by Guy Arnold
Kaunda’s anti-British diatribe reflected his deep disillusionment with the country that he had turned to first for assistance and whose motives he had believed were honourable until its more or less overt support for the white regimes in the South taught him a different lesson. Work on the TANZAM began in October 1970; on 27 August 1973 the railway tracks crossed the border from Tanzania into Zambia. Deliberate scepticism in the Western press – that the Chinese could not finance the line, that they were incapable of building it properly, that it would fall behind schedule – told more about Western attitudes than Chinese performance and such criticisms became more muted as the line progressed.
Negotiations with the Chinese by Zambia and Tanzania had begun in 1967 and once the agreement had been finalized in 1970 Chinese ships were to appear regularly at Dar es Salaam bringing workers and equipment and the line was then built at a spectacularly fast pace. In October 1975 the line was officially declared open although it had reached the old Zambian line of rail at Kapiri Mposhi in central Zambia months earlier to become part of the whole Zambian network. The raison d’être of the TANZAM was always political: to enable Zambia to be independent of the white South and to provide it with an additional exit route that might still be needed after UDI in Rhodesia had come to an end, depending upon Zambia’s relations with its other neighbours. South Africa opposed the TANZAM because it wanted to retain as large a part of its northern neighbour’s trade as possible for both economic and political reasons. The more of its trade that it captured and the fewer options available to Zambia the greater would be South African dominance and control over Zambia and the region as a whole. Both Nyerere and Kaunda emphasized that the line would give them greater security and more choice, and make them less dependent upon the South. Its construction, despite all the Western pressures against it, represented a victory over Western neo-colonial manipulation. The railway was not strategic for Tanzania in the way it was for Zambia but it gave promise that the remote southern region of the country could be opened up for agricultural production and mineral exploration. Even as the railway extended southwards there was an immediate and encouraging use of it by people who lived along its path.
The history of the TANZAM Railway reveals the extent of Western sympathies with the white South and the lengths to which the West would go to forestall an African venture that threatened its interests. In 1965, prior to UDI in Rhodesia, Kaunda and Nyerere announced that they had decided upon such a railway and they invited offers of assistance. In July 1965 Nyerere told a press conference that the railway should be built and said: ‘I am prepared to accept money from whoever offers it and see it is built.’ The two presidents made extensive soundings for aid but in the end only the People’s Republic of China offered support on the scale required and this amounted to the largest single economic assistance project financed by China. It was made after much prior manoeuvring.
A World Bank study of such a line had been carried out for Zambia shortly before independence but its findings were lukewarm. The report suggested that the region was already sufficiently served by railways, which was clearly a Western-biased conclusion, given the race politics of the region. Even should the routes to the south be closed to Zambia, the World Bank argued that there were still sufficient existing alternatives. Such a conclusion was either wilfully obtuse or had not taken any account of the politics of the region. The World Bank advocated improved road facilities. A UN report then endorsed the World Bank view and this, too, ignored the political realities. Then Kaunda and Nyerere made joint approaches to Britain, the United States, France and West Germany. Britain did finance a survey by the Maxwell Stamp Company and this was being carried out when UDI was declared and Zambia’s needs became pressing. The Maxwell Stamp report was positive: it considered the political aspects, the possibility of carrying copper and agricultural products and argued that it would complement existing lines. It estimated the cost at US$350 million and advocated the expenditure of an additional US$33 million to expand the harbour at Dar es Salaam. The Maxwell Stamp report was subsequently subjected to criticisms by the World Bank, the United Nations and the African Development Bank, and the three organizations proposed to undertake a further survey. This suggestion was rejected by the two presidents, for by then they had decided to accept the Chinese offer.
