Word: desertion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Guns and geopolitics in the desert...
Though no Western correspondents were allowed to observe the desert combat at first hand, Somalia's Radio Mogadishu reported that guerrillas of an organization known as the Western Somali Liberation Front had captured as much as 90% of the Ogaden-all, in fact, except the Ethiopian strongholds of Dire Dawa, Harar and Jijiga, where fighting was raging...
...Ethiopia. In the northern province of Eritrea, Addis Ababa's Marxist military government of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam has lost everything but the provincial capital of Asmara and the port cities of Massawa and Assab to the secessionist rebels. If Ethiopia should be defeated in both of its desert wars, it would lose more than 40% of its territory, 6 million of its 28 million people, and its access...
...carefully assorted lot, the exotic equivalent of the cross sections found in bomber crews in World War II movies-a soulful French muscian, a what-ho English blueblood, a hulking Russian who once guarded the Czar's family, and so on. Hackman and the chieftain of the hostile desert tribes (Ian Holm) are, naturally, old and respectful friends, although somehow Scriptwriter David Zelag Goodman neglected to make them former college roommates...
More important, Arab Leader Holm denounces the mission of both men-the soldier as well as the archaeologist-as "a rape of our heritage." But nobody pays much attention to what Holm says after he emerges as an opportunist who is only using the colonialist issue to unite the desert tribes in his own drive for power. This is a pity. In view of some of the tacky beach-front resorts that have since been built with foreign money along the Moroccan coast, one cannot help thinking that the fellow really had a point there...