Africa

by Guy Arnold

  The decision to intensify the war against the Eritrean secessionists, arguably, spelt the long-term defeat of the Dergue itself since, as became clear over the following decade, the war was unwinnable. Immediately, the new campaign restored the army’s initiative although at the cost of between 2,528 and 3,500 Ethiopian soldiers killed. This major assault did not destroy the Eritrean capacity to resist; rather, it inflamed Eritrean nationalism when 300,000 people were driven from their homes and 50,000 crossed into Sudan as refugees to join the 450,000 already there. When the Dergue prevented either the Red Cross or NGOs taking food to the refugees the effect was to harden Eritrean resolve. At this time the ELF and EPLF reluctantly formed a joint command though it was not to last.

  In February 1977 the PMAC, at Mengistu’s instigation, carried out another purge that included the execution of Gen. Teferi Bante, its chairman; Mengistu, who had long been seen as the most influential member of the Dergue, finally became its chairman. This event was seen as the defining point of the Ethiopian revolution in both East and West. The left-wing radical wing of the Dergue had finally triumphed. This was confirmed in April when PMAC closed down various US institutions in the country including the Kagnew Military Base, the Military Assistance Advisory Groups (MAAGs), the Naval Medical Research Unit (NAMRU) and the USIS. In May Mengistu led a PMAC mission to Moscow where a ‘Declaration of the Basic Principles of Friendly Mutual Relations and Co-operation’, the prelude to a full friendship treaty, was announced. Ethiopia at once began to receive massive supplies of weapons and other economic assistance from the USSR and other socialist countries and this marked the end of Ethiopia’s dependence upon the US for military assistance and the beginning of an Ethiopian alliance with the socialist world. Later that May US President Jimmy Carter ‘cut off military assistance and sale credits to Ethiopia’. He cited the violation of human rights as the reason for his action.

  THE OGADEN WAR

  The Ogaden war between Ethiopia and Somalia (1977–78) demonstrated the cynicism of Cold War politics as the United States switched its support from Ethiopia to Somalia and the USSR did the same thing in reverse, deserting its Somali ally for what it saw as the greater African prize of Ethiopia. The huge involvement of the two superpowers in the Horn contributed nothing to solving regional problems, but only served to emphasize African vulnerability and big power opportunism.

  The Somali drought of 1975 was the worst in memory, affecting the pastoral nomads of the northern region who comprised 75 per cent of the population. The disaster forced the government to put its Five-Year Development Plan on hold, incur large debts and concentrate on relief measures. The government handled the crisis efficiently. Siad Barre was a far more complex character than later appraisals of his performance suggested and was the only person after independence to come near to uniting the Somali clans in a single national system. Like all Somalis, he was fiercely determined to safeguard the country’s independence and he took care to balance the growing Somali relationship with the USSR that he established in the early 1970s by promoting closer ties with the Arab world, which he consolidated in 1974 when Somalia was admitted to membership of the Arab League, despite Arab suspicion of Somalia’s socialism and ties with the Soviet Union. The Somali armed forces were equipped with Soviet arms, yet the government denied BBC claims that it had given base facilities to the USSR. At the same time that the USSR was seen as the country’s principal external ally, Somalia cemented good relations with China, which undertook a road-building programme in the country and welcomed a Somali delegation to Beijing in May 1975 to discuss co-operation in the fields of forestry and agriculture. Had such a visit been to a Western country it would have passed unremarked; since it was to Communist China the Western media elevated it into an ideological alignment.

