ONLF (Ogaden National Liberation Front)

[Red Future]

What isthe Revleft view on the ONLF and its struggle against the Ethiopian Government for a self-governing Ogaden region.Do you support them ?

http://onlf.org/

[Hiero]

There is no "revleft view", there is no consensus.

[Red Future]

There is no "revleft view", there is no consensus.
I guessed so , I just wanted any views on the group ?

[X5N]

I believe in self-determination for all peoples. Not sure about the ONLF though. I don't know much about it. Haven't even heard of it before today.

[Olentzero]

Just gave a talk on Lundin Oil and Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt's involvement in extracting oil from Ethiopia and how it's connected to the jailing of the two Swedish journalists, so I picked up a little about them, mostly from a Human Rights Watch report from 2008 which you can read here (http://www.hrw.org/features/ogaden-war-crimes-ethiopia-0).

Suffice it to say neither the Ethiopian government nor the ONLF have their hands clean on this one. While the ONLF has stood up for self-determination in the region, they apparently have done so in a way that makes other local tribes think they're only fighting for self-determination for the Ogaadeeni. It also looks like the ONLF have committed human rights abuses - admittedly I only skimmed sections of the report to get a better idea of the history of the region and didn't look at the laundry list of horrors detailed by HRW - so for me it's absolute support for the right to self-determination of all tribes in Ethiopia, but no confidence that the ONLF is the vehicle for achieving it.

[aty]

There will be demonstrations against Carl Bildt and his involvement in the genocide in Ogaden and Sudan in several cities in Sweden tomorrow.

[Red Future]

There will be demonstrations against Carl Bildt and his involvement in the genocide in Ogaden and Sudan in several cities in Sweden tomorrow.

Thanks for the info.I sent the ONLF an email to clarify their position on National Liberation for the Ogaden.I hope that this will clarify some issues about them.They have been sadly ignored by progressive people around the world.

Note I think Mosfield and the Maoists are supporters of ONLF.

[Sankara1983]

Wasn't the ONLF the group that the U.S.-backed dictatorship in Somalia used in an expansionist proxy war against the Ethiopian Derg regime in the '70s and '80s? If so, why support it?

[Olentzero]

That's a good question - I don't think they were, but again I haven't read the Human Rights Watch report I linked to earlier all that thoroughly. They do have a brief history of the region in one section, you could probably find something about that in there.

[Ismail]

Wasn't the ONLF the group that the U.S.-backed dictatorship in Somalia used in an expansionist proxy war against the Ethiopian Derg regime in the '70s and '80s? If so, why support it?No, that was the Western Somali Liberation Front, which was formed and carried out its operations before the Soviets turned against Somalia and opportunistically backed Ethiopia out of geopolitical concerns. The WSLF became increasingly weaker as the 80's progressed and in 1988 Somalia stopped supporting it in return for Ethiopia stopping support for anti-government rebels in Somalia (which Ethiopia didn't really do.) The ONLF became prominent in opposition to the WSLF around 1984.

It wasn't an "expansionist" demand for Somalia to reunite the Ogaden with it, just as it wasn't an evil plot for Eritreans to demand a separate state from Ethiopia. The British gave the Ogaden/Haud region to Ethiopia in the 50's against the wishes of politically conscious Somalis. The Ogaden was/is an important region for Somali nomads and herders since they can get access to water and fodder there and the region obviously has a clear Somali majority.

Ethiopian Marxist-Leninists opposed the stand of the Ethiopian national-chauvinist Derg government and supported true federalism and the right of nations to self-determination. They fought against the Derg with such a purpose in mind. Although as noted in A Political History of the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front Marxism-Leninism in Ethiopia was handled quite poorly, e.g. pp. 215-216:

The TPLF’s reorientation of Marxism-Leninism from the Chinese to the Albanian interpretation was also the making of Meles [Zenawi] after he read a journal sent by the Union of Tigraians in North America (UTNA)... For Meles and his supporters, the Stalinist revolutionary line and the Albanian version of socialism were truly Marxist-Leninist. The Chinese path, which had embraced the national bourgeoisie as a strategic ally in its new democratic revolution, was discarded as a ‘revisionist system capitulating to the bourgeois order’. The MLLT was to be constructed on these ideological foundations.The Marxist-Leninist League of Tigray (MLLT) didn't become very influential in terms of getting its ideology cemented and didn't really operate like a vanguard party, so Zenawi quickly led the way in pretending Albania didn't exist after 1991.