The Africans (38 page)

“Many Africans in positions of power—the power elite—are not genuinely interested in making their people aware of the basic human rights in society,” the report said. “Given the present situation with human rights on this continent, anyone in Africa can become a refugee.”

In many cases the flight of refugees follows no logical pattern, reflecting the artificiality of Africa’s national boundaries. About 400,000 Angolans, for example, have fled to Zaire, and 200,000 Zairians have taken refuge in Angola. Thousands of Burundians have escaped to neighboring Rwanda, and thousands of Rwandans have moved into Burundi. In all, twenty-five of Africa’s fifty-one countries have sizable refugee populations. Among them are deposed presidents, former cabinet ministers and guerrilla leaders, wealthy businessmen and university professors and, by the millions, peasants and nomads, whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Tragically, Africa’s refugee problem is of more concern to the international community than it is to Africa itself. The same is true of
food shortages, population growth and the misfortunes wrought by droughts and other natural disasters. It is, in fact, to most African presidents’ advantage to keep their countries in a constant state of emergency, because then they can parlay the crisis into a windfall of monetary assistance and can justify the repressive measures they use in the name of national survival. In one particularly bad harvest year, for instance, Kenya sold 80,000 tons of wheat to Zambia, then declared that it had been struck by an emergency shortage. Western donor agencies filled the quota, and everyone was happy. Kenya banked the proceeds of its sale to Zambia, received free wheat to make up the difference and didn’t have to go through the hassles of planning for the storage and distribution of its crops. And the donor agencies once again had been able to explain their existence by ticking off statistics on how many people they had saved from starvation.

President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania nicely summed up this crisis mentality, telling the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Poul Hartling: “I love the refugees. They cultivate the country for me. But I have no money. You bring in the money.”

Of all the countries I visited in Africa, none remains etched more clearly in my memory than Ethiopia. A land rich in history and full of international intrigue, Ethiopia today is the fulcrum for the balance of power in the Horn of Africa, and it is here, as much as anywhere on the continent, that one learns just how fickle political alliances can be.

The name Ethiopia is derived from the Greek words “to burn” and “face”—the land of people with burnt faces. Except for Egypt, Ethiopia is the oldest independent state in Africa. The fertile mile-high plateaus of the interior are surrounded by craggy mountains that shoot almost straight up from the desert floor below. These mountains formed a natural barrier that enabled the Ethiopians to repel outside penetration and, living in isolation, to develop their own culture over more than two thousand years. The mountains made Ethiopia so inaccessible that it was one of only two countries (the other being Liberia) in black Africa never colonized by Europe. And it is the only country where Christianity (Coptic) is indigenous and not imported by European missionaries.

According to legend—and it is only legend—the first Ethiopian ruler, Menelik, was a descendant of King Solomon and the Queen
of Sheba. Many Ethiopians have European facial features, and the dominant ethnic group, the Amharas (from a Hebrew word meaning “mountain people”), look down on other black Africans as inferior. Long before the rest of East Africa had discovered the wheel, Ethiopians were recording their history in a written language, Amharic.

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.