by David Lamb
So isolated was Ethiopia that in Homeric times the Ethiopians were known as “the farthest away of all mankind” and their country was supposed to be the place where the sun set. It was not until 1895 that the Ethiopians faced their first major challenge from abroad, an Italian invasion. But the Italians were soundly defeated at the Battle of Adowa and forced to withdraw, marking the first time any European army had been vanquished in black Africa. Ethiopia’s independence continued uninterrupted until 1935, when the country was conquered by Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. The emperor, Haile Selassie, forced into exile and living in Bath, England, during the Italian occupation, took his case to the League of Nations. The league ignored his plea for assistance.
“Outside the kingdom of the Lord,” Selassie said in an address to the league in Geneva in 1936, “there is no nation which is greater than any other. God and history will remember your judgment.”
Selassie returned from exile in 1941, after British, Indian and Ethiopian troops had driven out the Italians, and moved back into his hilltop palace around which thirty lions roamed free. From the palace in Addis Ababa (“new flower” in the Amharic language), Selassie looked down on a sprawling capital where, as time went on, slums and modern office buildings stood side by side and the past seemed forever in conflict with the present.
Even today, caravans of donkeys plod each morning down the rough streets of Addis Ababa, their backs piled high with wheat, their masters stopping from time to time at the mud homes where an empty tin can placed on a stick by the door indicated that homemade beer is for sale inside. Like other old men in Ethiopia, a donkey driver would coat his head with butter to cure a headache and wrap his limbs with religious scrolls to heal wounds and scare away evil spirits. When he returned home at day’s end, his tired feet were washed and massaged by his wife.
Emperor Selassie made every decision, controlled every cent in the treasury and never held a real election. But unlike some of Africa’s modern-day authoritarian rulers, the Lion of Judah, as he was called, did bring some positive reforms to Ethiopia. He spent one-third his budget on education, built some excellent hospitals and schools, and by African standards, was not brutally repressive, holding fewer than a hundred political prisoners in the mid-fifties. He was a stuffy man of dignity and grace, at home in the company of presidents and prime ministers. With the help of the United States, Selassie brought Ethiopia to the threshold of modern times.
The conservative, anti-Communist emperor had turned to the United States as his chief ally partly because Washington had money to spare and partly because Washington had never recognized the legitimacy of the Italian conquest. From 1954 to 1977 Ethiopia was a client-state of the United States. At one time Washington had key Americans posted in the ministries of foreign affairs, finance and commerce. Washington armed and trained Ethiopia’s army. Washington ran top-secret communications and intelligence-gathering military facilities staffed by Americans. Washington gave Selassie $2 million to buy a yacht.
But while Selassie and the royal family lived in splendor, the Ethiopians in the early 1970s languished in poverty with an annual per capita income of $90 and a literacy rate of 7 percent. They labored, virtually as slaves, on land owned by imperial princes and princesses. Occasionally, there were rumors of unrest in the army and whispered talk among young men educated in England or the United States that Ethiopia and Africa were not in step. But Selassie seemed firmly in charge and several attempts to unseat him were amateurish affairs that hardly got by the planning stage. Then, in 1973, a drought swept Wallo province. The government tried to keep the disaster a secret, not wanting to admit it was unable to care for its people’s needs. More than 200,000 people died. At about the same time Selassie, then eighty-one years old, was photographed tossing scraps of fresh meat to his two Great Danes. The stories of discontent in the barrcks were no longer rumors.
Selassie was overthrown the next year, after forty-four years as emperor, by a group of enlisted men. If any African country needed a revolution, Ethiopia did; unfortunately, though, it got a Marxist group of revolutionaries whose style was murderous and vindictive. Under the military junta, headed by Mengistu Haile-Mariam—a five-foot-five member of the dark-skinned Galla tribe that had long been dominated by the Amharas—hundreds of Ethiopians with ties to the royal family were executed; scores of Selassie’s relatives were murdered or chained to walls in the wine cellars of the imperial palaces; thousands of suspected “counterrevolutionaries” were gunned down on the streets; an estimated 30,000 persons were jailed. When one member of the junta questioned the government’s terror tactics at an official meeting, Mengistu calmly leaned back in his chair, pulled out his revolver and shot him in the head. Dissent diminished.
