Ogaden Online: The official homepage of Ogaden on the Internet

There are many pretenders to the throne,
but the bride will only accept to marry
the best among them:
those who offered - and still willing to offer - the ultimate sacrifice,
for God and country.

Did you ever wonder why the history of traitors is not written after the nation gains independence? Because the bride, which of course is the land, has distanced them from her embrace - in life and in death. 

I have never in my entire life heard a glorification of collaborators with the enemy, excepting of course the histories written by the enemy. And in there they only feature as minor footnote - as ‘errand boys’ - to the tales told by the conquering nation of their people.

Ask yourself why the histories of Imam Ahmed Gurey, Sayid Mohamed Abdulle Hassan, and heroes like them are glorified in our historiography and not that of those Somali Askaris who served under the British, Italian, and Abyssinian occupiers, are not.

For instance, the British built statues for the fallen soldiers of their military campaigns in ‘British Somaliland’ but not for those Somali Askaris who died alongside them. There is statue which stands in the center of Richard Cornfield’s hometown, erected in honor of his sacrifice for Her Majesty’s imperial army in British Somaliland. To the Somalis he is the man we ignominiously call Koofil which our great Sayid had memorable captured in his poem “Adaa Koofilloow Jiitayoo dunidan joogeyne” after the Dervishes defeated Cornfield’s troops and killed him in action.

Similarly, after Somalia gained independence the new Somali state had deservedly honored its heroes who died fighting for freedom and built statues for them. The history of the Dervishes and those before them was excavated from the rubbish heap it was thrown into by European colonizers and placed on the pedestal of the great and the venerated of the Somali nation.

Between the two - colonizers and freedom fighters - are the collaborators with the enemy who in serving with the forces of oppression and colonialism against their people, delay their nation’s march to freedom. No colonialist enterprise ever becomes effective and successful unless it employs sections of the colonized populace to dominate them and prolong its stay. In the end, collaborators are discarded after their shelf-life and usefulness to colonial authorities expires, and in many times they’re thrown out and retired before their expiry date in case they know too much and get acquainted with the system. New ones are selected from the colonized and brought in. This is how colonialism perpetuates (and renews) its presence among the colonized. In Ogaden, we’re very familiar with this situation. In the last decade alone we had more than ten regional presidents appointed from Addis Ababa. These appointed lackeys are brought in and replaced so first before some of them get to know their job description.

The strategy and modus operandi of the enemy had hitherto been to use the collaborators first and abuse them later. That is why many so-called regional presidents ended-up in jail after being removed from their positions unceremoniously, often accused of mismanagement, corruption and inefficiency (clearly a case of ‘the pot calling the kettle black’ and condemning it as such) and; ironically, accused of supporting the ONLF.

Things had however changed lately; the enemy had improvised its strategy and adopted a different approach. At local level, the new regional ‘president’ Abdi Iley has been empowered and given room to maneuver. A paramilitary force called Liyuu Police whose units are almost all Somalis have been created. The regular Ethiopian army units conduct supervision, training, and instruction for the Liyuu Police. This force in turn acts as protection for Ethiopian troops stationed in Ogaden. There are a lot of human rights abuses committed by the Liyuu Police. As a result of the horrible human rights abuses committed by this force, some of our people have lately resorted to saying “the Liyuu Police is much worse than the Ethiopian troops”. There is a psychological warfare element to all these. The aim of this strategy is to show the locals that the Somali forces, their own sons and daughters, can in fact be worse than Ethiopian troops.

At international level, Abdi Iley and his ministers are dispatched to the Diaspora to preach to those who had fled from the tyranny they represent as its slavish spokesmen about the existence of imaginary peace and development at home. There is also the issue of the so-called ‘peace deals’ which Ethiopia had entered into with dubious characters who represent nothing but themselves.

At home and abroad, an image is created of Somalis at loggerheads and finishing each other.

How did we come to this point?

In April 2007, the ONLF attacked an illegally Chinese run oil field in Obole, Ogaden. This attack came after the ONLF issued many warnings to oil companies willing to prospect oil in Ogaden to desist doing so until a political settlement to the conflict is achieved, a warning which the Chinese and other companies did not heed to their detriment.

After the Obole attack Ethiopia was humiliated and its claim of being fully in control of the Ogaden was proven to be untrue. To correct this anomaly and bring back the confidence of oil companies, the Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi announced in a press conference in June 9, 2007 that his government had commenced a full scale military campaign in Ogaden to crackdown the ONLF.

According to a Human Rights Watch report of June 2008 titled “Collective Punishment: War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity in the Ogaden area of Ethiopia's Somali Region,” the Ethiopian regime’s answer to the ONLF attack was to target civilians indiscriminately and collectively punish them as they were seen in the eyes of the Ethiopian government to constitute the support base of the struggle. The report says: “From June to September 2007, the counterinsurgency campaign appears to have been at its peak. This period was characterized by systematic and intensive efforts by Ethiopian forces to relocate, terrorize, and punish communities in areas of ONLF operation or perceived to support the insurgency, using various abusive strategies.”

