SOMALIA: War in a Barren Wasteland

The Ogaden rebels fight on against Moscow's Ethiopian allies

In a small but calculated display of muscle flexing, Washington let it be known last week that an 1,800-man Marine amphibious unit would soon be dispatched to the Arabian Sea for military exercises, probably in conjunction with the 21 U.S. Navy ships patrolling the Indian Ocean. At the same time, the Carter Administration disclosed that the U.S., in exchange for an undetermined amount of aid, had obtained tentative rights to use air and naval facilities in three countries along the Asian-African "crescent of crisis": Oman, Kenya and Somalia.

One of those bases will presumably be the huge Soviet-built naval installation at Berbera on the Gulf of Aden, about 625 miles north of the Somali capital of Mogadishu. In 1977 Somalia's mercurial President Mohamed Siad Barre threw out several thousand of Moscow's advisers after the Kremlin opted for neighboring Ethiopia as its principal client on the Horn of Africa. Ironically, the problem that broke up the Soviet-Somali alliance could also inhibit the budding military cooperation between Washington and Mogadishu. That issue is Somalia's continued support for the Western Somali Liberation Front (W.S.L.F.), which since the mid-1960s has been fighting a slow-motion guerrilla war to free the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia from the "black colonial regime" in Addis Ababa.

The Somalis claim that they are no longer supporting the W.S.L.F. insurrection, which is opposed by most African states because it violates a basic principle of diplomacy on the continent: namely, that national borders, even though drawn arbitrarily by European colonial powers, must remain sacrosanct. In fact, Somalia's protestations of noninvolvement are not quite accurate, as TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief Jack White discovered on a trip to the Ogaden area last week. His report:

As our four-wheel-drive Toyota bucked and rattled over a rutted road, past a desolate landscape of brick red clay and wind-sculpted termite hills, it was hard to imagine how anyone could live in this barren wasteland. Even tough acacia trees wither and die in the unceasing glare of the Ogaden's hostile sun. Suddenly the car rumbled to a stop. "Look over there," said the guide, Mohamed Heeban, gesturing toward a clump of thornbushes along the bank of a dried-up stream. "That is Karraro, the city under the trees."

Inside the thicket stood two rows of dasoyils, the dome-shaped folding huts used by wandering Ogaden herdsmen. There were two shops stocked with canned goods, boxes of spaghetti and bolts of cloth, a café where men sat drinking cups of steaming spiced tea laced with sour camel milk, a stall where a cobbler took orders for made-to-measure goatskin sandals. Camels groaned in protest as their owners loaded them up with sacks of rice, flour and sugar; the sounds blended unevenly with the bleat of goats and sheep grazing on the scrubby vegetation of a nearby field.