The Soccer War

THE OGADEN: AUTUMN ’76

A scorpion bit me at night. I crawled into the tent in the close, stifling darkness and lay down on the cot. Neither flashlight nor matches. Anyway, the commandant is ordering us to cut down on light so that we don’t give away the position of our camp. They might be lying in a ring a step away and waiting, with their eyes to their gun-sights.

Something moved suddenly on the sheet in the place where I had put my head. I thought it was a lizard. It could not be a cobra, because the movement was too light, too feeble. One more twitching of something close to me, a rustling, and silence again, dead. It went on like that, quiet, soundless, invisible, but I could feel that it was going on very near, even coming nearer. Suddenly there was an explosion in my forehead, deafening, as if someone had smashed my head with a hammer. Excruciating. I leapt up and started to scream: Scorpion! Scorpion!

Marcos ran in a moment later, and then the soldiers. One of them turned on a flashlight. A flat, grey, venomous repulsiveness lay on the sheet. The soldiers cautiously gathered up the sheet, put it on the ground, and began to stamp on the scorpion. Others looked on, as if they were observing a ritual dance for the expulsion of an evil spirit.

My face began to puff up instantly. The soldier shone his flashlight at me and now they all looked gravely at my violently swelling head which was growing like dough in a mixing bowl, the eyes getting smaller and smaller until they must have vanished, sunk, because I stopped seeing. They looked at me standing before them: a hundred mouths, monstrous, wailing in pain, not belonging to myself, isolated from me.

But what could be done? Scorpions sting people like mosquitoes. Those who took a heavy dose of venom died. From here to the nearest hospital was two days on the road. Lie down, said Marcos. They left me alone in the tent. I sat on the cot afraid to move, so that I would not agitate the scorpions, not give them any sign of myself. They crawled along the ground in the darkness. up the flaps of the tent, dragging their barbed abdomens behind. From that night on, through my whole stay in Ogaden, I could not free myself of them. They spawned in the sands, emerged from under rocks, lurked on the trails. I wanted to get out of there, but we were imprisoned in the desert and had to wait for a chance to escape.

Marcos and I flew to Gode in a light airplane. Disembarking from the airplane was like riding a coal-shovel towards a stove. We escaped straight under the wings, into the shade. The police came and began the body search, the poking, the pawing, looking for guns, checking passes. I did not have a pass. My predicament was ambiguous. I had flown from Addis Ababa at the last moment, without any certainty that I would reach Ogaden — a province closed to foreigners. Go ahead, said Y from the Ministry of Information, I’ll send word by radio to let you in. I met the boy named Marcos in the airplane. He was carrying pesticides to be used against some insect that nibbled corn. I thought that if I stuck close to Marcos, he would pull me through all the checkpoints. To buy my way into his favour, I helped him carry the box full of pesticide. In general, I behaved as if I had been assigned to him officially. I tagged along somewhat impudently, but I had no Ethiopian documents and I knew no one in Ogaden. How was I going to get around without a car in that hell where walking a hundred metres is a major effort, and where was I going to sleep, since there are no hotels there? But what I feared most were the suspicions of the police and the soldiers. A white man in this front line zone at the end of the world — what’s he doing here?

Show your papers.

I have no papers.

Well, then, let’s go to the barracks for the interrogation.

The airplane took off, leaving us alone in the sun with the pesticide. We covered our heads with newspapers so that we could stand the molten heat, so that we wouldn’t fall over, it was so hot. The Ogaden desert burned all around and now, high noon, there was no sign of life. We were looking at the most uncomplicated of images, reduced to two planes: at the bottom — a band of earth; higher, into infinity — the expanse of the sky. In the middle, two drops of sweat — Marcos and I.

We waited a long time until a Land-Rover drove up and a tiny bearded man got out. That’s Getahun, the commandant, Marcos told me. We loaded the box as if we were in a slow-motion film, every movement an ordeal, and we drove off in an unknown direction, like a boat wandering over the sea. They spoke in Amharic and I understood not a word. We moved slowly through billows of dust, our vehicle pitching from side to side.

‘So who are you?’ asked Getahun.

I told him.

‘Do you have a paper?’

‘No, but they’re sending word by radio.’

He fell silent, and later he went on talking with Marcos. We were in the drought zone. In the place where the Ethiopian government was organizing camps for the starving and the thirsty, for those who had managed to save themselves from death. A few people, like Getahun and Marcos, were fighting their own war here for the lives of the dying nomads.

Every morning Getahun went to the camp to urge the people to go out into the desert. We’ll dig a canal, he would say, the water will flow, the corn will grow. They did not know what a canal looks like or how corn grows. A murmur would go around the crowd and Getahun would turn to the interpreter to ask what they wanted.

They do not want corn. Their diet is meat and milk. They want camels.

But don’t you see, Getahun would say, your camels died off.

Yes, that is true, it all happened by the will of Allah.

