The Africans (39 page)

In 1934 Italian-led Somali troops clashed with Ethiopian soldiers at a watering hole for camels in the Ogaden known as Wal Wal. Mussolini used that battle as an excuse to conquer and occupy Ethiopia. He detached the Ogaden from Ethiopia, ruling it as part of Italian Somaliland. (Later, in 1941, the British defeated the Italians in East Africa and established a military administration to govern the Ogaden.)

Britain proposed in 1950 at the United Nations that the five parts of Somali be reunited. Ironically, that proposal was shelved largely because of opposition from the Soviet Union—which two decades
later would be instrumental in preparing Somalia for its ill-fated attempt to win back the Ogaden militarily. Rebuffed at the United Nations, Britain returned the Ogaden to Ethiopia in 1955 at the insistence of Selassie. Five years later British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland were united to form the independent republic of Somalia. Though not supported by black Africa—which considers the colonial boundaries inviolable (i.e., the boundaries they inherited at independence)—the Somalis still want to reclaim their missing chunks as part of a “Greater Somalia.” Each of the white star’s five points on the flag represents one of the regions populated with the homogeneous Somalis. So when one speaks of the hostility between the Somalis and the Ethiopians in the Ogaden, he is talking about a hatred implanted in a thousand years of strife.

Throughout the 1970s Moscow prepared the Somali military for its invasion of the Ogaden, which was lightly defended by the American-backed Ethiopians. But then, in 1977, with Selassie dead and Ethiopia under the control of young revolutionaries, the Russians began to have second thoughts. They virtually begged Somalia to scrap its planned attack and proposed that Somalia and Ethiopia merge into a Marxist federation. Mohamed Siad Barré, Somalia’s Moslem president, scoffed. The Russians started leaving Somalia in large numbers, and Barré secretly dispatched an envoy—his American dentist, who lived in New York—to Washington to see if the Carter Administration had anything to offer. Yes, the Administration said, the United States was willing to give Somali “defensive” weapons if Barré cut his ties to the Soviet Union. Barré told Moscow it would have to choose—it could back Somalia or Ethiopia, but not both—and just before dawn one June morning, he sent his army across the border and into the Ogaden. The Ethiopian defenses crumbled. Within two months Somalia had captured 90 percent of the region, and Barré’s dream of reuniting all his people under a single flag seemed within reach.

Until then, Somalia had been one of Africa’s most isolated countries, as closed to the outside world as North Korea and completely off-limits to Western journalists. Suddenly, though, Barré had something he wanted to tell the world and Somalia started passing out visas like supermarket discount coupons. A group of us descended on Mogadishu, looking for a way into the Ogaden. We hung around the Uruba Hotel, a new place with a lovely seaside view and toilets that overflowed when flushed, permeating every room with an outhouse smell. We pestered the government for transportation to the
Ogaden, scraped together some interviews around town and went to a press conference in which Barré denied that his troops had invaded anything. All the fighting, he said, was being done by Somali inhabitants of the Ogaden. And where did these peasants get their tanks and heavy artillery? Barré, a former policeman who was born in the Ogaden, said he wasn’t sure; they must have “borrowed” them from the Somali army.

Barré claimed, not without some justification, that the Ethiopian presence in the Ogaden was a colonial one. And there was no doubt that the Ethiopians had been harsh rulers, intent on driving the Somali nomads back across the border. The Ethiopians had poisoned water holes and on occasion, according to some Somalis we talked to, cut off women’s breasts to deprive children of milk. The Ethiopians collected taxes at gunpoint and maintained administrative control with second-rate soldiers and policemen who had been more or less exiled to the Ogaden by the government in Addis Ababa.

“I have lived under three colonial powers—the British, the Italians and the Abyssinians [Ethiopians],” said a seventy-one-year-old Ogaden peasant, Husein Liban, a frail man with a wispy white beard, watery eyes and a single tooth. “The Italians and the British exploited us and harmed us, too, but they did it gradually. The Abyssinians were quick and primitive. If you have to have an injection, you will choose the one that only hurts a little rather than the one that goes deep into your body.”

