By Jeffrey Gettleman, ethiomedia.com, 18 June 2007
IN THE OGADEN DESERT, Ethiopia: The rebels march 300 strong across the crunchy earth, young men with dreadlocks and AK-47s slung over their shoulders.
Often when they pass through a village, the entire village lines up, one sunken cheekbone to the next, to squint at them.
“May Allah bring you victory,” one woman whispered.
This is the Ogaden, a corner of Ethiopia that the urbane officials in Addis Ababa, the capital, would rather outsiders never see. It is the epicenter of a separatist war in which impoverished nomads are fighting one of the biggest armies in Africa.
What goes on here seems to be starkly different from the carefully-constructed image that Ethiopia – a country that America increasingly relies on to fight militant Islam in the Horn of Africa – tries to project.
In village after village, people said they had been brutalized by government troops. They described a widespread and longstanding reign of terror, with Ethiopian soldiers gang-raping women, burning down huts and killing civilians at will.
It is the same military that the American government helps train and equip – and provides with prized intelligence. The two nations have been allies for years, but recently they have grown especially close, teaming up last winter to oust an Islamic movement that controlled much of Somalia and rid the region of a potential terrorist threat.
The Bush administration, particularly the military, considers Ethiopia its best bet in the Horn of Africa – which, with Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea, is fast becoming intensely violent, virulently anti-American and an incubator for terrorism.
But an emerging concern for American officials is the way the Ethiopian military operates inside its own borders, especially in war zones like the Ogaden.
“JEFFREY GETTLEMAN is the New York times reporter who was arrested by the Ethiopian military on May 16, 2007 in the Ogaden region. He was held for five days, interrogated at gunpoint, and then released without any charges.” – Ethiopian politics
In Ethiopian Desert, Fear and Cries of Army Brutality
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN