chief Filter Magazine)
I hope you are fine. As you understand we will miss the deadline. We got some problems, but are now fine, our wounds are healing and we are strong. Our situation is and has been very interesting. Sooner or later we will be back and we will give you a call as soon as we can.
Best, Martin and Johan.
This note we wrote in prison to tell our editor that we would miss our deadline for the report about Ogaden, that we’d traveled to Ethiopia to write. We wanted to see how the ruthless pursuit of oil affected the population in the closed and conflict-ridden Ogaden region. The border to Ethiopia were crossed and five days later we were shot and bloody in the desert sand.
In our book – 438 days – you can follow the journey that our story took, right there in the desert. The new story came to be about lawlessness, propaganda and big politics. Basically, it’s exactly what we wanted to tell you from the start – but the depiction of oil was now more a story of ink. In prison, we met journalists and politicians who were convicted for not going along with the dictatorship.
John and Martin