Western objections to the TANZAM, accompanied by much denigration of the proposal and delaying tactics, were based upon two considerations: that such a railway would detach Zambia from the South African sphere of influence and that, in strategic terms, it would point like an arrow at the white heartland. Kaunda claimed that Western objections to the line were all based ‘on political and ideological grounds’. And in 1969 Nyerere said, ‘The world has never seen such a profusion of railway projects in Southern Africa as those which are now being canvassed – all of them… designed to try to stop the TANZAM railway from being built.’7 In September 1967, therefore, Zambia, Tanzania and China signed an agreement in Beijing: China would build the railway, finance it, supply technical personnel and train local manpower. A survey followed and the final agreement was signed in July 1970. Construction began almost at once and Chinese ships arriving at Dar es Salaam thereafter were given priority for unloading. The West, which had been invited first to build the line, had turned down the chance, deployed endless arguments against the need for it, and then belittled the Chinese capacity to do the job. Now the West saw the line being constructed at speed. Over the years of construction from 1970 to 1975 constant rumours were circulated about the number of Chinese working on the line and though the Chinese probably never exceeded their official figure of 18,000 it was suggested that 45,000 Chinese had been drafted into Tanzania. The West, in classic Cold War mode as it saw China accumulating both influence and respect in East/Central Africa, speculated as to what the Chinese would do when the railway was completed. The Rhodesians were alarmed chiefly because of the impending loss of revenue for their railway system while the South African Prime Minister, Johannes Vorster, saw only the advancing ‘yellow peril’; both countries believed that the TANZAM would enable Zambia to escape from the white southern orbit.
The Chinese performance was impressive. China equipped and financed a single-track line of 1,162 miles length that embraced 147 stations, 300 bridges, 21 tunnels and 2,200 culverts. They constructed a 10-track marshalling yard at Dar es Salaam and repair yards at Dar es Salaam, Mbeya and Mpika. The finance to pay for the project came to approximately US$412 million in the form of an interest-free loan with repayment to begin in 1983 while Tanzania and Zambia would bear local costs. The railway would soon be beset by a number of difficulties due to structural faults while the exigencies of UDI forced Zambia to use Rhodesia Railways again in 1978. Even so, it was the politics surrounding the TANZAM Railway rather than its actual construction, dramatic as that was, which revealed so much about Western attitudes towards Africa at that time. The West was more interested in maintaining the economic and political dominance of the white South over the region than in assisting two independent African countries break free of that dominance, an attitude that reinforced the prevalent African accusations of Western neo-colonialism and racism.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Cold War Comes to The Horn
The Horn of Africa became entangled in Cold War manoeuvres as early as 1950 when the United States effectively replaced the colonial powers of Britain and Italy as the principal source of external support for the regime of Emperor Haile Selassie in Ethiopia. That year the United States insisted upon a federation of Ethiopia and Eritrea to forestall moves by the latter towards full independence; the USSR by contrast supported independence for Eritrea and the creation of a corridor to give Ethiopia direct access to the Red Sea. The US view prevailed, however, and for the next 20 years Ethiopia was a major recipient of US aid.
The strategic importance of the Horn gave its conflicts a wider significance than they would otherwise have achieved. The Horn of Africa protrudes into the Red
Sea and Indian Ocean at the maritime crossroads between West and East, Africa and Asia, and control of the Horn by a major power would enable it to dominate the Arabian Peninsula from the south. At this time the Horn comprised four political entities: Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea and the Territory of the Afars and Issas, which became independent from France in 1977 as Djibouti. Ethiopia and Somalia had a long history of antagonism and conflict over their disputed border region; independent Somalia had been formed in 1960 by the union of British Somaliland and former Italian Somaliland. Subsequently it laid claim to the three territories of Djibouti, the Ogaden region of Ethiopia and the Northern Frontier Province of Kenya. In the early 1970s, despite being a Muslim but non-Arab state, Somalia had sought and obtained substantial aid from the USSR and in 1974 was admitted to membership of the Arab League. Ethiopia, as well as Somalia, claimed Djibouti, whose port was vital to Ethiopia’s commerce with the outside world. The wars that afflicted the region during the 1970s were extremely costly, not just in terms of the material destruction of infrastructure that took place but also because of the suffering they caused to the most vulnerable sectors of the societies concerned while they retarded the development of the region by a decade or more.
