http://dspace-roma3.caspur.it/bitstream ... uction.pdf
During this period, we had lost a war with the
Russian-backed forces of Ethiopia. How many Somalis had
been killed in the war we never learnt.
Though we had been defeated
in the Ogaden War it was by forces that the Soviet Union had
brought from the ‘Socialist Camp’, not by Mengistu’s forces.
The Cubans had brought their troops from Angola to
Ethiopia to fight against the Somalis. A Cuban Diplomat
once told me in Dar-es-Salaam, that “for the Cubans that was
a very hard war
I continued speaking, undiplomatically, adopting the tone
with which he had begun our meeting. “You Russians must
have seen in your military records what the Somalis were
capable of. If the military experts and troops of the Soviet
Union and its allies, including the Cubans, had not engaged
in the War, you know what we could have done to the
Ethiopians. In war, someone has to lose. Today you are with
them [Ethiopia] and so it is to you that I say, tell them to let
the people of the Ogaden go free. Before you, there were
others,who have now left, as you too are bound to leave the
area. And the moment you leave the people will rise again.”
I ended with a proverbial kind of statement:
“You are like the broom and the Somalis are the ground.
The broom will perish and the ground will remain.”
Mohamed Siad signed an agreement with
Mengistu Haile Mariam abandoning the Ogaden in 1986. In
short, by 1986 the Somali leaders had unofficially and
indirectly renounced all claim to our ‘missing territories’
