Conflict in the Horn

THE ETHIOPIA-SOMALIA conflict this past winter received more press coverage than any other clash in Africa. The Horn of Africa is undoubtedly a hot spot--not solely because Cuban mercenaries bolstered the Ethiopian regime's fight against the Somalis and Eritreans as the cover of Newsweek last week would suggest. But because the area is politically and militarily strategic for a multitude of countries--not least of all Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran. For many Americans the Horn has become yet another conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union staged on third world terrain. This impression alone negates the importance of the area to the stability of the governments of other countries in the Mid-East-Africa area.

The perennial Somali-Ethiopian tension has a lengthy history, but had yet to culminate until this year. As early as the 1960s, the Somalis professed their wish to unite all the Moslem Somali peoples, despite the fact that these expansionist aims would engulf not only the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, but also Eritrea, Djibouti (once French Somaliland, and otherwise known as Afars and Issas), and Northeastern Kenya. For this reason the United States then rejected the Somalis' request for military support and is not now extending large military support to President Said Barre's regime.

The Somali threat also prompted Haile Selassie's Ethiopian government to tighten its control over the self-proclaimed separatists in Eritrea--the half-Moslem, half-Christian province that is Ethiopia's only outlet to the Red Sea. With the U.S. refusal to supply arms to them in 1963, the Somalis accepted Soviet MIG's, artillery weapons and armed personnel carriers in exchange for Soviet rights to the port of Berbera. This led Kenya and Ethiopia--already friendly to the U.S.--to ask for a step up of arms shipments to them. The U.S. subsequently supplied both with obsolete Pentagon reject weapons.

While the U.S. found Ethiopia strategic because its port of Massawa bordered on the Red Sea, providing U.S. nuclear submarines with a friendly port, so did the Israelis--for different reasons. Seeing Nasser commit 70,000 men into what is now the Democratic anti-monarchists, fearing the further spread of Arab influence and ever aware of the importance of maintaining an open seaway from the Indian Ocean through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean, the Israelis sent police-military advisers to Ethiopia to combat the Moslem independence group in Eritrea. At the same time the rebel Eritreans received support from Egypt, Syria and Iraq. The backward empire of Iran. however, susceptible to Soviet influence and a possible overthrow by insurgent Marxists, established diplomatic relations in Addis Ababa. The Shah kept the oil running to Israel while encouraging the Kurds in Iraq--actions aimed at disrupting the unity of Arabs, especially in their opposition to Israel. The Saudis, insistent on spreading the Islamic faith, took another course--they financed Somalia and the Eritreans in their opposition to Christian Ethiopia.

WITH THE EGYPTIAN defeat in the 1967 war and the Israeli advance to the Suez in 1973, the Iranians and Saudis abandoned their previous policies and united to create the oil embargo and later to form the oil cartel. At the same time the Egyptians helped to seek an accommodation with North Yemen--the Arab Republic of Yemen, which subsequently sought relations with the Saudis. But Southern Yemen splintered and set up a Marxist-Leninist regime--The Democratic Republic of Yemen.

The tables again turned. In 1972 Egypt expelled the Soviet Union. In 1974, the Ethiopian emperor was overthrown by a Marxist-Leninist military group known as the Dergue. Saudi Arabia supported both Egypt and the Sudan with huge cash flows, helping both countries to break with the Kremlin. And in 1976 Carter became president. Shocked by Carter's "hands off" policy in Africa--specifically Angola, and now the Horn--and determined to keep the Soviets out of their backyard, the Saudis and Iranians pushed Sadat to seek direct negotiations with Begin, rather than concede to the American effort of bringing the Soviets to the peace table at Geneva. Both realized the importance of a decisive U.S. policy and in light of Andrew Young's comment that the Cubans were helping to stabilize the Ethiopian situation, the U.S. decision not to sell arms to the Sudan, and the U.S. efforts to include the Soviets in designing the future of the Middle East, they sought a better rapport with the U.S.--thus, the Saudi influence in deciding not to raise the price of oil again last year.

While Carter ignored the Horn, the Soviets moved to support Ethiopia economically as well as militarily: they poured $850 million into the country. The Somalis, fearing Soviet support of Ethiopia and seeing the possibility of expansion in the future checked, expelled the Soviets, forcing them to withdraw from Berbera. But the Soviets, anticipating the Somali move, had already established themselves at Aden, the port at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula of South Yemen, long considered by the British as the most strategic point on the Red Sea. The base is close to the Red Sea island of Yanbu, where the Saudis are building a $10 billion refinery-city.

THEN THE WAR between the Somalis and the Ethiopians erupted. The Somalis pushed into the Ogaden in Ethiopia and were met by the superior Ethiopian forces. They were forced to withdraw in March of this year not, as Carter claims, because of U.S. pressure, but rather because they were incapable of sustaining the fight. The Soviets who have set themselves up as the champions of the black liberation movements are now supporting the Dergue's squelching of the Eritrean independence movement. They are supporting a regime that has moved to wipe out student opposition in the country and that has already killed thousands of Ethiopians--unofficial estimates go as high as 100,000? while the State Department claims they knew of only four to five thousand killed.

The importance of the Horn is heightened by the Soviet presence in Ethiopia not only because it gives Moscow a foothold adjacent to the Sudan, the only real supporter of Egypt, but because it enables the Soviets to control both sides of the Red Sea and thereby control the traffic through the Suez--a direct threat to Israel. In addition, it threatens to neutralize the small countries of Djibouti, which recently gained independence, Somalia and Yemen, which borders on Saudi Arabia. The Soviet Union thus seeks to undermine the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and justifies their wishes for more than a mere kind word of condolence from Jimmy Carter.