We had met the old man in Jijiga, a one-street desert town the Somalis had just captured from the fleeing Ethiopians. Jijiga had no running water and no electricity, and what was known as the Genet Hotel was nothing more than a large windowless room with a sand-covered floor, a battered sofa and three cot beds. We had reached Jijiga after a five-hour drive in Land-Rovers provided by the Somali government, traveling straight across the desert on a moonless night to avoid detection by Ethiopian war planes. Everything seemed so mysterious, so distant from any people or place I had ever seen before—the solitary figures wrapped in robes who appeared with their camels out of the icy blackness and watched us pass with silent stares, the little towns that emerged as an outline of mud shacks and disappeared into the night as though they had been only an illusion, the rutted desert tracks that seemed to have no end and no direction but which our driver negotiated as surely as if he were reading a city street map.

It was just past three in the morning when our three four-wheel-drive
vehicles arrived in the abandoned Ethiopian army camp on a rise overlooking Jijiga. The sand turned to rocky earth, and our driver cut off the track, heading overland to a small dark building made of mud and cement blocks. A candle burned inside, beneath an Italian-charted map of the Ogaden, and half a dozen Somali guerrillas with rifles rose from a long dining table to welcome us in halting English. The rebel leader, Abdullah Abdi, motioned us toward the table, where a roast of freshly slaughtered goat had been placed in our honor. Like our hosts, we pulled off the greasy meat with our fingers. The meat, which was barely cooked, was chased down with gulps from a bottle of dust-covered Scotch that one of the Somalis had taken from an ammunition box. Stomachs churning, we reclined in a corner to wait out the night.

Word of our presence spread quickly through Jijiga, and early the next day the entire town gathered outside the Genet Hotel to demonstrate for us their hatred of the Ethiopians. The people, perhaps 2,000 in all, came from out of nowhere in a rush. One moment the place was as lifeless as a ghost town, the next alive and teeming, swirling with a carnival-like motion and color. The crowd moved as a single body, dancing and prancing, surrounding us and carrying us with it. “Victory to the front!” they shrieked, their cries echoing through the desert valley. Old men, barefoot and spindly, waved their spears and daggers and machetes and odd assortments of old rifles in our faces. The children laughed and flung rocks at stray “Ethiopian” dogs, chuckling gleefully when one was struck and limped away yelping. The women swayed among their menfolk in a hypnotic trance, their delicately featured faces wreathed in smiles, their pounding drums and tribal war calls melting into the clamorous welter.

For twenty minutes the euphoric crowd reeled along the sandy, unpaved street, falling quiet only when Abdullah Abdi jumped atop a 1959 Chevrolet sedan outside the hotel. “Back to your homes now,” he shouted, cupping his hands to his mouth. “We do not want a big crowd on the streets, because this is the time of day when the planes like to come, and you know …”

But the warning was too late. The Ethiopian war planes had come from the north, graceful and silent against the soft blue Ogaden skies. In the streets below, where we stood with our notebooks and cameras, the Somalis neither heard their high-level approach nor sensed that death was once again imminent in Jijiga.

Suddenly the planes veered and plunged, hurtling straight for the hotel. And in the split second it takes for disbelief to turn to horror, they were upon us, two silvery American-made F-5 fighters leading the attack, a poky old British Canberra Bomber bringing up the rear. Bombs thudded and cannon barked like firecrackers and people screamed, diving and tumbling and elbowing their way to the ground in a panic of confusion. I dove toward the old Chevrolet, my camera and cigarettes and sunglasses all headed in different directions. I clutched my notebook with both hands and squirmed to make myself as flat as possible. There were moans and cries all around me and I remember thinking that I had seen—which I’m sure I hadn’t—the face of one of the pilots, smiling as he flashed by fifty feet above. I had an absurd reaction, wanting to stand up and scream, “For God’s sake, don’t hit
me
! I’m an
American
!”

Four times the planes passed over us, engines shrieking, guns rattling, the ground trembling. At the end of the first three passes they pulled straight up at the outskirts of town, circled high above Jijiga for what seemed like a tantalizing hour—but was actually only a few seconds—and dove again upon us like hawks seeking their prey. Then, after a fourth pass, they were gone, streaking back to the north.

