proceeded to use their economic and military muscle to sustain and
aggravate areas of historical conflict in an economically fragile area.
Therefore we must study the history of the region if the events of the
past thirty years are to make sense.
Ethiopia was an ancient empire, an empire compromising many ethnic and
religious groups and dominated by the Christian Amharic elite. The
Highland Amharic's believed their mission to be a holy crusade against
the forces of Islam, which over the centuries had continually
threatened and encircled their vulnerable Christian dominions. However,
Ethiopia emerged from these Moslem attacks with a siege mentality and a
warlike centralised State. A process of colonisation and conquest
followed reaching its zenith in the latter part of the nenetenth century
under the forceful rule of Emperor Menelik II (1889-1911) During this
period the centralised Ethiopian empire, backed up by modern weapons,
emerged as a regional power quite capable of treating on equal terms
with the European nations, and proceeded to engage in a classic colonial
carve up of the North East African coast into spheres of influence. In
this respect the Ethiopians received the Ogaden and Southern Oromo, and
the French, British and Italians divided up the rest of the coast which
the nomadic, but culturally cohesive, Somali people dominated. The
ceding of Eritrea to Italy, and the arbitrary division of the Somali
people among the participating colonial powers, provided the
opportunities for foreign intervention and intra-regional enmity, which
did so much to destabilise the Horn more than eighty years later.
To the outside world Ethiopia was a Black Christian state
which had not only retained its independence but profited from it. Thus
Ethiopia enjoyed a prominent position not only on the African continent
but on the world stage. The brave stand against the Italians in 1935
only added to this reputation and secured Haile Selassie extremely
favourable concessions from the UN after the end of the Second World
War. In 1952, Eritrea was federated to Ethiopia as a locally autonomous
state and was fully incorporated into the Ethiopian empire in 1962. It
was after this annexation that the Eritrean's frustration at economic
decline began to be focussed on the regime in Addis Ababa. Also, and in
spite of Somali protestations, the Ogaden was relinquished to Ethiopia,
and Somalia made a UN trusteeship under Italian administration for a
ten-year-period in preparation for self-governemnt. (1950-1960)
Meanwhile the tiny Republic of Djibouti won an independence in 1977,
imperilled by ethnic division and guaranteed only by the presence of
3,500 French Legionnaires, to protect it from the predatory designs of
Somalia. Thus the stage was set for the regional- wide instability and
warfare which plagued the Horn in the 1970's and 80's.
POLITICAL AND STRATEGIC INTERESTS OF SOMALIA, ETHIOPIA AND SUDAN
Upon becoming independent in 1960, Somalia immediately set about
pursuing its claims to the Ogaden province of Ethiopia, the North-
eastern province of Kenya and the French possession of Djibouti. All of
these territories and people, Mogadishu claimed, were rightfully part
of a Greater Somalia based on the facts that "they share a common
language, a common religion, a common culture, and notably.... a common
understanding of themselves as a long-standing political community."
(Schwab:p.10) The Somali's, however, received little sympathy from the
United Nations (UN), or the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) whose
policy is to respect the sanctity of borders of its member states.
Despite these setbacks, the desperately poor Somali state set about
looking for allies who would support their irredentist ambitions and
help them in the simmering feud with Ethiopia over the Ogaden. These
ambitions became much more realistic with the military coup in 1969,
which placed Siad Barre, through the Supreme Revolutionary Council, at
the head of the Somali state. In October 1970, on the first anniversary
of his taking power, Siad proclaimed Somali socialism and proceeded
rapidly to build a society and economy modelled on Marxism-Leninism.
