Buried in the Sands of the Ogaden

The United States, the Horn of Africa, and the Demise of Detente

Louise P. Woodroofe

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781612777207
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts

How the Cold War came to Africa—and everybody lost

When the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) between the Soviet Union and United States faltered during the administration of Jimmy Carter, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski claimed that "SALT lies buried in the sands of the Ogaden." How did superpower détente survive Vietnam but stumble in the Horn of Africa? Historian Louise Woodroofe takes Brzezinski's claim as a starting point to analyze superpower relations during the 1970s, and in so doing she reveals how conflict in East Africa became a critical turning point in the ongoing Cold War battle for supremacy.

Despite representing the era of détente, the 1970s superficially appeared to be one of Soviet successes and American setbacks. As such, the Soviet Union wanted the United States to recognize it as an equal power. However, Washington interpreted détente as a series of agreements and compromises designed to draw Moscow into an international system through which the United States could exercise some control over its rival, particularly in the Third World. These differing interpretations would prove to be the inherent flaw of détente, and nowhere was this better demonstrated than in the conflict in the Horn of Africa in 1974–78.

The Ogaden War between Ethiopia and Somalia involved a web of shifting loyalties, as the United States and Soviet Union alternately supported both sides at different points. Woodroofe explores how the war represented a larger debate over U.S. foreign policy, which led Carter to take a much harder line against the Soviet Union. In a crucial post-Vietnam test of U.S. power, the American foreign policy establishment was unable to move beyond the prism of competition with the Soviet Union.

The conflict and its superpower involvement turned out to be disasters for all involved, and many of the region's current difficulties trace their historic antecedents to this period. Soviet assistance propped up an Ethiopian regime that terrorized its people, reorganized its agricultural system to disastrous effects in the well-known famines of the 1980s, and kept it one of the poorest countries in the world. Somalia's defeat in the Ogaden War started its descent into a failed state. Eritrea, which had successfully fought Ethiopia prior to the introduction of Soviet and Cuban assistance, had to endure more than a decade more of repression.

1

“I Hadn’t the Foggiest Idea.”

The United States considered the Horn of Africa a diplomatic backwater in the early 1970s. However, the eruption of Cold War competition for the loyalties of Ethiopia and Somalia would serve to ensure that President Gerald Ford took notice of the impoverished region. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger concisely summed up the classic Cold War paradox for the designers of American foreign policy:

Ethiopia. We have no overwhelming interest in this region, but it will be apparent that anyone (like Somalia) who relies on the Soviet Union is sustained, and anyone who relies on us is dropped when the going gets tough.¹

The actions of a couple of extremely poor nations in a region that most Americans could not find on a map took on magnified importance because the U.S. foreign policy establishment viewed all international relations through the tunnel vision created by the Cold War. Though the post-Vietnam landscape limited America’s ability and inclination to respond to Third World conflict, its debacle in Southeast Asia did not teach the United States the folly of categorizing all conflict as freedom and democracy against communism. Stuck in that mind-set, American leaders learned only that they had to find means other than massive troop intervention in order to combat communist ideology. During the mid-1970s, American policymakers tested a new approach in Africa, in which they attempted to control the Soviets through détente while still trying to manipulate the regional players.

However, the American response to the Ethiopian revolution was indicative of a new way of dealing with Third World revolutions. The post-Vietnam era did create a generation (especially within the State Department) of those who were able to separate a singular socialist revolution from worldwide Soviet communist expansionism. This recognition created a situation in which the United States could attempt to maintain positive relations with socialist countries rather than force them into the Soviet camp. This approach, however, did not work in Ethiopia because the overriding mentality of successive presidential administrations remained centered on confrontation with the Soviet Union. Indeed, Washington continued to supply arms to a government that disdained the United States and used those weapons to commit terrible atrocities against its people. By taking neither a principled stand, nor a hard-line containment stand, the United States allowed Ethiopia to dictate the terms of the relationship.

American Ambassador to Ethiopia Arthur Hummel expostulated on the American strategy (or lack thereof) toward Ethiopia in a telegram to Kissinger in November 1974:

Thus far into the Ethiopian revolution, U.S. policy has been guided by two principles. The first has been that we should not only avoid intervention in the situation, but we should try hard to avoid actions that could readily be interpreted as intervention. The second principle has been to continue all of our assistance programs at full strength in the belief that this would help to strengthen the position of those who will struggle for the continuation of close and friendly relations with the United States.²

The years of 1975 and 1976 represented the last chance to actually use military aid as an incentive to urge the Ethiopian Provisional Military Government (EPMG) toward more respect for the United States and for human rights. Instead, Ethiopia and Somalia were able to manipulate the superpowers to massively arm two of the poorest countries on earth and contribute to the violent decades to follow; this is a tragedy that persists to this day.

