Ethiopia, Somalia: More Famine and Fighting at a Horn of Unplenty

Times are always bad in the Horn of Africa and they are bad now--lack of food, failed politics and warfare. Ethiopia again suffers from famine and a civil war in the northern part of the country is cutting off relief supplies. The problems always seem intractable but they always demand attention.

Unlike most of Africa, the Horn has been in the world news off and on for more than 3,000 years, ever since Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt sent fleets to the incense land of Punt. A century ago, European governments began grabbing protectorates in this newly strategic region where ships from the Suez Canal came out of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden into the Indian Ocean. Inland lay the ancient Ethiopian kingdom, where Czarist Russia made a unique African connection: Russian military advisers helped Ethiopia stave off the Italians in the 1890s, while the Russian Orthodox Church took a motherly interest in Ethiopian Christians.

The Russians are still, or rather again, a presence in the Horn. Soviet military advisers operate in Ethiopia, along with Cuban troops paid for by Moscow. What is newer is a Soviet offer of a quarter-million tons of grain to alleviate famine in Ethiopia--more than the United States, heretofore the largest food donor in East Africa, is planning to provide. There is irony in this; Ethiopia’s food shortages result in good part from the Mengistu Haile Mariam regime’s Soviet-style collectivization (which even Moscow finds crudely done).

The Soviet food offer is also a reminder of the importance that Moscow attaches to its presence in the Horn of Africa. One should never underestimate the weight of the Russian past in present Soviet thinking; the Soviet leadership unquestionably believes that its presence in Ethiopia is sanctioned by history. Yet even leaving the past aside, Moscow can still see powerful reasons for remaining in the Horn.

If the Soviet Union pulls out of Afghanistan, how many more strongpoints abroad can Mikhail S. Gorbachev afford to give up without hawks in the Kremlin undermining him? Both East and West agree that the Horn has strategic importance--how much, can be debated.

The strategic question also involves Ethiopia’s neighbor Somalia, equally poor, more arid and smaller--but half again as big as California, with a 1,700-mile coast along the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden. This is one of the few countries that rid itself of a Soviet presence. In 1977, Somalia, like Ethiopia, housed several thousand Soviet advisers; the Soviets had constructed major bases there, including one at Berbera which, with its twin at Aden across the water, monitored approaches to the Red Sea. Then war began between Ethiopia and Somalia; Somalia wanted the Ethiopian-ruled but ethnically Somali Ogaden region.

This was a quandary for Moscow, wanting to maintain its position in both countries. The quandary was resolved in 1978 by Maj. Gen. Mohamed Siad Barre, president of Somalia, when he learned that the forces fighting his army were led by a Soviet general who had been chief Soviet military adviser in Somalia. Siad Barre gave the Soviets four days to pull out their advisers and turned to the United States for assistance.

The United States responded, with food to feed the hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees who fled the Ogaden, with development projects for this, the eighth-poorest country in the world and with military aid. The United States did not replace the hundreds of Soviet-supplied tanks that Siad Barre used for his invasion of Ethiopia but did provide TOW missiles and recoilless rifles as an effective defense against the Ethiopian forces which began probing, and have continued to probe, into Somalia.

The results of U.S. Somali policy have been mixed:

America has provided Somalia the means to defend itself, but military assistance levels have declined because of U.S. budgetary problems, leaving the Somalis wondering how much they can really rely on America, and intensifying their search for weapons in strange new places. (South African diplomats quietly visited Mogadishu in late 1984; the Somalis have a reputation, not entirely undeserved, for taking aid where they can find it.)

U.S. humanitarian aid for the Somali refugees, channeled through the World Food Program, has--together with other governments’ donations--saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Unfortunately, few of these people have been resettled outside the U.N.-administered camps, raising the specter of a future Gaza-in-Africa. Furthermore, America has not come to grips, either inside or outside these camps, with the problem of exploding populations--both humans and grazing animals--that destroy vegetation at alarming rates.

Western development projects, European as well as American, have often come to nought, just as earlier Soviet projects did.

One of the saddest sights in Somalia is the Soviet-built fish cannery at Las Qoray on the Gulf of Aden, where sand has drifted over the pier and the machinery is rusted out--but the staff still reports for work. At least that plant used to work, which is more than can be said for some Western-sponsored projects.

The political scene is perhaps worse than the economic. Somalia has recently been in the news because eight of its citizens, including a former vice president, a former foreign minister and two Somalis who studied at American universities, were condemned to death in a court run by the secret police. Siad Barre reviewed the cases and was pleased to commute death sentences to prison terms, which may have been the plan all along; the two former high officials are understood to be back home, under house arrest after years in jail.

Most if not all of those condemned are from the Isaq clans, long at odds with Siad Barre. When Siad Barre came to power in 1969, he outlawed any mention of clans--which did not end the clan basis of Somali society and which has not kept him from favoring his own clan, the Marehan, in ways that deeply trouble many Somalis. As Siad Barre comes near the end of a long career that began in the Italian colonial police, he is drawing the wagons ever closer; his intended heir is a son who commands the Mogadishu military district. That would be tragic, for the Somali tradition was a democratic one; Somali nomadic clans were governed not by hereditary rulers but by assemblies of all adult males.

A decade of U.S. influence has not moved the regime toward democracy. It has not even kept Siad Barre from dickering with his former Soviet patrons. Fortunately, there are now many Western-educated Somalis who hope for a better system after Siad Barre.

Just how important is Somalia, or the Horn, strategically? Perhaps not as important as Moscow thinks. Soviets are tough fighters but not always good strategists; take Afghanistan as an example. It may be that the Soviet presence in the Horn of Africa is a kind of continuing romantic exaggeration. On the other hand, the United States has really never decided one way or the other on the importance of the Horn. Could Somalia play a part, separately from Red Sea defense, in U.S. Persian Gulf strategy? Perhaps, but it is 1,200 miles from Berbera to the gulf--and we have no forces at Berbera.

Diplomacy should be able to avoid any new East-West confrontation there, but not drought and famine. In this region of perpetual problems, where times are bad and can always get worse, the people of the Horn are dependent on the outside world--for foreign mercy as well as foreign policy.