However, the Ethiopian government’s scorched earth policy of mass murder and genocide against the Ogaden population did not the reduce capability of the ONLF and the Ogaden people’s support for the movement. Instead, massive numbers of citizens affected by the Ethiopian troops’ collective punishment campaign had flocked to the ONLF army, so much so that the ONLF had turned many of them back. From every hilltop, villages and towns, throughout the length and breadth of our country, the Ethiopian troops were confronted with fire and war. The Ogaden had become their deathbed.

The annual US Department of State Human Rights Report, which was published in April 8, 2011, confirmed increased ONLF attacks against Ethiopian army and the Liyuu Police positions in the last couple of years. The report says, “Reliable sources reported increasingly violent ONLF attacks on police and military elements during the year [2010]. Development workers reported being frequently stopped for questioning by the ONLF…” What this indicates is, contrary to the Ethiopian regime’s claims, the military capability of the ONLF is neither reduced nor eliminated. To cut the long story short: let the Ethiopian regime allow journalists access to the region, to either confirm these claims or deny them.

It’s in the background of the aforesaid that the Ethiopian government changed tack and employed different strategies to minimize the damage. The oil companies had mostly fled the region and Ethiopia’s assurances to them came to nothing.  

When the collective punishment campaign didn’t work, the regime introduced a campaign of subversion, lies, machinations and propaganda in order to divide the resistance movement and disorient its supporters. The delivery boys of this program are Abdi Iley, the Diaspora operatives of UWSLF, Dabaqoodhiga doolka, all in concert singing from the same hymn sheet of Meles Zenawi.

No matter how the enemy maneuvers, our people truly know its true intentions.  That is why our movement, the ONLF, had adopted principled position NOT to negotiate or have any to do with the ‘errand boys’ Ethiopia employs occasionally to prolong its stay in Ogaden. But there are many who will fall for ina Iley’s talk of Hadaan Ogaaden nahay maxaan inaga uun Itoobiya ula col nahay? and so on, thinking that he is offering fresh new ideas to free our people from oppression by wrecking the ship, as it were, from the inside. However, what they don’t decipher is that he is reading from a script given to him by his Tigre handlers and those seemingly sympathetic words are not his own. If he is truly concerned about the suffering of the Ogadens let him close Jail Ogaden, lift the crippling economic sanctions imposed since 2007, and grant access to foreign journalists to the region. We know he can’t do these things, so we rather talk to the script writers and directors of the play he is made to giddily perform. Engaging players who get changed constantly is futile exercise. This month another play will be staged in cities across the USA whose intention is to win the hearts and minds of the Diaspora, specifically the Ogaadeen clan Diaspora members whom Ethiopia considers as constituting the backbone and support base of the ONLF. Sadly there are some Somalis who have fallen for this trick and started to complain to Zenawi about the conduct of Abdi Iley and the Ogaadeen clan’s so-called domination of influential positions in the region. The root of the problem is Zenewi and not Iley. It is the chicken (Zenawi) that gave birth to the egg (Iley) and not vice versa. Complaining about the actions of Iley to Zenawi is running around in circles.

At the end the day, Iley and the few converts he manages to trick will not write the true history of Ogaden. They will neither be celebrated by our people nor by those who used them to delay our struggle for freedom. I am very much confident that in the near future some of the Ethiopian secret service agents who handled Abdi Iley and his cohorts will write their glorious accounts of how they’ve outsmarted and used these stooges. It will not be wise to appear in their logs and notes.

Even if, God forbid, our struggle doesn’t succeed, but we do not betray the cause of freedom, our future generation will pick up the fight from where we left of with pride and greater determination than us, just as we have picked up from our preceding generation of Nasrulah and WSLF; it’s the very reason that every true Somali celebrates the legacy of the Dervish struggle even though they were militarily defeated. Let us not bequeath to our children a legacy of shame and disgrace. Sellouts do not inspire revolution and revolt.

The desperation felt by some of our people in accepting the clannish laden rhetoric and message of Iley is understandable given the intolerable suffering they are made to endure. In analyzing a somewhat similar situation in the struggle in Algeria, the great anticolonial revolutionary freedom fighter Frantz Fanon wrote in his famous book, the Wretched of Earth: “We have become so used to the occupier’s contempt and his determination to maintain his stranglehold, whatever the cost, that any semblance of generosity or any sign of goodwill is greeted with surprise and jubilation. The colonized then tend to break into song.” To this end, says Fanon, “The colonized subject is upgraded, and attempts are made to disarm him psychologically and, naturally, with few coins”. The result: “The colonized subject is so starved of anything that humanizes him, even if its third rate, that these trivial handouts in some cases manage to impress him…”

The motive behind Ethiopia’s collective punishment campaign in Ogaden was, and still is, to make us reach this point of desperation and accept whatever they offer us, even if its third rate. Let us not fall for it. We want nothing less than total freedom to become the bridegrooms of our native land, and the writers of its history.

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Nuradin Jilani
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