War in a Barren Wasteland

The Ogaden rebels fight on against Moscow's Ethiopian allies

In a small but calculated display of muscle flexing, Washington let it be known last week that an 1,800-man Marine amphibious unit would soon be dispatched to the Arabian Sea for military exercises, probably in conjunction with the 21 U.S. Navy ships patrolling the Indian Ocean. At the same time, the Carter Administration disclosed that the U.S., in exchange for an undetermined amount of aid, had obtained tentative rights to use air and naval facilities in three countries along the Asian-African "crescent of crisis": Oman, Kenya and Somalia.

One of those bases will presumably be the huge Soviet-built naval installation at Berbera on the Gulf of Aden, about 625 miles north of the Somali capital of Mogadishu. In 1977 Somalia's mercurial President Mohamed Siad Barre threw out several thousand of Moscow's advisers after the Kremlin opted for neighboring Ethiopia as its principal client on the Horn of Africa. Ironically, the problem that broke up the Soviet-Somali alliance could also inhibit the budding military cooperation between Washington and Mogadishu. That issue is Somalia's continued support for the Western Somali Liberation Front (W.S.L.F.), which since the mid-1960s has been fighting a slow-motion guerrilla war to free the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia from the "black colonial regime" in Addis Ababa.

The Somalis claim that they are no longer supporting the W.S.L.F. insurrection, which is opposed by most African states because it violates a basic principle of diplomacy on the continent: namely, that national borders, even though drawn arbitrarily by European colonial powers, must remain sacrosanct. In fact, Somalia's protestations of noninvolvement are not quite accurate, as TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief Jack White discovered on a trip to the Ogaden area last week. His report:

As our four-wheel-drive Toyota bucked and rattled over a rutted road, past a desolate landscape of brick red clay and wind-sculpted termite hills, it was hard to imagine how anyone could live in this barren wasteland. Even tough acacia trees wither and die in the unceasing glare of the Ogaden's hostile sun. Suddenly the car rumbled to a stop. "Look over there," said the guide, Mohamed Heeban, gesturing toward a clump of thornbushes along the bank of a dried-up stream. "That is Karraro, the city under the trees."

Inside the thicket stood two rows of dasoyils, the dome-shaped folding huts used by wandering Ogaden herdsmen. There were two shops stocked with canned goods, boxes of spaghetti and bolts of cloth, a cafe where men sat drinking cups of steaming spiced tea laced with sour camel milk, a stall where a cobbler took orders for made-to-measure goatskin sandals. Camels groaned in protest as their owners loaded them up with sacks of rice, flour and sugar; the sounds blended unevenly with the bleat of goats and sheep grazing on the scrubby vegetation of a nearby field.

Karraro is an armed camp, almost devoid of children, women and the elderly. They were sent away to relief camps in Somalia last fall, after Ethiopian jets bombed and strafed the settlement, killing scores of people and hundreds of animals. Only about 300 of the settlement's 3,000 original residents remain, tending the livestock and carrying on the war against the Ethiopians and their Cuban and Soviet allies. "This is a town of warriors," said a grim-faced herdsman who, like almost every other man in town, had an AK-47 assault rifle slung over his shoulder. "If I had the power, I would wipe the Ethiopians off the face of the earth."

Officers of the W.S.L.F. boast that they control 80% of the Ogaden; they also concede that they have no hope of driving the Soviet-commanded force of 60,000 Ethiopian militiamen, supported by 6,000 Cuban soldiers, from their strongholds in Jijiga, Harar and Dire Dawa. "It is a stalemate," says Hussein Mohamed Nur, the slender commander of the liberation army in the region near Karraro. "They control the big towns, and we control everything else. They never come out unless it is in a big convoy with tanks and armored cars. Then we attack them and destroy many vehides. On the other hand, we are not strong enough to take the garrisons. They have tanks, planes and heavy artillery. All we have is the people."

Somalia has paid a heavy price for its support of the rebels. Although it no longer sends its army into the Ogaden to fight alongside the W.S.L.F., Somalia allows the guerrillas to train at a camp near Hargeisa, permits occasional arms shipments from friendly Arab countries to be delivered at its ports, and cares for the liberation front's wounded in government hospitals. It has also provided refuge for some 540,000 displaced Ogadenians, who may become permanent wards of Somalia if the fighting does not stop. "Because of the sheer numbers involved, the only place for these people to go is back home," says Steffan Bodemar, director of the United Nations relief effort. "You cannot re-create their nomadic life-style inside Somalia, because there is not enough land. On the other hand, the government lacks sufficient resources for a viable resettlement program."

Somalia is one of the world's poorest nations. Western diplomats consider the Mogadishu government's relief campaign to be well intentioned, but it is hampered somewhat by bureaucratic bungling and low-level corruption. Moreover, international aid for the refugees has been slow in coming. The result is a severe shortage of food and medicine. At Agabar, a sprawling relief camp housing 44,000 people, a huge field was cleared on which camp farmers could grow vegetables and other crops. The project has come to a standstill for lack of a few feet of pipe to carry water for irrigation from a nearby stream. Malaria is rampant because camp officials have been unable to persuade the inmates to fill in the water holes they dig in an adjacent stream bed; the puddles are perfect breeding spots for disease-carrying mosquitoes.

The Somalis argue that the Ethiopians want to drive the nomads out of the Ogaden and replace them with more tractable, farming people, who could be resettled on the narrow fertile strips along the Juba and Shebele rivers. "The Soviets pretend to be friendly to the Third World, but here, in Afghanistan, and other places, they are the oppressors of colonized people," says Abdullahi Hassan Mohamoud, secretary-general of the W.S.L.F. "If the U.S. helps us to counter Soviet aggression, it will have most of the world on its side." In recent months, he claims, American envoys in Mogadishu have begun to meet discreetly with W.S.L.F. leaders. "There has been no great change in what they say, but the fact that we are talking to them at all is a great achievement for us."

Judging from the warm reception that American visitors receive, the Somali public would welcome a formal military cooperation agreement. Now that the Soviets are gone, many of the harsher vestiges of the police state, like the thugs who used to tail every foreign visitor, have disappeared.

Nevertheless, there is a huge obstacle to close ties with the U.S.: Somali pride. It was badly damaged by the ignominious defeat the army suffered in the Ogaden two years ago, and President Siad Barre was angry that Washington did not respond immediately with help after he threw out the Soviets. "The thing you must remember in dealing with Somalis is that they are a warrior race that sprang from one of the harshest environments on earth," says a Western diplomat. "Nobody is going to come in here and tell them what to do." If the price of U.S. aid is forgoing the chance to get revenge in the Ogaden, the Somalis may decide that the cost is too high.

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