The initial interest which the Soviet Union had shown in
Somalia during the 1960's, was heavily reinforced by the 1974 Treaty of
Friendship and Cooperation between the two countries and resulted in
over $300 million dollars of military assistance in the following three
years. In return for this, and previous military equipment, the Soviet
Union received port facilities for its Indian Ocean fleet at Berbera
and an airbase at Harghessa. In addition to this thousands of Soviet
advisors and military personnel were stationed in Somalia. Therefore,
with the erosion of the American position in Ethiopia, the Soviet
Union, utilizing the friendly ports of South Yemen and Somalia, had
succeeeded in the mid 1970's in crucially affecting the balance of
power in the Indian Ocean/Red Sea/Gulf of Aden area. However, during
the years that the USSR was consolidating its presence on the Horn,
Somali efforts towards economic and social development began to falter.
Therefore, Siad revived the territorial ambitions of a Greater Somalia,
which the USSR had now provided him with the means to achieve. To this
end, the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF) which had been involved
in the the border wars with Ethiopia in the 1960's, was resurrected in
1975. And in 1976, the Somali Abo Liberation Front (SALF) announced its
formation with the intention to liberate the Moslem Oromo people
from Ethiopian oppression and incorporate then into a Greater Somalia.
Both of these organisations received aid from regular Somali forces and
began insurgency operations inside the Ogaden and southern Ethiopia.
Siad planned to destabilise Ethiopia and then liberate the Ogaden with
his powerful Soviet trained and equipped army. In July 1977, Siad took
advantage of the internal dissent and weakness of the Ethiopian regime
and sent his armed forces into the Ogaden. By October, virtually the
whole province was under Somali control with the exception of the
cities of Harar and Diredawa.
This, however, was as far as Siad Barre and his armies
reached. Their failure to mobilise the Oromo through the SALF, capture
the all important cities of Harar and Diredawa and consolidate their
control in the Ogaden was due to a sudden and unexpected upsurge in
Ethiopian nationalist solidarity: and, more perversely still; to the
massive military airlift to the Ethiopians from the Soviet Union, the
Somali's staunchest ally.
That the Soviets were becoming increasingly attracted to an
alliance with the very able and hardline Marxist, Mengistu Haile
Mariam, who eventually emerged as the undisputed leader of the Ethiopian
Provisional Military Administraive Council (PMAC), or Derg: became
obvious to General Siad even as his guerrilla movements and army
invaded Ethiopia with the full knowledge, but not blessing, of the
Soviet advisors stationed in Somalia. The months betweeen the invasion
and November 1978, when the Somalians were being thrown back and Siad
publicly tore up the Treaty with the Soviets, were spent inveigling
foreign powers to become Somalia's new military backer. The USA,
however, declined to become directly involved, but assured Somalia that
its borders would not be violated by Ethiopia and gave the go-ahead to
the Saudi's, Egyptians and Iranians, to provide Somalia with enough
defensive weapons to ensure its territorial integrity. Siad's gamble,
therefore, had not paid off. The basis of the Somali claim was that the
border itself lacked international validity, having been arbitrarily
determined, not by the former colonial powers, but by Ethiopia's
imperial expansionism. However, this Somali claim was not upheld by the
OAU: not one Black African state supported Somalia, the general feeling
being that the regime in Addis Ababa had the right to invite any allies
it chose to help defend itself from Somali aggression. Despite the
subsequent and humiliating defeat suffered by Somalia, Siad clung onto
power and continued to support the insurgency operations by the WSLF
and the SALF in their struggle with Ethiopia. In turn, however, the
Ethiopians harboured and supported the Somali Salvation Democratic
Front (SSDF) and the Somali National Movement (SNM) which emerged
during the eighties to challenge the increasingly corrupt and tribal
regime based in Mogadishu. Predictably, Siad accused these movements of
being Ethiopian and Soviet tools and received just enough military and
financial aid from the Americans and the Gulf States to stave off this
internal challenge. "Thus it was in the pursuit of their own local
interests that the local contenders in the struggle to reshape the
political and geographical contours of the Horn of Africa region sought
foreign allies to buttress their perceived strategic and economic
needs." (Legum:p.4) The economic and social collapse, plus the
inevitable military strife, which these policies courted, is evident in
Somalia this very day.