  When in the 1950s the US negotiated for a military base in Eritrea it acted in the role of Cold War ‘aggressor’ in the Horn and became the principal external support of Ethiopia. At that time the USSR, supporting Eritrean independence, was on the defensive. When Siad Barre came to power in Somalia and initiated a socialist revolution, the USSR saw its chance to obtain a foothold in the Horn, although, as it later discovered, Barre was always his own master, was suitably wary of Russian and Chinese friendship and kept open his options with the West. As the confrontation between Somalia and Ethiopia escalated in 1977 and it became clear that the USSR was switching sides, Somalia expelled its Soviet experts and advisers (in November 1977) and abrogated its Treaty of Friendship with the USSR of 11 July 1974. Meanwhile, until 1975, Cuba had supported the Eritrean secessionists in their fight against Ethiopia; however, as Russia saw the possibility of a greater regional prize as an ally in Ethiopia rather than Somalia, following the Ethiopian revolution, and proceeded to become Mengistu’s principal supporter, it then cynically pressured Cuba into deserting the Eritrean liberation struggle and switching its support to Ethiopia. Once Ethiopia had entered into an alliance with the USSR and was ‘lost’ to the West, the US turned again to Siad Barre and worked to woo Somalia back into the Western camp while, for his part, Barre needed Western support to balance the Soviet desertion. In 1977, therefore, the West calculated that an offer of arms would be sufficient to bring Barre back into its camp and the US and other Western powers ‘promised’ both military and other economic assistance if Somalia would embrace their moves against the Ethiopian revolution. The Saudi monarchy promised between US$330 million and US$500 million to Somalia ‘on the condition that Somalia join the movement to eliminate Russian influence in the Red Sea’.20 In the straitened circumstances in which it found itself, Somalia was eager to accept these Western overtures and began issuing pro-US statements. However, the US found itself in a dilemma since, by the end of 1977, there was too much evidence of Somali aggression in the Ogaden conflict, including Somali warplanes that had been shot down by the Ethiopians, for Mogadishu to deny its support for the WSLF guerrillas. Even so, the US feigned neutrality although it had given Somalia assurances that it would ‘come to their aid’ if they attacked Ethiopia. Saudi Arabia, moreover, had encouraged Somalia to count on Western support. In the event none of substance was forthcoming. ‘The Soviet Union, Cuba and other socialist countries provided unequivocal support to Ethiopia, decisive in the victory over Somalia in March 1978. The US and its NATO allies were caught in a dilemma when the tide began to turn against Somalia. They would have liked to have “openly” intervened on the side of Mogadishu but were apprehensive of the condemnation such an intervention would evoke from many African states which had clearly noted Somalia was the aggressor.’21 Somalia complained that the West had failed it, but continued to seek Western support since it then had no option.

  COMPARISONS

  Somalia’s Barre and Ethiopia’s Mengistu had a good deal in common. Both were revolutionaries and political opportunists, both seized power when their countries required strong leadership to supervise major changes and both were to discover during the 1980s, as many revolutionaries had found before them, that the best of revolutionary intentions could be defeated in the end by the innate conservatism of the people they aspired to lead. When Barre seized power in 1969 he claimed to have done so to combat ‘tribalism, corruption, nepotism and misrule’. He dissolved the National Assembly and set up in its place the Supreme Military Council which instituted military rule. His politics were Marxist inspired and authoritarian; he was then shunned by the Western powers and so turned for aid to the USSR. Although he was a political Marxist Barre was also a practising Muslim who often invoked God in his speeches. He worked hard to gain acceptance from the Arab Muslim world and succeeded in this aim when in 1974 Somalia was invited to join the Arab League. In 1976 Barre attempted to give his regime increased authority when he established the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party (SRSP) on Soviet lines. The party provided the National Assembly with a single list of candidates nominated by its Central Committee but Barre retained effective power in his own hands. He was to be unanimously elected Pres
ident by the People’s Assembly in 1980 and again in 1986. His undoing began when he pushed the Somali claim to the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, although given the strength of Somali irredentism, he may not have been able to resist doing so even had he wanted to. Barre took advantage of the revolution in Ethiopia when in 1977 he committed his army to supporting the WSLF in their Ogaden campaign. He had grossly underestimated the realpolitik of the Russians and the relative value to Moscow of Somalia and Ethiopia as an ally. His Soviet backers deserted him in 1977 for what they saw as the greater prize and in 1978 he faced defeat by the Ethiopians with the aid of their new Russian and Cuban allies.