Selassie was locked up in a wing of his palace. For a while the junta put out occasional releases on his health, giving the unlikely explanation at one point that he had gone on a hunger strike. Then the releases stopped. No official announcement was ever made, but word was passed through Addis Ababa that the emperor had died of poisoning. Haile Selassie, the most enduring and eloquent head of state modern-day Africa had produced, was buried in an unmarked grave whose location is known only to the tough young soldiers now running the ancient empire.
The thirty-eight-year-old Mengistu, who looked as innocent as an ROTC cadet when he attended OAU summits dressed in a Western business suit, turned out to be an unpleasant fellow with no pretense of compassion. When Eritrean secessionists threatened to kidnap his wife and children, he snapped, “Go ahead. Boil them in oil for all I care.” Before long, he replaced Selassie’s portraits that hung throughout Addis Ababa with his own and started living in the grand style of the deposed emperor. His underlings became as sycophantic as had been Selassie’s. A new cult had been born.
The coup gave the Soviet Union a grand opportunity. The junta was speaking with an increasingly radical voice and was embarrassed by its close military and economic relationship with the capitalistic United States. And the junta needed two things Moscow had plenty of: guns to put down the secessionist movement in Eritrea province* and the guerrilla war waged by Somalis in the Ogaden; and guidance on how to turn a feudal society into a Marxist state.
But the Soviet Union had a problem. Ethiopia and next-door Somalia were bitter enemies who had been fighting periodically in the Ogaden since time immemorial, and Somalia was Moscow’s most important ally in Africa. Moscow could hardly be friends with both Ethiopia and Somalia. It was going to have to choose, and in many ways Ethiopia and its 31 million people presented a more inviting target: Ethiopia was nearly twice as big as Somalia and its potential for development was far greater; it offered two major ports on the Red Sea, Assab and Massawa, and possession of the main source of the Blue Nile, the heartline of Egypt.
Somalia, in 1974, had become the first black African government to sign a treaty of friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union, and the 6,000 Russian soldiers and civilians there ran the place as though they were operating out of a mini-Kremlin. They controlled the ministries of defense and information, the secret police and an important military facility at Berbera. They turned the ragtag Somali army into a 25,000-man fighting force, armed with heavy artillery and AK-47 assault rifles. They supplied the Somali air force with MiG fighters, and the schools with teachers who taught more political theory than mathematics. They put together an impressive military parade each May Day, and they spent their weekends sunbathing by the Soviet beach house, shooing away barefoot Somali children who tried to sell them seashells and homemade sandals.
And the Americans? Well, they had rushed into Somalia after independence with millions of dollars of aid money, but now they were unwelcome ogres, the victims of their own alliance with Ethiopia and of a propaganda campaign orchestrated by the Soviet Union. Peace Corps volunteers were stoned in the streets of Mogadishu, and in 1971 the organization was forced to pull out of Somalia entirely. U.S. diplomats were spat upon, and by 1977 Washington had closed
down its aid mission—none of its agricultural projects had done much good anyway—and had reduced its sizable embassy staff to just three envoys. “There’s nothing to do on this assignment except catch up on my reading,” one of them said. Posters of Uncle Sam being stomped by Somali peasants were all over the capital, and the residence of the U.S. ambassador, John Loughran, was broken into, probably in an attempt to find documents that would discredit him. The U.S. embassy phone was tapped, its mail was opened, and Somali civilians were forbidden by presidential decree from talking to foreigners. Any Somali who dared set foot inside an American’s home would immediately have been branded a spy.
The xenophobia reached its peak in the spring of 1977 as Somalia prepared for a full-scale invasion of Ogaden to fulfill its long-standing territorial claim. Once again the Horn of Africa was to become a battlefield. But this time the combatants would include Cubans, Russians and, indirectly, Americans, and the Ogaden war would lead to the most extraordinary flip-flop of superpower partnerships independent Africa had ever seen. It might be useful to take a brief historical look at the Ogaden to understand what was about to happen.
