The politics of homelessness

...ETHIOPIA, of course took umbrage at this final statement, as it does with most Somali pronouncements and vice versa...

...With 300,000 troops, Ethiopia can boast of having the largest army in black Africa, one-third of which is deployed in the Ogaden...

...The British and Italian portions were welded together, but the French colony at the port of Djibouti, a sizable chunk of northeastern Kenya, and the Ogaden were missing...

...also for the time when they might return to their traditional lives as free-ranging nomads or independent small farmers in the most remote regions of the Horn of Africa, scrub-brush territories in easternmost Ethiopia and westernmost Somalia that have gained political significance because they are sliced by the disputed border dividing the two countries...

...Behind these alignments and the bitter politicking are the refugees, still waiting...

...Before the convening of the OAU, there had been persistent rumors in diplomatic circles that negotiations might be in the offing...

...The Soviet Union has poured $2 billion worth of armaments into Ethiopia, formerly a staunch American client state, and the United States has pledged Somalia, the erstwhile Soviet ally, $40 million worth of theoretically defensive arms...

...A crucial element to a political settlement, he continued, would be the "removal of external forces from the Horn of Africa," a reference to Cuban forces garrisoned in Ethiopia, the bulk of them in the Ogaden, as part of the Soviet Union's military assistance package...

...Djibouti opted in an internal referendum to become an independent nation, the Kenyan army was too strong to risk attacking and so the Ogaden was left as the principal basis of Somalia's dream of regaining the "lost territories...

...Ethiopian officials chronically argue that the 15,000 Cuban troops would never have been called for if Somalia had not made it necessary by attacking the Ogaden in the first place...

...They are waiting HELEN winternitz is on the staff of the Baltimore Sun...

...Somalia has concentrated the best of its relatively ragtag forces on the opposite side of the border, where in previous centuries no demarcation existed and nomads crossed freely in search of seasonal pasturage for their herds of camels, cattle, and goats...

...Ethiopia was in turmoil as civilian leftists and the Marxist military group that managed the 1974 overthrow of the old emperorship battled for control of the government...

...At the same time, the United States quietly implied that Somalia could expect some military backing if it attacked the post-revolution Ethiopian regime, which was from the American point of view espousing increasingly unpalatable radical ideologies...

...The woman said she had been three years in the camp, living in a stick hut furnished with a few blackened pots, a dirty blanket and some matting, one of the thousands of such huts threaded by dusty pathways and unrelieved by trees, grass, or any vista other than the plains.ista other than the plains...

...The war ended in 1978 with the rout of the Somali army and resulted in the first influx of refugees seeking asylum from the destruction of livestock and villages that accompanied the fighting...

...At its June meeting in Nairobi, the OAU resolved that the Ogaden is "an integral part" of Ethiopia, in accordance with the organization's policy that old colonial boundaries must be respected in order to prevent chaos throughout the African continent...

...Major General Siad Barre, president of Somalia's military government, has insisted that the refugees cannot return to the Ogaden until peace reigns there, meaning until Ethiopia takes the implausible step of granting self-determination to the indi-genuous Somali peoples there...

...The biggest problem here is the future of the refugees," said Ernst Reinhardt, a Swiss disaster relief official who was in charge of administering a conglomeration of eight refugee camps that sprawl along a solitary stretch of the Juba River about forty miles from where the watercourse crosses the border and then cuts eastward across an expanse of plains vegetated by nothing more lush than a dozen varieties of thorn trees...

...The soldiers of both sides, ironically, carry identical Soviet-made Kalashnikov combat rifles supplied to each during their alliances with Moscow...

...Meanwhile, Somalia and Ethiopia persist with their arguments over the refugees and over who is to blame...

...Many of these people whom they claim are refugees were forced to go with the Somali army when it withdrew over the border...

...Even as the pledges were being announced, Jama Mohamed Ghalib, Somalia's chief delegate to the conference and Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, scored the donors for having "chosen the less controversial path of treating the sick rather than trying to prevent the disease" and having "not seriously faced the challenge-to find a political solution to this problem...

...About half a million people subsist in these camps now, waiting for ration days when their free food is doled out...

...Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile-Mariam, chairman of the Dergue, Ethiopia's ruling military council, has placed paramount importance upon squashing the WSLF and other secessionist groups, including the Eritrean and Tigrean movements in the north...

...The Soviet Union responded with arms and Cubans to an appeal for military help at the outset of the war when Ethiopia was being trounced by Somalia and it was this outside assis- . tance that enabled the Ethiopian army to turn around the losing war...

...In the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, Tarah's counterpart had other things to say...

...The Ethiopians are trying to depopulate the Ogaden of Somalis," said Abdi M. Tarah, Somalia's Extraordinary Commissioner for Refugees, during an interview at his office in the capital of Mogadishu...

...She is currently traveling in Africa on a Pulitzer Fellowship...

...The international community also took some harsh criticism last spring at a United Nations conference convened to garner pledges of financial assistance for African refugees...

...Admittedly, it would take a lot of pressure to bring peace to the Horn...

...We never knew that the Somalis were able to tell such big lies," said Shimelis Adougnas, commissioner) of the Ethiopian Relief and Rehabilitation Commission...

...A HALF MILLION CAUGHT BETWEEN ETHIOPIA & SOMALIA The politics of homelessness HELEN WINTERNITZ IT HAS BEEN four years since the first refugees began trickling and then flooding into relief camps in the arid and inhospitable hinterlands of Somalia...