  When the Ethiopian revolution began with the army mutiny of February 1974 Mengistu, who was an ordnance officer in charge of military supplies, played no part until he was sent to Addis Ababa as the representative of the Third Division to sit on the Armed Forces Coordinating Committee where he found that many of the officers competing for power were his seniors. Although several senior officers were to be given the titular position as Head of State it soon became clear that real power lay with the Armed Forces Coordinating Committee; following the deposition of the Emperor on 12 September 1974 the Committee turned itself into the Provisional Military Administrative Committee (PMAC) or Dergue. Mengistu was elected as one of the two vice-chairmen. He was a charismatic speaker and quickly made his mark; he coined the phrase ‘Ethiopia tikdem’ (Ethiopia first). He had the qualities required of a dictator: he was single-minded, hard working, dedicated and ruthless. In November 1974 when 60 top ranking soldiers and others, including Gen. Andom, were executed, the purge that destroyed them was carried out by forces loyal to Mengistu. He, however, did not push himself forward but allowed Gen. Teferi Bante to become head of state, a post he held for the succeeding two years. In February 1977 Mengistu organized a second putsch against his opponents on the Dergue; Teferi Bante was executed and this time Mengistu seized supreme power and became head of state. He allowed no dissent and though the Dergue turned Ethiopia into a Marxist-Socialist state, dissident groups, including those that adopted Marxist-Leninist policies, were eliminated. Like Barre, Mengistu needed to legitimize and civilianize his regime while retaining control in his own hands. In December 1979 he established a commission to find the correct solution; this was named the Commission for the Organization of a Party of the Workers of Ethiopia (COPWE). However, more than two-thirds of its members remained military men. Gradually its Central Committee took over the functions of PMAC and Mengistu saw that his own supporters were in a dominant position on both committees. These two contemporaries who presided over the revolutions in their respective countries saw their achievements unravel during the 1980s and each was forced into exile in the early 1990s.22

  Unlike the military coups and takeovers that characterized the politics of Africa at this time, the revolution in Ethiopia unfolded along classic lines: it was neither the instant overthrow of a regime by a rebellious army promising to reform a corrupt system nor was it the replacement of one military group by another that considered its turn to rule had come in a newly independent state that was still searching for the most appropriate form of government. The Ethiopian revolution followed a pattern of escalation akin to the French Revolution. It began with gathering protests against the injustices of a long-established and deeply entrenched feudal system that came to a head in strikes, student protests and an army mutiny, though their demands were still for change within the system.23 Thereafter, for a matter of months, the Emperor was left on his throne while his powers were whittled away. The moderates were then replaced by the first group of radicals, ‘guilty’ men of the old regime were executed, the Emperor was first isolated and then deposed and there followed a period in which different revolutionary factions struggled for supremacy, until in 1977, in a second brutal putsch, Mengistu, the Ethiopian ‘Robespierre’, finally emerged at the top to wield undisputed power, enabling him to impose a radical revolution on Ethiopia.

  COLD WAR MANOEUVRES

  It was in keeping with his character that Siad Barre, a fervent Somali nationalist as well as revolutionary and political opportunist, should seize the opportunity offered by the unfolding revolution inside Ethiopia in early 1977 to provide all-out military support for the WSLF guerrillas fighting in the Ogaden region in the hope of achieving one of his people’s irredentist claims and bolstering his own position at the same time. By early 1977 the WSLF was sending ever larger guerrilla units across the border into the Ogaden where they were making substantial gains of territory. In July Barre sent regular army units across the border to support the WSLF thereby changing long-standing guerrilla skirmishing into a full-scale military assault. By that time, however, the Russians were already withdrawing their support from Somalia and providing military assistance on a far greater scale to Ethiopia. ‘In entering the fray as the committed partisan of one side (Ethiopia) and repudiating its former friendship with the other side (Somalia), the Soviet Union – unlike all the other contestants – was making a calculated strategic decision in which national sentiment or sympathy with a struggle for independence had no part and provided no justification.’24 It was in May 1977, a few weeks after the Dergue ended its arms agreement with the United States, that the USSR and Ethiopia negotiated a secret military agreement in Moscow. No details were published but informed estimates put the arms aid programme at US$400 million. In fact, Soviet military input over the following 12 months came to something in the order of US$1 billion worth of arms and by September crated MiG fighters and tanks began arriving in Addis Ababa. Russian troopships brought thousands of Cuban troops to Assab and by February 1978 between 10,000 and 11,000 Cubans were in Ethiopia, most of them in the Ogaden region, supported by 400 Russian tanks and 50 MiG fighters. At the height of the Soviet arms build-up between December 1977 and January 1978 an estimated 225 Soviet transport planes – Antonov 22s and Tupolov 76s, equivalent to between 12 and 15 per cent of the Russian military transport fleet – were engaged transporting arms to Ethiopia. Further, dozens of Russian and East European cargo vessels, escorted by Soviet naval units, were bringing materiel to Massawa and Assab, including tanks, planes, missiles and 120-mm artillery pieces. According to the Somali Minister of Information, Abdisalam Hussein, military personnel from East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary were also involved in the Ogaden war.25 The Soviet effort in support of the Mengistu regime was one of its biggest military aid efforts anywhere and its role was later to extend to the war in Eritrea as well.