The Ogaden is an arid Montana-sized plateau reaching from the eastern deserts to the inland mountains that flow in the shape of a crescent through Ethiopia. The land is of little use to anyone except the nomads who wander there with their camels and cattle, and from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries these nomads—Moslems from the Arabian peninsula who would eventually be known as Somalis and Christians from the Ethiopian kingdom—battled for control of the Ogaden’s waterholes and grazing lands.
Somalia was carved up by the European powers in a series of treaties that followed the Berlin Conference of 1884–85. One chunk was given to the British to form the northern third of Kenya, another to France as the Territory of Afars and Issas (now Djibouti) and a third—the Ogaden—to independent Ethiopia. (Emperor Menelik of Ethiopia signed treaties in 1897 and 1908 with Britain and Italy, respectively, formalizing his jurisdiction in the Ogaden; the Somalis were neither consulted nor present at the signings.) What remained of Somalia after its dismemberment was divided into Italian Somaliland, with its capital at Mogadishu, and British Somaliland, with a capital at Hargeisa.
In 1934 Italian-led Somali troops clashed with Ethiopian soldiers at a watering hole for camels in the Ogaden known as Wal Wal. Mussolini used that battle as an excuse to conquer and occupy Ethiopia. He detached the Ogaden from Ethiopia, ruling it as part of Italian Somaliland. (Later, in 1941, the British defeated the Italians in East Africa and established a military administration to govern the Ogaden.)
Britain proposed in 1950 at the United Nations that the five parts of Somali be reunited. Ironically, that proposal was shelved largely because of opposition from the Soviet Union—which two decades later would be instrumental in preparing Somalia for its ill-fated attempt to win back the Ogaden militarily. Rebuffed at the United Nations, Britain returned the Ogaden to Ethiopia in 1955 at the insistence of Selassie. Five years later British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland were united to form the independent republic of Somalia. Though not supported by black Africa—which considers the colonial boundaries inviolable (i.e., the boundaries they inherited at independence)—the Somalis still want to reclaim their missing chunks as part of a “Greater Somalia.” Each of the white star’s five points on the flag represents one of the regions populated with the homogeneous Somalis. So when one speaks of the hostility between the Somalis and the Ethiopians in the Ogaden, he is talking about a hatred implanted in a thousand years of strife.
Throughout the 1970s Moscow prepared the Somali military for its invasion of the Ogaden, which was lightly defended by the American-backed Ethiopians. But then, in 1977, with Selassie dead and Ethiopia under the control of young revolutionaries, the Russians began to have second thoughts. They virtually begged Somalia to scrap its planned attack and proposed that Somalia and Ethiopia merge into a Marxist federation. Mohamed Siad Barré, Somalia’s Moslem president, scoffed. The Russians started leaving Somalia in large numbers, and Barré secretly dispatched an envoy—his American dentist, who lived in New York—to Washington to see if the Carter Administration had anything to offer. Yes, the Administration said, the United States was willing to give Somali “defensive” weapons if Barré cut his ties to the Soviet Union. Barré told Moscow it would have to choose—it could back Somalia or Ethiopia, but not both—and just before dawn one June morning, he sent his army across the border and into the Ogaden. The Ethiopian defenses crumbled. Within two months Somalia had captured 90 percent of the region, and Barré’s dream of reuniting all his people under a single flag seemed within reach.
Until then, Somalia had been one of Africa’s most isolated countries, as closed to the outside world as North Korea and completely off-limits to Western journalists. Suddenly, though, Barré had something he wanted to tell the world and Somalia started passing out visas like supermarket discount coupons. A group of us descended on Mogadishu, looking for a way into the Ogaden. We hung around the Uruba Hotel, a new place with a lovely seaside view and toilets that overflowed when flushed, permeating every room with an outhouse smell. We pestered the government for transportation to the Ogaden, scraped together some interviews around town and went to a press conference in which Barré denied that his troops had invaded anything. All the fighting, he said, was being done by Somali inhabitants of the Ogaden. And where did these peasants get their tanks and heavy artillery? Barré, a former policeman who was born in the Ogaden, said he wasn’t sure; they must have “borrowed” them from the Somali army.