...Among the victims of the mined roads in recent months were two trucks carrying food supplies to Ethiopian government relief settlements...

...According to various estimates, Ethiopia lays out from thirty percent to more than fifty percent of its annual budget for the military and Somalia upwards of forty percent...

...The United States did not come through in the end, Somalia suffered an utter defeat, and President Barre was forced to back off from his policy of annexing the Ogaden...

...The world must recognize this injustice...

...The United States also has provided Somalia many more millions in relief assistance for the refugees...

...Somali soldiers shed of their regulation uniforms look and talk like Somali guerrillas...

...They have destroyed villages, poisoned wells, killed the livestock, and made these people flee because they are Somalis...

...Somalia, however, continues to support the Western Somali Liberation Front, a guerrilla organization fighting to liberate the region from Ethiopian control and keeping up a low-level harassment by ambushing Ethiopian troops and mining roads...

...Nor can the refugees settle permanently in Somalia, according to the government's stance, because the country has not sufficient resources to support them and, more importantly, because the Ogaden is their rightful homeland...

...Also many, many of them are people who have been suffering from droughts, so they go to the camps in Somalia where they can get free food...

...I want to go back," said an elderly woman in one of the camps on the Juba, "because my home was beautiful because I had my family there and my animals there and I could live like a person...

...Whether the weapons will be used solely for defense remains to be seen, since there is an easy exchange between the regular Somali army and the WSLF...

...When present day Somalia gained its independence in 1960-the northern half created from former British Somaliland and the southern half from former Italian Somalia-it adopted a flag flaunting a five-pointed white star at its center to symbolize the "pan-Somalia" goal of uniting all five of the Somali-inhabited territories that had been divided during the colonial era...

...They can't just continue to sit here and rot, with nothing to do and no place to go," he said...

...The longstanding Ethiopian-Somali enmity has been buttressed by the Soviet Union and the United States, which have played a game of superpower musical chairs with their alliances in the Horn and abetted the conflict rather than pressuring for a settlement...

...After the Soviets began airlifting armaments to Ethiopia during the war, Somalia broke off its treaty of friendship with the Russians and expelled them from their military base at the Red Sea port of Berbera...

...Neither of the superpowers has invested any military or economic brawn in ending the dispute, which keeps both countries on the Horn in edgy fear of one another and anxious not to lose the might of their respective foreign backers...

...The airlift from Libya to SSF bases in the Ogaden was halted after the Sudan protested that the overhead flights were a violation of its airspace...

...But Ethiopia's radical military government, which has become the Soviet Union's most important African ally, has seen all its economic aid from the United States cut off and is getting only about $7 million annually in American humanitarian aid, a relative pittance when it comes to international-scale relief donations...

...In 1977, the Ogaden became a tempting possibility...

...But just as the arid plains of these regions seem to stretch endlessly, to the horizon and beyond, so too there appears no end in sight to the political conflicts and maneuverings at the root of the refugees' plight, Somalia and Ethiopia remain bitter enemies after the all-out war that began in 1977 with a cross-border invasion of Ethiopia's Ogaden region by Somalia, which for decades has coveted the region populated largely by nomads of Somali lineage whom it believes were unjustly made Ethiopian subjects under a colonial agreement at the turn of the century...

...The donor countries there pledged a whopping $560 million for African refugees, the largest portion of them in Somalia, a sum that included a promise of $285 million from the United States...

...Soviet arms also have been flowing into the Ogaden via Libya, which earlier this year was airlifting weapons to the Somali Salvation Front, an organization of supposed Somali dissidents that the Ethiopian government has nurtured as a way of conducting cross-border raids against Somalia...

...The Somalis immediately rejected this conclusion and then the Ethiopians scathingly attacked the Somalis for their disobedience to the organization's decision, while publicly announcing that any possibilities of negotiations over the region were out of the question...

...The American arms have not yet begun arriving...

...Both Ethiopia and Somali rank on the list of the world's poorest and least developed countries but both are draining mammoth portions of their budgets into their armed forces...

...The United States moved to fill the gap and this year signed a treaty to supply defensive armaments to Somalia in return for the use of Berbera as a staging facility for the Rapid Deployment Force and as a counter to the new Soviet base on the Dahlak Islands off Ethiopia's more northern coast...

...Somalia is using the refugees for politics and to get aid from the international community...

...If a Somali tells you that these people were destroyed by the Ethiopian army, he is lying...

...The most recent move by the Organization of African Unity to address the problem left the two sides farther apart than ever...

...A couple of other and smaller anti-Ethiopia guerrilla groups, the Oromo Liberation Front and the Somali-Abbo Liberation Front, also are operating in parts of the Ogaden, further complicating the tension...

...Although there is no denying that the refugee aid has in part a humanitarian impulse, there is also no denying that it has a strategic motive, guaranteeing the unlikely friendship of the United States with socialist Somalia and maintaining it as an anti-Soviet bastion in Africa as well as in the crucial Indian Ocean sphere...

...Particularly severe droughts in recent years have exacerbated the original problem...

...Ethiopia, too, has hundreds of thousands of destitute and displaced people on its hands in the Ogaden, people who have not crossed the border and are therefore not officially classified as refugees...

...Mengistu has decided-as did his imperial predecessor, Emperor Haile Selassie-that he cannot afford to lose a single region to the secessionists, lest the other groups gain encouragement and the whole of the ancient empire disintegrate...