Ethiopian Rebel Group Attacks Oil Field, Kills 74 (Update2)
By Abyinur Abate and Antony Sguazzin
April 24 (Bloomberg) -- The Ogaden National Liberation Front, a rebel group demanding an independent state within Ethiopia, claimed responsibility for an attack on a Chinese-run oil field that left 74 people dead, the African nation said.
Bereket Simon, an aide to Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi, confirmed the death toll in an interview and said seven workers had been kidnapped during the incident near the town of Abole. The area is in eastern Ethiopia near the border with Somalia.
Nine Chinese workers and 65 Ethiopians working for the Zhongyuan Petroleum Exploration Bureau under the China Petroleum and Chemical Corp. were slain, the acting manager of the company, Xu Shang, was quoted as saying by China's state-run Xinhua news agency.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao in Beijing described the deadly assault as an ``atrocious armed attack'' and asked Ethiopia to step up security for Chinese in the country, according to Xinhua.
The Ogaden group is fighting for an independent state for ethnic Somalis. It warned last year that any investment in the Ogaden area that also benefited the Ethiopian government ``would not be tolerated.''
Today the group circulated an e-mail message that said it would not allow ``the mineral resources of our people to be exploited by this regime or any firm'' with whom it does business, the New York Times reported on its Web site.
200 Gunmen
About 200 gunmen were involved in the attack at about 6 a.m. at the oil site, Xu said, according to Xinhua. It lasted 50 minutes.
The rebel group was founded in 1984, according to its Web site. The predominantly Muslim Ogaden region was transferred to mainly Christian Ethiopia in three stages in 1941, 1954 and 1956 by the U.K., which controlled the area after the defeat of Italian invaders in World War II, according to the Ogaden Web site.
The region lies between Oromia state to the West, Afar state to the northwest, Kenya to the south, Djibouti to the north and Somalia to the east.
Ethiopia's intervention in Somalia may have motivated the attack, said Stephen Morrison, executive director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy study group in Washington.
``The Horn of Africa is endemic with tit-for-tat cross- border proxy warfare,'' Morrison said. ``The Ethiopians are in Somalia pounding the living daylights out of the Islamists, and the Islamists and their buddies, including the Eritreans, have every incentive to fight back using proxies,'' he said in a telephone interview.
To contact the reporter on this story: Abyinur Abate in Addis Ababa through the Johannesburg bureau on asguazzin@bloomberg.net ; Antony Sguazzin in Johannesburg asguazzin@bloomberg.net |
