Word: djibouti
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Even before the election returns were complete, unruly mobs began to surge through the streets of Djibouti, the sun-bleached and impoverished capital of French Somaliland. Then they heard the news: by a majority of 61%, Somaliland's 39,000 voters (out of a population of 125,000) had opted to maintain the country's ties with France, thus defeating a move to independence. Somali tribesmen, who wanted to break away from France, threw up barricades of sidewalk slabs and bedposts, began hurling rocks with the aid of crude slingshots. As their husbands lit oil fires that flashed...
...Neighboring Ethiopia, which contains large numbers of Afars, backs the tribe's cause in French Somaliland. More than tribal loyalty is involved: Ethiopia has a sound economic motive in not wanting its outlet to the Gulf of Aden, a 486-mile narrow-gauge railway from Addis Ababa to Djibouti, to be controlled by the hostile government of Somalia...
Charles de Gaulle ordered last week's referendum after the two rival tribes rioted in the streets of Djibouti during his visit there last August. De Gaulle sternly warned that French troops would never be committed to preserve "the appearance of a state," would withdraw and leave Somaliland to civil war unless the voters clearly demonstrated that they wished to remain with France. To help matters along, police rounded up some 6,000 Somali tribesmen in and around Djibouti before the balloting and expelled them to Somalia...
...French aid ($26 million last year). The French have thus won the right to continue pouring money into Somaliland, but they have also won more trouble than they bargained for. Before the week was out, legionnaires rooted thousands of dissident Somali tribesmen out of their tumble-down shanties in Djibouti and herded them into barbed-wire concentration camps near the Somalia border. Somalia thereupon refused to accept any more deportees, leaving the tribesmen imprisoned in French Somaliland as a source of embarrassment-and potential trouble-for France...
...fact, De Gaulle spent more time talking about tiny French Somaliland than any other foreign topic. Street rioting for independence greeted him in Djibouti on his visit last August, and the memory still rankles. De Gaulle announced that the Somalis will be given their independence if they opt for it in a forthcoming referendum. If they do, they will be sorry, for France will pull out entirely, and "certainly not engage its resources and its troops to support the appearance of a state"-which is at least brutally consistent with his views about the U.S. role in Viet...