Word: djiboutis
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...miles (roughly the size of New Hampshire) is desert, a desolate mixture of searing sand, thorny scrub and boulder-strewn hills. Its estimated population of 200,000 is split between two unharmonious tribes, the nomadic Afars and the more industrious Issas, and about 90% of the inhabitants are illiterate. Djibouti, the territory's capital and only city of any size, has some of Africa's worst slums...
...single source of wages for the natives is domestic work for French and other foreign residents. Even the climate is dreadful: from May to October the temperature averages a windburned 92°. Afars and Issas, in short, is not even a nice place to visit. Yet dropping in on Djibouti last week, at the height of the cool (mid-80s) season, was French President Georges Pompidou...
...Somaliland until 1967, is France's last remaining real estate on the African mainland. It sends one Deputy and one Senator to the French National Assembly. But the colony's voters will hardly play a major role in the French elections in March. In fact, by visiting Djibouti, Pompidou was courting trouble rather than making campaign gains...
...last time a President of France visited Djibouti, in 1966, the city erupted in anti-French riots. Though an Issa-led independence movement has weakened since then, French authorities imposed stringent security measures for Pompidou's call. Some 240 riot-control experts were flown in from France to bolster the regular military force of 5,000, which includes one of the two remaining units of the French Foreign Legion stationed abroad. (The other is in Madagascar.) A French frigate stood guard in Djibouti Harbor...
...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...