while tracing some other errors I had a look at ifup-routes and I think
there is an error:

--- ifup-routes.orig    Mon Mar  5 21:32:23 2001
+++ ifup-routes Tue Mar 13 23:07:13 2001
@@ -14,6 +14,7 @@
        exit 0
 fi
 
+DEVICE=$1
 #note the trailing space in the grep gets rid of aliases
 grep "^$DEVICE " /etc/sysconfig/static-routes | while read device args; do
        /sbin/route add -$args $device