The crowd then melted away, disappearing somewhere into their shelters, into the bushes, collapsing into the shade. Getahun did not give up. So he began from the beginning, every day. There was inexhaustible patience on both sides — his explaining and their listening. Weeks passed and nothing happened. They received a daily ration of a half-kilogram of corn. They ate part of it, because they had nothing else, and they set some of it aside without telling anyone and sold it on the black market: they were saving up for camels. Whoever managed to save up the price of a camel, or even a few goats, would disappear into the desert. Often this meant certain doom, death from thirst, never seeing anyone again, but nature was stronger than the instinct of self-preservation. For them, life meant movement, conquering space, and when they stayed in one place they withered up and died.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Emperor Menelik of Ethiopia extended his control over regions to the east and south of the territory that traditionally made up the land of Ethiopia. One of his conquests in this campaign was the province of Ogaden, which the Ethiopians today call the province of Harer and which the Somalis call Western Somalia. Since the inhabitants of Ogaden are Somali nomads, Somalia demands the return of the province.

The border between Ethiopia and Somalia exists only on the map; in fact it can be crossed at will, as long as one does not come into contact with an outpost of one of the armies, and these outposts, few in number, lie at intervals of dozens of kilometres. Neither of these countries has the means or sufficient military forces to guard its border rigorously. It is possible to drive one or two hundred kilometres into the depths of Ethiopia without being detected. The same is true on the Somali side. Fixed points are scarce in this terrain: a few small, impoverished settlements, clay shelters lacking light and plumbing. Whoever holds a settlement controls the entire surrounding territory.

Ogaden is a great semi-desert, a gigantic frying pan in which the sun-scorched air sizzles all day long and the principal human exertion involves the search for shade and a breeze. To find shade is to hit the winning number in the lottery. To find a breeze is to know the taste of joy. To last out a whole day in the sun there seems like a task beyond the strength of man, and in earlier days the most ingenious forms of torture included stripping a white person naked and leaving him alone with the sun.

The total surface area of Ogaden (Ethiopian and Somali combined) is equal to that of Poland. This territory can boast of one more or less tolerable road — which is, nevertheless, too demanding for passenger cars. That road is suitable only for all-terrain vehicles, desert trucks and tanks. There is also one river: the Wabe Shebele Wenz, full of dangerous and voracious crocodiles. Anyone who controls that road and that river can call himself the lord of Ogaden.

The night watch returns at dawn and the day patrols set out into the desert. The officer says that the border is near and that Somalia could attack at any moment. He doubts that they would mount a frontal attack, with the whole army, because the terrain is too rough to wage a regular war. Most often, they send in loose units of soldiers made out to look like partisans. If there are only a few, he regards the situation as normal. If there are many, he regards it as war. Here, the front is always and everywhere.

I ask if these units could overrun a settlement like Gode or K’ebri Dehar.

No, he says — there are strong army garrisons in the settlements, there are tanks and artillery, and the partisan units have to be small because otherwise they would have trouble transporting water. They can attack tiny villages or vehicles on the road, nothing more.

I ask if he remembers the last war.

He says that he does. I also remember. It was 1964. I was in Somalia then. I was sitting in Hargeisa, with no way of reaching Mogadishu. The only stately building in all Hargeisa was the former residence of the British governors. Hargeisa became a large city in the dry season — it had water, which the nomads with their flocks were always chasing. In the spring, when the pastures started to turn green, the city emptied out and turned into a third-class desert stopping-place. Life concentrated around the only petrol station in town. You could get tea there and listen to the radio. From truck drivers passing through — a rare sight — you could find out what was going on in the rest of the country, as well as in the outside world: in Djibouti and Aden. I went there every day, hoping to encounter a truck that would take me to Mogadishu. For a week the road was empty and nobody appeared. Finally, suddenly, a column of twenty new Land-Rovers emerged out of a cloud of dust. They were driving from Berbera to Mogadishu. I asked the drivers to take me. We drove for five days across an appalling desert, through a dead no-man’s land, in clouds of dust that billowed not only behind the vehicles, but also from underneath them, so that the drivers lost all visibility. They did not drive single file, but in a row, across a fiery plain without roads, without people. You could see only your nearest neighbours on the left side and on the right; everything else had vanished into the clouds of dust.

I did not see water for five days. Our only drink, or indeed nourishment, was tart, bitter camel’s milk. We acquired that milk from nomads we met along the route. They appeared suddenly out of nowhere. They were wandering with their flocks of camels, goats and sheep in search of pastures and wells.