Ethiopia was by far the most important of the four Horn territories. In 1974 it had an estimated population of 27.8 million, one of the largest in Africa, and with Eritrea covered 475,000 square miles with a 500-mile coastline on the Red Sea. It had an ancient history and, apart from the Mussolini interregnum (1935–41), had never been colonized. The great prestige of Emperor Haile Selassie at the beginning of the 1960s persuaded the other African countries to make Addis Ababa the headquarters of the OAU when it was formed in 1963. He, however, presided over one of the poorest countries on the continent: agriculture accounted for 99 per cent of export earnings with coffee the dominant crop while 88 per cent of the population worked on the land. The average per capita GDP (1974) was only US$76. Up to the beginning of the 1970s Ethiopia’s foreign policy was Western oriented, mainly due to strong US influence while it maintained close relations with Israel as a nearby non-Muslim country, in part to offset Arab support for Eritrean secessionists. Haile Selassie, however, represented an imperial-feudal tradition whose days were numbered and by the beginning of the 1970s his people were waiting for the ‘Old Man’ to die so that some radical changes could be implemented.
THE DEVELOPING CRISIS IN ETHIOPIA
On 16 December 1970, reacting to the growing threat from the Eritrean rebels, Haile Selassie declared a state of emergency throughout most of the province of Eritrea, claiming that foreign governments were training people as bandits, supplying them with arms and helping them infiltrate Ethiopia to embark upon banditry, sabotage and subversion within Eritrea. The foreign governments in question were Sudan, which provided rebel Eritreans with asylum, Syria, where the leaders of the Eritrean Liberation Movement (ELF) were based, and Iraq. Support for the Eritreans was also being provided by Saudi Arabia and Yemen and such support had been growing since 1962 when the Ethiopian government had abrogated the federal status of Eritrea to integrate it into a single Ethiopian state. The army was now placed in control of the two ports of Massawa and Assab and the border with Sudan was closed. By 1971 the whole province had been brought under military control; ELF responded by stepping up its guerrilla attacks. In some ways, according to the London Observer, the rebellion bore the overtones of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The rebels at this time were mainly Eritrean Arabic-speaking Muslims backed by several Arab countries that resented the Emperor’s close relations with Israel. Arms for the rebels were being supplied by Russia while the Ethiopian army was largely American armed and trained.1 Over Christmas 1970 the Ethiopian air force carried out bombing raids on Eritrean targets and ELF claimed that 1,000 Eritreans had been killed since the declaration of a state of emergency while 37,000 refugees had fled to Sudan.
The roots of the Eritrean struggle can be traced to the Scramble for Africa when Italy, defeated by the Ethiopians at the battle of Adowa in 1896, was able to retrieve something from the disaster by making Eritrea an Italian colony. Growing Eritrean resentment at the Federal connection with Ethiopia that had been created under UN auspices in 1952 became an outright demand for secession in 1962 when the Ethiopian Parliament, which the Eritreans described as the Emperor’s rubber stamp, voted to incorporate Eritrea into a unitary Ethiopia. Thereafter, ELF demanded secession and full independence. By early 1971 the war developing in Eritrea was described as 10 times greater than the war then being waged in Chad; it involved two-thirds of the Ethiopian army. Growing Arab support for the Eritreans ensured a commensurate growth of Israeli support for Ethiopia.2
The failure of Haile Selassie on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, 23 July 1972, to announce plans for a constitutional transfer of power precipitated a period of uncertainty for by this time the Emperor was uncertain in his actions and his unsteady hand on the tiller of state paralysed decision-making.3 As a result Ethiopia entered a phase of marking time as it waited for the Old Man to pass on. Opposition to his rule became more vocal and was no longer just confined to modernizing radicals but also included members of the establishment who, aware that change had to come, were busy jockeying for position. Two events exerted particular pressure upon the Emperor’s weakening grip on power: the growing rebellion in Eritrea; and the disastrous handling of the drought and famine in Wollo Province. Even so, until the end of 1973, Haile Selassie regarded both the war in Eritrea and the famine in Wollo as distant problems; more important was growing unrest in the army.
