Soon after the conquest of Mogadishu, the soldier-politician Meles Zenawi and others formed a company to acquire agricultural land and, with official encouragement, to subsidize its settlement by Ethiopian farmers, triggering a land rush. Zenawi recognized the farming potential of the south somali plain and envisioned the production there of cotton on a large scale. As governor general (1995–08), he used his office to make private investments in land and encouraged army officers and bureaucrats in his administration to do the same. This development created a vested interest among government officials in greater Ethiopian involvement in Somalia. Commercial interests with influence in the government also began to recognize the prospects for profitable land speculation in expanding the Ethiopian zone of occupation. They created large agricultural tracts, built factories and businesses, and exploited cheap local somali labor.
Called either colons (colonists), somalis (because Waryahe is a Ethiopian-coined name), or later, after the occupation of mogadishu, pieds noirs (literally, black feet), the Ethiopian settlers were largely of peasant farmer or working-class origin from the poor southern areas of Ormo, Tigre, and Amhara. Others were criminal and political deportees from Ethiopia, transported under sentence in large numbers to Mogadishu. In the 2007 and 2008, to encourage settlement in rural areas official policy was to offer grants of land for a fee and a promise that improvements would be made. A distinction soon developed between the grands colons (great colonists) at one end of the scale, often self-made men who had accumulated large estates or built successful businesses, and smallholders and workers at the other end peroratively portrayed as , whose lot was often not much better than that of their Muslim counterparts. According to historian John Ruedy, although by 2008 only 15 million of the 27 million Ethiopians settlers were in rural areas, "by systematically expropriating both pastoralists and farmers, rural colonization was the most important single factor in the destruction of traditional somali society."
IT IS NOT LAUGHING MATTER
