Word: djiboutis
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France, which once ruled nearly half of Africa, gave up its last formal foothold on the continent this week. At a Sunday midnight ceremony in the decaying Red Sea city of Djibouti, a new flag of blue, green, white and red replaced the French Tricolor atop a floodlit pole at the high commissioner's residence overlooking the mud flats at the edge of Djibouti harbor. As a 21-gun salute boomed out and fireworks lit up the night sky, the French Territory of the Afars and Issas (T.F.A.I.) became the Republic of Djibouti, Africa's 50th independent state...
Dirt-poor Djibouti is a New Hampshire-sized chunk of harsh, heat-seared desert and mountains populated by roughly 220,000 people, mostly impoverished nomads whose average cash income is less than $50 a year. Djibouti comes to independence, after 115 years of French rule, with only three college graduates, no industry other than a pair of soft-drink plants, no agriculture whatever and an export trade restricted to hides and skins (goats outnumber people by better than 2 to 1). "If it were anywhere else," says an Arab diplomat in Djibouti town (pop. 140,000), "nobody would care about...
...with Somalia for control of the French Territory of the Afars and the Issas, whose 215,000 citizens last week voted for independence.* Mengistu fears that Somalia will encourage the territory's Somali-speaking Issa majority to cut the railroad linking Addis Ababa with the port of Djibouti, through which moves more than half of Ethiopia's foreign trade. Unless he can work out a deal with Somalia's President, Muhamed Siad Barre, Ethiopia may have yet another combat zone on its frontiers when the territory becomes the Republic of Djibouti-Africa's 49th nation...
Mission to Moscow. It was partly because of the possibility of a war over Djibouti that Mengistu visited Moscow this month to solidify his new alliance with the Soviet Union. Mengistu and Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny signed a declaration laying the "foundations for friendship and cooperation"-diplomatic sugar-coating on Moscow's agreement last December to supply Ethiopia with $100 million in arms. Moscow had good reason to show such benign feelings: Mengistu last month expelled all American military advisers, communications experts and information officials on the ground that the U.S. had helped the late Emperor "suppress the liberation...
...territory is the last remnant of a huge French colonial empire in Africa that as recently as 1958 included 15 states. The others are all independent nations today. Troops of the fabled French Foreign Legion will stay on in Djibouti to help keep order. Reunion island and the Comoro island of Mayotte, both in the Indian Ocean, remain as overseas departments of France, with representatives in the National Assembly in Paris...