As is often the case, conflict arises in areas that have received relative inattention from the outside world. Having not been colonized, Ethiopia did not have a former imperial power scrutinizing its internal affairs. The Soviet Union did not have extensive ties with Ethiopian Marxists. The United States did have a long history with Ethiopia under Haile Selassie and conceptualized the region as part of Africa as well as part of the Middle East. In the mid-1970s, however, Washington’s Middle Eastern focus was on the Arab-Israeli struggles, and its African focus was on the battle for majority rule in southern Africa, the collapse of the Portuguese empire, and eventually the Soviet and Cuban presence in Angola. (Indeed, Secretary of State Kissinger often missed relevant meetings on the Horn as he was in the midst of his shuttle diplomacy to the Middle East.) With little political pressure, consistency is easier than creativity. With lots of political pressure, the opposite is true. As the political stakes changed, so did the perceived need for action.

On 9 August 1974, while Ethiopia was in the throes of revolution, Gerald Ford was sworn in as president of the United States under dramatic circumstances. Following a tumultuous summer in the White House brought on by the Watergate imbroglio, Richard Nixon had resigned from office, and President Ford was charged with the task of attending to the healing of a nation while pledging to continue the policies of his predecessor. Domestically, the United States faced not only a public crisis of confidence in its government but was also in the midst of an economic recession. In international affairs, the recent withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam still loomed large, despite progress in bilateral relations with the Soviet Union. To ensure some continuity in the foreign policy arena, Ford invited the always controversial Henry Kissinger to remain as both the secretary of state and national security advisor with James Schlesinger (whom Kissinger referred to as a “coward”) as secretary of defense.³ Though mid-term Ford replaced Schlesinger with Donald Rumsfeld, and Kissinger lost his national security advisor hat to Brent Scowcroft in November 1975, rifts over détente attitudes were prevalent within the administration. Still, President Ford hoped to further develop détente with the Soviet Union by means of a new Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement, known as SALT II. Unfortunately for Ford and Kissinger, the mid-1970s witnessed unprecedented Soviet involvement in the Third World, as tensions over Vietnam, Angola, and the Horn of Africa strained discussions on other bilateral issues.

Kissinger, the architect of American foreign policy throughout the Nixon and Ford administrations, never gave much priority to the Third World. As a proponent of a grand strategy, he viewed regional issues through the lens of the larger Cold War. Thus, while he was successfully able to use back channels and personal appeals to advance relations with the Soviet Union and China, his inattention to the needs and desires of local players and his emphasis on superpower solutions to regional conflicts weakened American ability to deal with the Third World.⁴ Though the Nixon doctrine implied that the United States would give arms and financial support to its allies in the event of regional conflict while avoiding another embroilment like Vietnam, Kissinger did not look to the local causes of such conflict, instead focusing on external influences from the communist bloc. The follies of this strategy were originally apparent in Southeast and South Asia, the Middle East, and during the Ford years, in Africa.⁵

Ford inherited a disorganized Africa policy. For President Nixon, the continent was not a high priority as he fixed his focus upon Southeast Asia and China. However, the new president initiated a more cohesive and forthcoming Africa strategy based on events on the continent as well as his own personal sense of justice for a region in the process of decolonization. Kissinger, in his memoirs, explained the overall approach:

However influenced by geopolitical considerations, we embarked with conviction and determination on the evolution to majority rule. . . . For us, reducing the Soviet and Cuban capacity to turn Africa into a front in the Cold War was certainly a major objective. But we could only achieve it as part of a broad policy enlisting the support of the countries of the region in terms of their own sense of priorities and values.⁶

This retrospective (and, of course, sympathetic) portrayal of the Ford administration’s Africa policy acknowledged the primary concerns influencing American attitudes toward a continent involved in large-scale decolonization and the changes it wrought. The United States would seek to limit or undermine Soviet and Cuban inroads into Africa. Unlike his predecessors, however, President Ford proposed to do this through working closely with African leaders, risking relations with the colonial powers, in order to address the longer-term objective of achieving friendly relations with African governments. The administration would achieve some success in this area, but its major aim of preventing a large-scale Soviet and Cuban presence on the continent ultimately failed—first in Angola and later in the Horn of Africa. While Washington did seek out friendly players on the ground, it failed to understand the root of the Marxist appeal in Africa, instead blaming the Soviets and Cubans for creating problems.

The Soviet Union had gained a footing in the Horn earlier that summer. Somalia and the USSR had signed a “Treaty of Friendship” in July of 1974, which granted the Soviets use of the military base at Berbera, though Somalia initially denied that such a privilege had been granted. Somali-American relations had long been strained following Mohammed Siad Barre’s military/socialist revolution in 1969 and his subsequent overtures to Cuba and North Vietnam. The United States had discovered in 1970 that Somali ships were doing business with Hanoi. A stipulation of the Foreign Assistance Act of that year dictated that the United States could not continue aid to countries trading with North Vietnam, and the State Department and USAID began to phase out their assistance programs for Mogadishu.⁷ This served to escalate the Cold War in the Horn.

