The recent
murders of Chinese oil workers in Ethiopia are a reminder that some
places are best left alone.
The
killings of nine Chinese oil workers last month by separatist rebels
and the capture of several others in a remote area of eastern
Ethiopia has come as a great shock to the Chinese. “Protect our
compatriots,” thundered an editorial in the China Daily.
The
editorialist would have done better to spend his energies looking up
the recent history of the region in which the oil workers were
operating. Then he might have asked how Chinese workers were to be
protected, and even how China itself had contributed to the endemic
instability of that region.
The
Chinese were drilling for oil in an area known as the Ogaden. It is
not surprising that they want the oil, not just for their own use but
as a source of profit for mainland companies. Equally unsurprising is
the fact that, as in Ethiopia’s neighbor Sudan, the oil lies in
a region traditionally owned by ethnic groups very different from the
people who control the government, whether in Khartoum or Addis
Ababa.
In the
Sudan, Chinese oil interests have been protected by a judicious and
so far effective combination of military force and payoffs. The
oil-producing area may be alien to its Arab rulers but its population
is sparse and lacks ready access to arms.
But the
Ogaden is another matter altogether, as officials in Beijing should
know. It is just 30 years since it was invaded by Somalia, at that
time under the rule of a dictator named Siad Barre, who was a brutal
thug but happened to be quite successful in holding Somalia together,
a feat which none of his successors has since achieved.
But if
Somalia is now everyone’s idea of a failed African state, it
also happens to have a distinct ethnic identity. And it is that
identity which caused the war of 1977, and the existence today of the
Ogaden Liberation Front, which was responsible for killing the oil
workers. They were killed because they were there, not because they
were Chinese.
Barre had
the merit, at least at a time when the world was divided between the
into pro and anti-Soviet camps, of being anti-Soviet, not because he
was a good Muslim but because his enemy number one, Ethiopia, was in
the hands of an even more ruthless thug named Mengistu Haile Mariam.
In 1975 Mengistu overthrew the aging emperor Haile Selassie and
attempted to turn the ancient kingdom into a Marxist-Leninist
“paradise” along the lines of North Korea, which was
providing training for his militia.
Siad Barre
figured that, suitably armed, he could seize the Ogaden, which was
largely populated by Somalis. It was rather like a mini version of
Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran a few years later. The evil
to be attacked was Mengistu, not Khomeini.
Unfortunately
for Barre, like Saddam, he over-reached. Not content with occupying
the Ogaden, he marched further into Ethiopia. This was too much for
the Soviets who not only shipped in new supplies of arms but arranged
for “volunteers” from their “progressive”
surrogates, Cuba and South Yemen, to go to Mengistu’s aid. The
west was reluctant to get further involved in this fringe war and
help Barre who was forced to retreat back to his own borders.
The
Somalis are a troublesome lot who in the not too distant past have
claimed a small chunk of Kenya as well as a large one of Ethiopia.
But they have a strong ethnic identity, are Muslims and have friends
across the Gulf of Aden in Yemen and to the north in Eritrea, which
has been at almost constant war with its former ruler Ethiopia since
1991, when the collapse of the Mengistu regime provided it with an
opportunity for independence.
Indeed
were Somalia itself not in a state of civil war, its ability to make
life difficult for Ethiopia would be rather greater. As it happens,
both the US and China are now backing a non-socialist,
pro-foreign-capital regime in Addis Ababa, which is just fine except
that it was recently persuaded by the Americans to join in a little
bit of adventurism in Somalia itself, sending troops to support the
supposedly legitimate government against the supposedly Muslim
extremist Islamic Courts alliance.
The
Americans have gone back to their reprehensible cold-war habit of
backing any government, no matter how odious, against those at which
they are at odds. That led them to provide aid to kleptocracies
across Africa, Asia Latin America that they continue to pay for today
in terms of international distrust. That habit reached its apex when
the Americans provided aid to the murderous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia
in the 1970s against the Vietnamese.
The result
of backing the Ethiopians in Somalia has been the destruction of
large parts of Mogadishu and thousands of deaths in the name of
combating el-Qaeda. Whatever the problems with the Islamic Courts, it
was foolhardy from the beginning to imagine that Somalis would
welcome troops, however well-intentioned, from their historical
enemy.
China is
complicit in this mess, if only indirectly. If, as the China Daily
demands, it should give Chinese citizens who go overseas as workers,
investors or tourists “appropriate protection,” Beijing
should tell its companies and workers to get out of places like the
Ogaden and stay out, for their own good as well as the good of a
region in which international rivalries have merely added fuel and
guns to ethnic animosities and the ambitions of dictators and local
warlords.
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