The "Ogaden War"

Many Americans who depend on the major media for their news have been kept twisting slowly in the wind, ever since the U.S. rushed arms to Somalia last summer to help protect that country from invasion.

What had happened was:

A force of several thousand Somali dissidents and Ethiopian troops had crossed the frontier from Ethiopia's province of Ogaden and captured two Somali villages.
Somalia's President, fearing the attack might be the beginning of a wider offensive, appealed to the U.S. for help.
The U.S. responded to Somalia's appeal with an emergency airlift of small arms, ammunition, air defense equipment and transport, and communications and engineering supplies.

After covering these developments, only rarely have newspapers or TV news programs mentioned the subject again.

So what has been happening on the Somali-Ethiopian border since?

For one thing, the fighting of last summer has not spread or intensified, as once feared. In fact, the attacking forces have withdrawn from one of the captured villages. There is still some fighting, but it is sporadic. Some Western diplomats credit the U.S. airlift with having exerted a psychological and political, if not military, deterrent to any further incursions that might have been contemplated by the Ethiopians.

The whole episode had grown out of Somalia's claim to Ethiopia's eastern province of Ogaden, whose inhabitants are Somalis. In 1977 and 1978, Somali forces invaded the Ogaden and attempted to incorporate the area into Somalia—but were badly beaten by Ethiopia's much larger, Soviet supplied armed forces. Somalia still claims the Ogaden, however, and the recent Ethiopian incursions followed claims by Somali irregulars that they planned to mount a new offensive there.

The U.S. has an agreement on military cooperation with Somalia, which is a member of the Arab League, and views it as an ally in countering Soviet influence in East Africa. But the U.S. does not support Somalia's claim to the Ogaden. The U.S. position is based on a decision made by the Organization of African Unity, by which the frontiers of African countries—inherited from the days of Western colonial rule—would be regarded as permanent and not subject to adjustments in accordance with the ethnic distribution of Africa's population. The U.S. justified last summer's emergency arms shipments on the grounds that Somalia was not doing the attacking, but was being attacked.