The first strafing run decapitated a Somali nurse named Sarah outside the ramshackle eighty-bed hospital. It also blew away a ten-year-old boy in a mud home across the street. The hospital’s only doctor was critically wounded by shrapnel as he rested in his bed, and outside one ward a civilian patient writhed on a stretcher, his stomach and head torn open. He moaned his final prayers to Allah, then his body quivered and relaxed. The man who had been comforting him removed the plasma tube from his arm and walked toward the toolshed that in times of crisis also served as a temporary morgue.

In all, seven Somalis were killed; twenty or thirty were gravely wounded. The attack was apparently designed not to destroy Jijiga, but only to demoralize the people there. Indeed, seven deaths were not many for a people so inured to never-ending war. In the Ethiopian air attack a few days earlier, three had died; in the one before that, nine. And over ten centuries of warfare between the Somalis and Ethiopians, fought first with spears, then with multimillion-dollar war machines supplied by foreign allies, those small numbers had grown large, and the hating had become very deep.

“We have lived with war for many years,” said a blacksmith, Mohammed Heeban. “For as long as I can remember, as long as my grandparents can remember, there has been war in the Ogaden. We are used to death. It is not a big price to pay if our people can get our land back from the Abyssinians.”

Chances are good that Heeban’s children may not know much peace either. For one Saturday night that November, shortly after we left the Ogaden, American spy satellites detected an unexpected massive movement of Soviet aircraft heading for the Horn of Africa. The Russians had made their choice. Fifteen thousand Cuban troops and $1 billion worth of Soviet weapons were on the way to Ethiopia. Soon Soviet-advised Ethiopian troops, spearheaded by Soviet tanks and Cuban infantrymen, would sweep back into the Ogaden, recapturing Jijiga and the other desert towns lost during the Somali offensive. The Somali guerrillas would drift back into their mountain hideouts to restock arms and prepare for hit-and-run nighttime attacks, just as their forefathers had been launching for generations.

The arms lift resulted in a stunning shift in the Horn of Africa’s military balance, international loyalties and political ideologies. President Siad Barré threw out the Russians—most of whom simply moved to Ethiopia—and never again uttered a favorable word about Marxism. He ordered the removal of all anti-American posters in Mogadishu, ended the surveillance of American diplomats and asked for assistance from Washington, which had reneged on its promise to give Somali “defensive” arms. The Americans returned with a diplomatic mission of sixty-nine persons and $86 million for military, developmental and refugee assistance. They moved into the residences and offices abandoned by the Russians and began negotiations to take over the former Soviet military base at Berbera. The Ethiopians meanwhile expelled the Americans, smeared Addis Ababa with grotesque caricatures of Uncle Sam, signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union and announced their intention to become black Africa’s first authentic Communist state. Washington’s closest African ally was now a Soviet satellite, and Moscow’s African stepchild was under the tutelage of the United States. Ethiopia and Somalia had put themselves on the open market and sold their allegiances to the highest bidder with the best deal. One day, no doubt, the arrangement will come unhinged and the loyalties will change again.

The flip-flop in the Horn underscored once more that Africa’s fortunes rest in the hands of the Eastern and Western factions and that both blocs consider Africa important enough to make substantial military and economic investments in the continent. The Russians have been willing to fight to the last drop of Cuban blood, the Americans to counter Soviet expansionism with guns if not surrogate troops. Certainly Africa’s strategic location and potential wealth—as well as its inability to defend itself—make it vulnerable to outside manipulation that could lead to foreign confrontation.

Although I have had few kind words about the Soviet role in Africa, each African country should, I think, be free to choose its own form of government. Marxism has been no more a disaster in Mozambique than capitalism has been in Ghana, but by its very nature, Marxism denies the Africans the economic advancement and individual dignity they seek to become a free people. To counter this, the West must continue to provide the financial assistance Africa needs to develop, even if much of that money is filtered off by corrupt presidents and ill-conceived projects. And, sadly, it probably will have to continue to provide the guns Africa needs to secure its borders even if some of those guns are used by despotic presidents to perpetuate their own rule. The alternative is to let Moscow take Africa piece by piece, exploiting the fragility of individual countries and choosing Communism for these people, who would not have chosen it for themselves.