News: Ethiopia's forgotten war
Ridwan Hassan Sahid awoke under a pile of corpses to a pricking sensation on her face. Ants were biting her eyelids and the inside of her mouth.
The pain, however, brought relief to the 17-year-old. "I thought, 'I'm alive,' " she thought as blood oozing from rope burns around her neck. Fearing that the Ethiopian soldiers who had left her for dead in a roadside ditch would return, she brushed away the ants and shut her eyes, then slipped back into unconsciousness.
The brutal assault and her escape mark a chilling story to emerge from an unfolding but hidden tragedy in eastern Ethiopia.
Ever since exiting colonialists arbitrarily stuck a triangle-shaped wedge of land with 4 million ethnic Somalis inside Ethiopia's border, violence and suffering have plagued the region. Now, many of them have been caught up in a nasty war between the Ethiopian government and a separatist group known as the Ogaden National Liberation Front, which gets little media attention. (Full)
Picture courtesy Cristina Alaman (Interaction.org). Source: International Aidworkers Today
Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order.
2 comments:
What's forgotten about it? I seem to remember reading about it numerous times on the BBC News website the last year.
Not to mention the fact that the Somalis keep complaining about the plight of their Ogaden brothers in connection with the Ethiopian occupation of Somalia proper.
Hi Andrew,
The BBC indeed did publish some newsitems about the plight of the Ogaden, but in general this internal war is not known. The more because journalists are not allowed into that part of the country, and the foreigners working in the area are requested not to report.
It is true any Somali press does report on the issue but once again the mainstream press does not (enough), in my opinion...
P.
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