Ethiopia's traditional regional interests - retaining
access to the sea through Massawa, Assab and Djibouti and preserving
its territorial integrity in the face of Muslim encirclement - survived
the otherwise drastic convulsions following the 1974 coup. These,
however, were virtually the only things to remain constant in the
turbulent years following the fall of Haile Selassie's 'Palace
Government'.
The 'creeping coup' of 1974 was in response to a number of
short-term factors: the oil crisis, famine, falling living standards
among the armed forces; but beneath these lay a deep-seated need to
overhaul the corrupt, bureaucratic, patronage system, which had
administered the creaking empire for hundrds of years. The increasing
pressure of supporting a three tier system of exploitation: the landed
elite, the central government, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church; was
giving rise to latent feelings of nationalism among such important
ethnic groups as the Oromo and the Tigreans. Haile Selassie, in his
declining years, failed to appreciate that his economic and social
reforms had not gone far enough, and that his central government was
presiding over a situation in which various ethnic elites, such as the
Highland Eritreans and the others mentioned above, were becoming
economically marginalised, and so increasingly susceptible to
historical grievances. In the jockeying for power after the 1974
revolution, the only question was: which political grouping would
emerge as dominant and in which direction and how far the new elite
would take the ethnically diverse and economically weak Ethiopia.
In February 1977, after successful assassination attempts
on his rivals and a decisive shoot out a Derg committee meeting, Major
Haile Mariam Mengistu finally emerged as the undisputed leader of the
PMAC. He was determined to impose a brand of Ethiopian Socialism on the
country's economic problems and a ruthless military solution on the
secessionist insurgents and political opposition. To achieve these aims
Mengistu had been fostering relations with the Soviet Union who quickly
moved in as the USA, Ethiopia's military backer since 1953, was pushed
firmly out of the equation. The Soviet/Cuban airlift of 1977/78 saved
Mengistu's regime during the Ogaden war and was to sustain it right
into the 1990's.
However, the increasing hostility from the Somali's, and
ultimately, the invasion of the Ogaden, was only one of many problems
facing Mengistu. The sweeping social, economic and agricultural reforms
in March 1975, shattered most of the lines of authority that had held
imperial Ethiopia together, and consequently anti-Derg resistance
movements mushroomed. In Gondar, Gojjam and Wollo, the Ethiopian
Democratic Union (EDU) was covertly supported by Sudan and advocated
replacement of the Derg with a liberal democratic government. In Addis
Ababa the Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Party (EPRP) challenged the
Dergs interpretation of marxism and fought bloody street battles. The
Tigre Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Oromo Liberation Front
(OLF) also emerged: all with demands and claims, and all looking, and
usually getting, external help. The Derg let loose a reign of terror
and mobilised peasants and workers to smash the opposition. The fears
that these centrifugal forces might cause the Ethiopian state to
fragment, before the revolutionary reforms could take affect, were very
real to the Derg at this time. In this respect suppressing the Eritrean
rebellion meant not only keeping Ethiopia's outlet to the sea, but
keeping the lid tightly shut on the hopes for autonomy and federation
of other ethnic and religious groups. Therefore "Mengistu accepted the
doctrine that permitting Eritrea to obtain independence would cause the
disintegration of a state that was riddled with horizontal cultural
pluralism" (Schwab:p.16) Once this is accepted it becomes clear why
Mengistu so assidously courted the USSR and pursued a ruthless policy
of centralisation. The Soviet Union could easily equip an efficient war
machine, and a centralised system could produce the surplus and
circumstances needed to run and maintain an all powerful State. For
Mengistu the only soltuion to the Eritrean insurgency was a military
one. Unfortunately, the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front (EPLF) and
the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) refused to be beaten. After the
bloody attacks by the Derg during the 1970's, all hopes for compromise
began to fade. The EPLF and the ELF had support and safe havens in the
Sudan, and from these bases gradually began to control much of Eritrea
and continue to attract money and arms from various states opposed to
Mengistu's regime, and the USSR's hegemonic interests on the Horn.