As the Ford administration struggled to make sense of Ethiopia’s internal situation, it would also contend with several other regional issues. The fate of Haile Selassie was of immediate worry. Members of the deposed emperor’s family and his friends in the United States pressured the president to use his influence to ensure Haile Selassie’s welfare and release. Later in his term, Eritrean rebels raided American facilities in Asmara and took several hostages, including two Americans—forcing media and congressional attention on the region once again. The largest concern, predictably, for the administration’s policy toward the region was the growing Soviet presence, first in Somalia, but later in Ethiopia as well. Ford and Kissinger had to balance the aforementioned issues with decisions on arms supplies to the region, and this was compromised by blatant human rights violations and new congressional restrictions on arms sales. Unfortunately for all involved, but especially for Ethiopians and Somalis, the United States missed a couple of chances to change the course of events for the Horn.

The Ethiopian Revolution

A succession of events in 1973 and 1974 had incited a revolution in Ethiopia, which ultimately toppled the ancien régime. The year that saw Emperor Haile Selassie celebrating his eightieth birthday also witnessed widespread famine, highly publicized by the Western press. The government’s subsequent efforts to downplay the extent of the calamity fomented unrest among the intellectual classes. In early 1974, the skyrocketing price of petroleum caused another crisis, causing taxi drivers to go on strike. Separately, members of the army began to demand higher pay. In Addis Ababa, students demonstrated and labor unions marched against the imperial government.

In the midst of the chaos, a group of low- to mid-level army officers formed a coordinating committee for the armed forces that came to be known as “the Derg.”⁸ They held central meetings in Addis Ababa, with military units from around the country sending delegates. The organization operated secretly and gradually gained power by taking advantage of the inertia of the aristocracy and senior military officials. Atnafu Abate, Teferi Bante, Aman Andom, and Mengistu Haile Mariam became the dominant Derg figures. The group took on the motto Ityopya Tikdem (Ethiopia First), a vaguely nationalist theme with little ideology. The Derg acted to undermine the emperor by blaming the famine on him and eventually recruited the patriarch of the Ethiopian Church to endorse the revolution at the end of August 1974. Afterward, their position was secure enough to arrest the emperor.⁹

On 12 September 1974, following months of violent upheaval, Haile Selassie was deposed from his throne after nearly a half century in power, driven away from his palace unceremoniously in a Volkswagen.¹⁰ The Derg took over the running of the country—embarking on a brutal consolidation of power, while confounding the outside world as to its ideology. Despite being military in nature, this seizure of power was not a mere coup. It was a true revolution, annihilating the old order, and undermining the complicated feudal system of land ownership. Still, as the Derg was a large, loosely knit organization without a clear leader, the direction of the revolution remained unclear.

The new Ethiopian leaders inherited an insurgency in the northern province of Eritrea. Having had a largely separate history from Ethiopia, including far more contact with the outside world through its Italian colonists, Asmara believed itself more sophisticated than the coarse and brutal rule dictated from Addis Ababa. Rebels there had been fighting for independence since 1961. The Marxist Eritrean Popular Liberation Front (EPLF) and the Muslim Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) led the insurgency that would require immense resources for Ethiopia to combat.¹¹ Handling this uprising would ultimately expose some of the fissures in the deeply secretive Derg as well as drive the Ethiopian desperation for arms, first from the United States and later from the Soviet Union.

The Derg also inherited most of the same foreign policy difficulties of the imperial regime, namely that Ethiopia was a Christian country in a region dominated by Islamic countries. Somalia, one of those Islamic states, had designs on Ethiopian territory, and the Arab neighbors to the north supported its claim. Many of those same countries also championed the Muslim insurgents in Eritrea. As such, Ethiopia felt under siege. Without friendly countries in the region, the Derg necessarily looked outside to the superpowers for military assistance. The rhetoric of the new Ethiopian leaders had always been rabidly anti-American, and as its leaders searched for an intellectual basis to their revolution, it became increasingly Marxist. Naturally, the Derg preferred an alliance with the Soviet Union, a country that both served as a model of rapid development and had little association with the previous regime. However, the United States was still the source of Ethiopian military equipment, and Addis Ababa could not afford to completely alienate Washington until it found another supplier.

Prior to the revolution, Ethiopia had been a feudal country, which made transforming the way its government operated an imperative. As such, the overthrow of the imperial regime achieved mass popular appeal. However, most of those with the ability to implement change had not thought beyond the initial seizure ...