Haud

Hawd (or Haud) is a region of thorn-bush and grasslands in the Horn of Africa. It includes the eastern side Somali region or the Hawd Reserve Area.

"Hawd" redirects here. For the administrative division of the autonomous Somaliland region of Somalia, see Hawd Region.

Overview

The Haud is of indeterminate extent; some authorities consider it denotes the part of Ethiopia east of the city of Harar. I.M. Lewis provides a much more detailed description, indicating that it reaches south from the foothills of the Golia and Ogo Mountains. "The northern and eastern tips lie within the Somali Republic, while the western and southern portions (the later merging with the Ogaden plateau) form part of the Harari Province of Ethiopia."[1] For decades it (as well as the entire Ogaden) has been an area of conflict and controversy.

The British exerted control of the Ogaden beginning in 1941 as part of the Anglo-Ethiopian Agreement, administering the Haud as part of their adjacent colony of British Somaliland, although Ethiopian sovereignty was still recognized in the area.[2] This region was defined in the 1942 agreement as including the Ethiopian territory within a continuous belt of Ethiopian territory 25 miles [40 km] wide contiguous to the frontier of French Somaliland running from the frontier of Eritrea to the Franco-Ethiopian Railway. Thence south-west along the railway to the bridge at Haraua. Thence south and south-east, excluding Gildessa, to the north-eastern extremity of the Garais Mountains and along the crest of the ridge of these mountains to their intersection with the frontier of the former Italian colony of Somalia. Thence along the frontier to its junction with British Somaliland.[3]

See also

• Somali Acacia-Commiphora bushlands and thickets, the ecoregion that includes the Haud.

Notes

1. I.M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Somali, fourth edition (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), pp. 2f
2. According to the map in John Spencer, Ethiopia at Bay: A personal account of the Haile Selassie years (Algonac: Reference Publications, 1984), pp. 186f, the Haud covered an area adjacent to British Somaliland south of 9° latitude and covering the modern woredas of Aware, Misraq Gashamo, Danot and Boh.
3. Quoted in D. J. Latham Brown, "The Ethiopia-Somaliland Frontier Dispute", International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 5 (1956), pp. 256f

Further reading

• Theodore M. Vestal, "Consequences of the British Occupation of Ethiopia During World War II".
• Leo Silberman, Why the Haud was ceded, Cahiers d'études africaines, vol. 2, cahier 5 (1961), pp. 37–83.