Therefore, the PMAC, which took over power from Haile Selassie, was
committed to retaining and strengthening the centralised power of the
Amharic/Shoan elite which had traditionally run the affairs of the
Ethiopian empire. However, the revolutionary reforms, with which it
hoped to quell the growing economic marginalisation and consequent
political awareness of its various ethnic groups, were subverted in the
face of Somali designs on the Ogaden and Djibouti and the secessionist
movements in Eritrea. In order to solve these security problems the
ideological inclination of the Derg was to veer sharply towards the
Soviet Union. The massive influx of arms from the USSR, and the
concomitant response from other interested powers, contributed to the
plethora of insurgencies which raged on the Horn into the 1990's.
The relationship between the Sudan and Ethiopia was one of
uneasy tolerance. A relationship which, from time to time, most notably
during border clashes in 1976, threatened to break out into open
hostility. Despite close ties with the USSR during the early part of
the seventies, President Nimeiri of Sudan maintained that the July 1976
abortive coup in his country was an attempt by the Soviet Union,
Ethiopia, and Libya to topple his regime and strengthen Soviet control
of the Horn of Africa. As well as this area of tension were well-
founded accusations between the two states that each was providing
supplies and safe-havens to insurgency groups hostile to their
respective governments.
After 1978, when a fragile understanding had been thrashed
out between the two countries, the Sudan turned increasingly towards
the pro-West Arab regimes and America for economic aid and military
equipment to counter the perceived Soviet threat. However, with the
introduction of Islamic Law in 1983 and in consequence of the rapidly
deteriorating economic situation, the mainly Christian South was once
again alienated and a bitter civil war ensued.
CONCLUSIONS
"The Horn of Africa is one of those regions of the world where the
present never seems to disentangle itself completely from the past..."
(Lewis:p.1) In this respect the network of conflicting relationships;
based on historical, ethnic, nationalist and religious grievances, were
nourished by Great Power involvement (either through proxies or direct
intervention) jockeying for strategic/political goals. However, it must
be stressed that the fertile for ground subversion and conflict was as
much a product, if not more, of economic deprivation than any of the
above explanations. In short, a hungry belly sharpens the mind to other
grievances; most notably in the former Ethiopian empire...."Whatever
the external and international factors, an essential cause of
continuing conflict in the Horn of Africa has been the failure of the
Ethiopian revoltuion to ameliorate the country's pressing problems of
poverty and economic backwardness: and to contain the centrifugal
forces within the former empire which have drawn many Ethiopians even
further from the grasp of central authority; and to resolve the
conflicting and long-standing nationalisms which for centuries have
vied for supremacy in the region...." (Legum:p.XL) In this respect,
external powers fished in troubled waters and provided the means to
facilite aggression, but not to resolve the conflicts which sprang
largely from ecnomic frustration.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
P. CALVOCORESSI WORLD POLITICS SINCE 1945
C. CLAPHAM TRANSFORMATION AND CHANGE IN REVOLUTIONARY
ETHIOPIA
P. HENZE THE HORN OF AFRICA: FROM WAR TO PEACE
C. LEGUM et al THE HORN OF AFRICA IN CONTINUING CRISIS
I M. LEWIS NATIONALISM AND SELF-DETERMINATION IN THE
HORN OF AFRICA
D A. KORN ETHIOPIA, THE UNITED STATES AND THE SOVIET UNION
JOURNALS:
P T. BAXTER AFRICAN AFFAIRS 1978, VOL77 p.283 - 296
P. SCHWAB 'COLD WAR IN THE HORN OF AFRICA'
AFRICAN AFFAIRS, VOL77 1978
C.CLAPHAM 'THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CONFLICT IN THE HORN
OF AFRICA'
SURVIVAL - 1989