Barré claimed, not without some justification, that the Ethiopian presence in the Ogaden was a colonial one. And there was no doubt that the Ethiopians had been harsh rulers, intent on driving the Somali nomads back across the border. The Ethiopians had poisoned water holes and on occasion, according to some Somalis we talked to, cut off women’s breasts to deprive children of milk. The Ethiopians collected taxes at gunpoint and maintained administrative control with second-rate soldiers and policemen who had been more or less exiled to the Ogaden by the government in Addis Ababa.
“I have lived under three colonial powers—the British, the Italians and the Abyssinians [Ethiopians],” said a seventy-one-year-old Ogaden peasant, Husein Liban, a frail man with a wispy white beard, watery eyes and a single tooth. “The Italians and the British exploited us and harmed us, too, but they did it gradually. The Abyssinians were quick and primitive. If you have to have an injection, you will choose the one that only hurts a little rather than the one that goes deep into your body.”
We had met the old man in Jijiga, a one-street desert town the Somalis had just captured from the fleeing Ethiopians. Jijiga had no running water and no electricity, and what was known as the Genet Hotel was nothing more than a large windowless room with a sand-covered floor, a battered sofa and three cot beds. We had reached Jijiga after a five-hour drive in Land-Rovers provided by the Somali government, traveling straight across the desert on a moonless night to avoid detection by Ethiopian war planes. Everything seemed so mysterious, so distant from any people or place I had ever seen before—the solitary figures wrapped in robes who appeared with their camels out of the icy blackness and watched us pass with silent stares, the little towns that emerged as an outline of mud shacks and disappeared into the night as though they had been only an illusion, the rutted desert tracks that seemed to have no end and no direction but which our driver negotiated as surely as if he were reading a city street map.
It was just past three in the morning when our three four-wheel-drive vehicles arrived in the abandoned Ethiopian army camp on a rise overlooking Jijiga. The sand turned to rocky earth, and our driver cut off the track, heading overland to a small dark building made of mud and cement blocks. A candle burned inside, beneath an Italian-charted map of the Ogaden, and half a dozen Somali guerrillas with rifles rose from a long dining table to welcome us in halting English. The rebel leader, Abdullah Abdi, motioned us toward
the table, where a roast of freshly slaughtered goat had been placed in our honor. Like our hosts, we pulled off the greasy meat with our fingers. The meat, which was barely cooked, was chased down with gulps from a bottle of dust-covered Scotch that one of the Somalis had taken from an ammunition box. Stomachs churning, we reclined in a corner to wait out the night.
Word of our presence spread quickly through Jijiga, and early the next day the entire town gathered outside the Genet Hotel to demonstrate for us their hatred of the Ethiopians. The people, perhaps 2,000 in all, came from out of nowhere in a rush. One moment the place was as lifeless as a ghost town, the next alive and teeming, swirling with a carnival-like motion and color. The crowd moved as a single body, dancing and prancing, surrounding us and carrying us with it. “Victory to the front!” they shrieked, their cries echoing through the desert valley. Old men, barefoot and spindly, waved their spears and daggers and machetes and odd assortments of old rifles in our faces. The children laughed and flung rocks at stray “Ethiopian” dogs, chuckling gleefully when one was struck and limped away yelping. The women swayed among their menfolk in a hypnotic trance, their delicately featured faces wreathed in smiles, their pounding drums and tribal war calls melting into the clamorous welter.
For twenty minutes the euphoric crowd reeled along the sandy, unpaved street, falling quiet only when Abdullah Abdi jumped atop a 1959 Chevrolet sedan outside the hotel. “Back to your homes now,” he shouted, cupping his hands to his mouth. “We do not want a big crowd on the streets, because this is the time of day when the planes like to come, and you know …”
But the warning was too late. The Ethiopian war planes had come from the north, graceful and silent against the soft blue Ogaden skies. In the streets below, where we stood with our notebooks and cameras, the Somalis neither heard their high-level approach nor sensed that death was once again imminent in Jijiga.