By July 1973 an estimated 1,874,000 people in the four northern provinces of Tigre, Wollo, Northern Shoa and Begemder were affected by the drought, while huge losses of livestock were impoverishing the nomads of the region. Massive aid was urgently required and, even so, it would take several years to build up the cattle herds again. The immediate relief efforts were insufficient. There was need for long-term measures to include farm diversification and the development of cash crops other than grain, the encouragement of rural industries, more irrigation, anti-erosion measures, re-afforestation, well-digging, improved grain storage, cattle improvement and nutrition education – in fact, an agricultural revolution to modernize a way of life that had not changed in centuries.4 By the end of 1973 the impact of the drought upon the country’s politics could no longer be ignored: between 50,000 and 100,000 people in central Ethiopia had died and two million more were directly affected by conditions that had been worsening over three years.
Thirteen refugee camps were established in Wollo province and as many as 712,000 out of three million people had become famine victims. Relief was hampered by the inaccessibility of the region. Following student protests in Addis Ababa, the government asked friendly countries for help but its first appeals were low key as it did not wish to admit to a major crisis. However, a great proportion of the medical and food supplies that were poured into the famine area by the government never reached their destinations; instead, corrupt government administrators and their aides sold the relief supplies or kept them. Subsequently, the government acted quickly and most of the profiteers were rounded up for trial. Foolishly, the government did not give the famine wide publicity and so was accused of minimizing the facts. The Ministry of the Interior wanted publicity, the Ministry of Tourism did not, while the government was averse to publicizing the corruption that had been uncovered for fear of giving the country a bad name. In the end the facts came out and did more harm than otherwise they need have done. Writing in The Times, Patrick Gilkes argued that though the climate caused the famine, the land system made it worse. Despite government attempts at land reform, the land tenure system and tenant-landlord relations were feudal. In Wollo, of 375,000 landless peasants 150,000 were tenants and of these, according to official figures, over 90,000 paid at least 50 per cent of their produce, with an upper limit of 75 per cent, to their landlords; 27 per cent of the landlords were absent, 40 per cent were deceased and only t
enants on government land had the security of a written lease. There was no control over evictions of those who did not possess a lease except an appeal to the landlords in their capacity as local government officials. Land reform had been opposed in parliament, a majority of whose members were landlords.5 Voluntary donations were made by members of the government and the Emperor to relieve the distress but failed lamentably to match the scale of the crisis.
In the post-World War II era Ethiopia had become a close ally of the United States, which had stepped in to replace older ties with the European colonial powers. The US had initiated currency reforms leading Ethiopia to sever its dollar from the British pound and tie it to the US dollar instead. Thereafter, Ethiopia had become one of the few countries in Africa that appeared to matter to the US. The US had secured a base for itself in Eritrea at Kagnew near Asmara. When, on 2 December 1952, the UN General Assembly passed, by 46 to 10 votes with four abstentions, Resolution 390 which embraced the US-initiated federal formula for Ethiopia and Eritrea against the Russian proposal for Eritrean independence it could be said that the Cold War had come to the Horn of Africa. The subsequent UN Commission found the Ethiopian demands relating to federation excessive and conceded less power to Ethiopia in Eritrea than it had demanded. ‘While the Commissioner was drafting the constitution, the British Military Administration (that had been responsible for Eritrea since the end of the war) was convening the Eritrean Assembly. The Assembly adopted the constitution with “minor modifications”. Haile Selassie ratified the constitution on August 6, 1952, and the Federal Act on September 11. Hence began the Ethio-Eritrean Federation.’6 The climate of Cold War secrecy at the time was such that the US base facilities in Eritrea were unknown to Congress. Washington provided military assistance to Haile Selassie’s government and this was increased following a secret US-Ethiopian defence pact in 1960. The US paid millions of dollars to the Ethiopian regime as part of the arrangement; the payments were ‘rents’ for Kagnew and naval bases in Eritrea and were made without most members of Congress knowing about the existence of these ‘secret’ facilities. Kagnew and the naval bases in Eritrea became controversial in the US Congress when, in 1970, a Senate sub-committee on foreign relations probed into the commitments of the US to Haile Selassie’s regime.7 The sub-committee revealed that US ‘aid’ to the Haile Selassie government was the highest in Africa since the early 1950s and by 1970 had reached a quarter of a billion dollars. In the light of this US support Haile Selassie felt able, on 15 November 1962, to issue Order No. 27 which ‘hereby wholly integrated into the unitary system of administration of Our Empire’ Eritrea. The secessionist war followed.