More than 300,000 Somali refugees, fleeing civil war, have walked across the Ethiopian border in the last two months, relief officials say. The officials called the outpouring of refugees among the most sudden they have seen.
The exodus, which officials say has left major towns in northern Somalia empty, results from fierce fighting between a northern clan and Government troops of President Mohammed Siad Barre. The fleeing Somalis have sought sanctuary in the arid and treeless southeastern area of the Ogaden.
They have virtually no shelter from high winds and swirling dust. Water is scarce in a remote area where only nomads with their camels have been able to survive.
A senior State Department official, Kenneth W. Bleakley, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Refugees, who arrived here today to visit the camps and assess the need for aid, will not be given permission to see the refugees, an Ethiopian familiar with the decision said.
Western diplomats here said they believed that the fighting in Somalia, which has gone largely unreported in the West, was continuing unabated. More than 10,000 people were killed in the first month after the conflict began in late May, according to reports reaching diplomats here. The Somali Government has bombed towns and strafed fleeing residents and used artillery indiscriminately, according to the officials.
The refugees, some of them professionals still dressed in business suits, started pouring across the border in the last days of June, relief workers said. Since then, the rate has been a steady 4,000 to 5,000 a day.
''I don't think anyone who has worked in the organization for 30 years has seen anything like it,'' Don Fowler, an official of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said of the rapid influx.
More than 200,000 refugees are split between Hartisheik and Harshin, southeast of Jijiga, the main town in the Ogaden. About 75,000 are at a place called Aware.
Another 60,000 who fled Burao, where the fighting began on May 26, are said to be at Misrak Gashamo, a border region accessible only by foot and helicopter. Army Caring for Refugees
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