Red, Red Terror in the Ogaden

The Regime change in Addis in May 1991
Had replaced a brutal dictator
With a tyrannical autocrat
The giant prison-house
Constructed with Soviet complicity
Has eased into a multitude of torture chambers
Secretly run in connivance with some in the West

Mengistu’s Red Terror Campaign
Has inspired Meles’ Red, Red Terror in the Ogaden.
On the orders of Meles, Mesfin, Yunis,
Yohannes, Hagos, and Meskel,
Swarms of Tigrean death squads and their henchmen
Roam through the great plains of the Ogaden
And with numbing regularity and impunity
Intimidate, torture, rape and kill innocent civilians.
And in a macabre ritual of death and dismemberment
Display tortured and mutilated bodies along main roads
In Degahbur, Fiq, Godey, Qabridaharre, and Warder.
The trees of life in the Ogaden
Are heavy with ‘strange fruit’[1]
Innocent victims lynched by the Tigrean Gestapo

Meles’ diabolical scorched-earth policy
Decimates the treasured oases and fertile stripes
That spot the vast sun-baked landscape
Large swathes of the fragile grasslands
Of Dollo, Jarar, Nogob and Qorrahay
Are crowned with carpets of organic ash
Bearing the signature and footprints
Of Mulugeta’s dirty warriors.
Aado, Fooljeh, Gudhis, and Sasabane are no more.  

Centuries-old traditions
And mechanisms for survival and sustenance
In the arid and drought-prone Ogaden
Are brutally targeted and torn apart.
The people of the besieged Ogaden
Are in the throes of state-sponsored terror and mass starvation.

Step by step
Day by day
Well by well
Village by village
Town by town
Zone by zone 

A slow genocide
Is in the works in the Ogaden
And the entire world is silent
Deafeningly silent
With the representatives of the Free World
In the city of flowers
Weaving and wallowing in ‘quite diplomacy’. 

Little do they know
That Meles is a man
With many names and many faces
A murderous combination of Machiavelli,
Amin[2], Bokassa[3], Mobuto[4] and Ceausescu[5]. 

Little do they know
That the anguished cries for help
Reverberate beyond the Ogaden
In Oromia
In Afar
In Amhara
Everywhere in Zenawi’s vast gulag

Little do they know
That appeasement is not an option
The end game is near
And freedom will prevail
By any means necessary.

By Hassan Abdi Mohammed
hsoomaali@hotmail.com
12 September 2007