The terrain that we were driving across was the border of Somalia and Ethiopia, the heart of the Ogaden. Since instead of marked roads there were only lonely rocks and solitary acacias there for the drivers to take bearings from, I asked them exactly which country we were in. They did not know with certainty. That means that, in their opinion, we were in Somalia, since they believed that their country covered the whole desert. Nevertheless, they drove the whole time in anxiety and tension, fearing that we could improvidently stray into the depths of Ethiopia and end up in enemy hands. From time to time we came across fresh signs of the continuing war: burned and devastated settlements, human and animal skeletons picked clean by vultures and scattered around poisoned wells. Whose settlements were they? Ethiopian or Somali? I could not tell. With the wells poisoned, there was no sign of life. The drivers swore vengeance against the Ethiopians, called the Prophet as their witness, and cursed the Emperor in the vilest of words. I rode with my heart in my mouth, dreading an Ethiopian ambush, because our fate could be dreadful. Again we passed abandoned settlements of thatched mud huts, smashed, testifying to fierce, ludicrous fighting. Once, we slept in such a place. At night the hyenas moved in, smelled carrion and raised their mad sneering laughter.

Nevertheless, when Marcos asked me if this was my first time in the Ogaden, I answered that yes, it was my first time. It would not have been pleasant for him to hear that I had seen that war through the eyes of the Somali drivers. That I had trembled in fear of the Ethiopian army. That I had dreamed of our convoy having a Somali army escort. And now everything had turned around. Now I feared that the Somalis would attack our camp. I had nothing against either nation, but circumstances had forced me to take sides in that conflict — first one side and now the other.

We went to where the Somali tents stood. Getahun called a meeting of the council of elders. Four of them came. I started asking them how old they were. The oldest was thirty-four. The unfavourable, indeed hostile, land did not permit them a long life. They said that the year consists of the rainy season, called gu, and the dry season—jilal. Rain is the sweetness of life. The earth covers itself with grass and the wells fill with water. That is the time for marriages, when the strength comes out in men and a desire for everything awakens in women. But gu ends quickly and jilal sets in. The sun burns the grass and dries up the wells. Then they have to roll up their tents and set out seeking pasture and water. The season of dangers and wars follows, since the pasture is scant and cannot accommodate all the herds. If some clan wants to occupy a pasture, it must wage war for it. People die so that the livestock can live. Similar wars are fought over wells, since there is too little water to divide among everyone.

Around every well, the ground is full of human bones.

In search of water and pasture, they cross the endless space of the Ogaden. They are always on the road. Because of this imperative to move, the Somali owns nothing aside from his shirt and his gun. There is the Somali, and there is his flock. His wife owns a tent, a tea-kettle, and a pot. They do not accumulate any inanimate objects, which would only be a burden. After all, the chances of survival depend on who reaches the pasture and the wells first. Therefore, their desires run in a direction contrary to the ideals and ambitions of people in the industrialized world. There, people walk through life gathering a thousand things; the Somali discards everything at the side of the road as he walks.

He walks proud, slender, tall, humming verses of the Koran.

In these wanderings he acknowledges no borders; for him the world is not divided into states, but into places where there is water, and therefore life, and places where there is drought, and therefore death. They say that there has been no gu for several years, that an eternal jilal has prevailed. Everything has changed. For a time they wandered as before, but they found water more and more rarely. The desert grew larger, became enormous, had no boundaries. First the sheep fell, and later the goats. Then the children began to die, and later the asses fell. Next, the women died. Anyone who comes across a tea-kettle or a pot while walking will find the remains of the woman nearby. Next, the camels fell. They — these four thirty-year-old elders — kept going. Or rather, at the beginning there were more than a dozen of them, but the others gradually dropped away, dying of thirst and exhaustion. These four, as well, finally ran out of strength.

They lay in the sun unable to take a single step; one of them sat on a stone.

The one who was sitting up noticed the distant Land-Rover in which people drove around the desert searching for dying Somalis. That was how they found themselves in the camp, where they stealthily hoarded corn so that they could buy camels and return to their world.

Marcos brought word yesterday that a tank truck is going to try to get through to Dire Dawa: 900 kilometres, three days on the road. But the next airplane might not come for two months and there is no other chance to get out of here. It is hazardous since the partisans are mining the roads and getting yourself blown up is easy. We could also run into an ambush, in which case they would either kidnap us or kill us. The discussion lasts all night, since departure is at dawn and we have to decide. The tank truck has to get to Dire Dawa to bring back fuel, which is running low in Gode. Fuel for the pumps that draw water out of the river and into the corn fields. If the pumps stop, the corn will wither and hunger will return. If the tank truck is blown up, then the death that the four elders avoided will catch up with them here.

The officer asks if we are afraid to go.

We are afraid, but what can we do? If only there were a truck full of soldiers. But the soldiers sit in their bases and only move when they have to.

On the other hand, it is better to go without an escort. We are innocent people, on our way to get fuel that is needed to save your Somali brothers.

Yes, but if we hit a mine the whole argument becomes pointless.

At dawn, we drive to the nearby settlement to look for the tank truck. The driver is asleep under his vehicle; we wake him. At that hour, it is even cold.

We set out jammed into the cab, jolting over the rocks and stones at a speed of ten kilometres per hour. Day breaks and the sun shines into our faces.