A child clings to its mother's beads in this file picture of a famine-hit Ethiopian village. The road from Harar runs for more than 600 miles east towards the border with Somalia, penetrating deep into the desiccated badlands of the Ogaden desert, the dusty heart of Ethiopia's war-torn Somali regional state. Sparse scrub and thorn bush, brown termite mounds, and flocks of bony sheep edge up against the burning asphalt strip. Wandering camels are a hazard to traffic; but vehicles are few. Like the occasional herdsman, standing outside transportable mudul huts, they stare in mild surprise as white U.N. Land Cruisers race by. The road's destination is Gode, via the regional capital of Jijiga, and the towns of Kebri Beyah, Degehabur and Kebri Dehar. But the part-finished two-lane road also blazes a figurative path, unwelcome to some, into the isolated and disputed fiefdoms of one of the world's most opaque, dangerous and misunderstood Muslim insurgencies. This is the land that the self-styled separatists of the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) claim as their own. Exactly what the ethnic Somalis of the ONLF want