  On 12 January 1978 the US President Jimmy Carter accused the Soviet Union of ‘dispatching’ Cubans to Ethiopia. The Russians responded by pointing to the US link to Somalia via Saudi Arabia and Iran. The previous December the Washington Post had described close US-Saudi relations in Africa through 1977 while Saudi sources were quoted estimating that Riyadh had provided Somalia with US$200 million to purchase arms in the West at a ‘bargain rate’ to replace Soviet equipment.26 In June 1978 US intelligence sources estimated that Russian war materiel had reached 61,000 tons, transported by 36 freighters and an air ferry of 59 planes. At the height of their involvement, the total number of Cubans engaged in the fighting in Ethiopia was variously estimated at between 11,000 and 19,000 men. After the Ogaden victory their numbers were reduced by 2,000 to 3,000. The Cubans, who played an important role in several parts of Africa at this time and had an influence out of proportion to their international strength, first attempted to mediate between Ethiopia and Somalia before becoming militarily involved in the Ogaden war. Early in March 1978, Fidel Castro announced that Cuban officials had held a secret meeting with Somalian and Ethiopian leaders in Aden in March of the previous year to avert hostilities in the Ogaden; when this failed, and following the Somali invasion of the Ogaden Province, the Cubans assisted the Ethiopian forces to turn the tide of invasion, although at first denying any front-line involvement. In April the British Foreign Secretary, Dr Owen, attacked Russian and Cuban attitudes towards Eritrean secession and claimed that
the Cubans had supported the Eritreans for years with both advice and training. The Cubans rebutted Dr Owen’s remarks as an example of ‘singular arrogance’. Later that month, Mengistu made an official visit to Havana, although it was believed that he had already been there secretly in October 1977, to ask for Cuban help. Eritrea was at the centre of his talks with Castro. In July 1978, Cuba announced that it had cut its forces in Ethiopia by about 25 per cent to between 12,000 and 13,000. The following month, despite initial reservations about taking part in an Ethiopian attack upon the Eritrean rebels, the Cubans did become involved in the fighting against the Eritrean secessionists and Cuban pilots were engaged, flying MiG 21s against guerrilla mountain strongholds. When Castro visited Addis Ababa in September 1978 he received a tumultuous welcome.

  The defeat of Somalia in the Ogaden war faced the country with massive problems and though, as Barre’s personal physician Dr Cahill, an American and confirmed Somali supporter, suggested, the Somali people ‘have learned to endure drought and expect periodic famine. The loyalty of the clan usually sustains the needy, and an intense national pride prevents them from easily seeking, or readily receiving, outside assistance’.27 They were certainly in need of such assistance by the end of the decade when a vast influx of starving women and children from the war-torn Ogaden crossed into Somalia. The same author, forgetting that the original aggression came from Somalia, depicted the plight of the refugees: ‘The men in these families are gone; some have been killed in the sputtering Ogaden war, many in bombing and strafing raids that have characterized Cuba’s and Russia’s contribution to the overt Ethiopian effort at permanently depopulating the contested area; other men continue to fight in one of the Somali Liberation Front units; while a few remain in the bush with their dying livestock.’28 In mid-1978 there were 80,000 refugees in Somali camps, but by mid-1979 the number had risen to 220,000; thereafter they arrived at the rate of 1,000 a day and by January 1980 there were over 500,000 refugees inside the Somali borders. Dr Cahill took issue with the US role in relation to Somalia when he argued that the US, in its post-Vietnam war mode, seemed ‘determined to permit a Russian-Cuban offensive in the Ogaden as long as it doesn’t pass a geographic line imposed by colonial powers, a line never accepted by the Somali people and irrelevant to the pattern of nomadic life essential for survival on the Horn’. He continued: ‘Is our fear of overseas entanglements so great that we will impotently watch while Russia dominates the Horn, and with it the Red Sea, and all that it represents to the West? Should we passively accept the insults of an Ethiopian regime that has eliminated a large portion of its university students and resolves political differences by murder? Have we lost the courage even to condemn?’29 Cahill’s is an interesting tirade: at heart a Cold War warrior he yet wanted to persuade the US to support Siad Barre despite Barre’s clear culpability in first attacking Ethiopia.