Word: ogaden
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...food is distributed. In the strife-torn Karamoja province of northeastern Uganda, relief workers wake every morning to find the corpses of malnourished children deposited on their doorsteps. In the Horn of Africa, more than 1.7 million refugees from the unresolved conflicts in Ethiopia's Eritrea, Tigre and Ogaden areas swelter in squalid relief camps, where thousands have already died from malnutrition and a host of hunger-related diseases...
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...
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...
...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...
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...