Surrender or Starve

FOREWORD

Surrender or Starve, my first book, also formed the basis for my first articles in The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine with which I have been associated for nearly two decades. The manuscript was completed in the summer of 1987 and published by Westview Press in the fall of 1988, before going out of print in 1994. Though it is a story of the Horn of Africa during the Cold War, it is relevant for understanding the region today, especially in light of the War on Terror. At the end of 2002, I returned to the Horn in order to write a postscript for the original manuscript.

In the mid 1980s, when I reported on and traveled in Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, and Ethiopia, a famine of biblical proportions engulfed the region. The world media attributed the famine exclusively to drought—an act of God, for which Africans bore no responsibility: thus they were only victims. My realization that the famine was partly a factor of ethnic and class conflict, deliberately perpetrated by a Marxist Ethiopian government, much like the famine that Stalin had inflicted on the Ukraine in the 1930s, impelled me to write this book. In the 1980s, the nineteenth-century Ethiopian empire of the Amharas was cracking up, and the Amhara regime, fortified by Marxist ideology, was using famine as a means to pressure the rebellious Tigreans and Eritreans into submission. These divisions have still not been healed. Between 1998 and 2000, Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a full-scale war in which hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and tens of thousands killed. Tensions persist up through the present; as does the threat, yet again, of massive starvation.

Sudan, meanwhile, was undergoing its own rebellions in the mid 1980s, with southern Christians pitted against northern Moslems, much like today. The famine there was also not merely the result of drought: it was partly a consequence of the neglect with which the Arabs of Khartoum treated the non-Arab and non-Moslem parts of that vast country.

These issues—and the Cold War background to them—have recently been magnified in importance. U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia have been under increasing restrictions, and in any case may not have a bright future. Therefore, the United States will have increasing need of bases and basing rights in countries close to the Middle East, especially in light of the large numbers of al-Qaeda terrorists in Yemen, directly across the Bab al Mandeb Strait from the Horn of Africa.

Not only have the U.S. Marines and Army Special Forces set up a basing platform in Djibouti, but the U.S. military may at some point extend its presence to neighboring Eritrea, whose friendly regime and port facilities at Massawa and Assab could make it strategically useful in the War on Terror for years to come.

Eritrea, whose guerrilla society is the central subject of this book, fought a three-decade-long war with Ethiopia from 1961 to 1991, which resumed briefly, as I have mentioned, at the end of the 1990s. Along with the Viet Cong and the Afghan mujahidin, the Eritreans were among the most formidable unconventional warriors of the twentieth century. When I wrote about them for this book, and for a lengthy profile published in the July 1988 edition of The Atlantic Monthly, they were seen in Washington and Jerusalem as hostile to Western and Israeli interests. I made the point that their particular characteristics as a unique guerrilla culture would ultimately make them allies of both the United States and Israel. In the case of Israel, my analysis was borne out by the early 1990s, and could yet be borne out in the case of the United States.

The same guerrillas whom I profiled in this book now form the government of Eritrea. It is the same monastic sense of isolation from—and suspicion of—their neighbors, which I first observed nearly two decades ago, that makes the Eritreans value an expanding relationship with the Americans and the Israelis. Finally, and tangential to these other issues, is the whole question of realism versus idealism in foreign policy. The Cold War history of the Horn of Africa, especially in the late 1970s—as I explain in these pages—shows how idealism shorn of any element of realism is immoral. In the Horn, it was the Ford Administration’s policies that held out at least a small hope for minimizing human suffering. And it was the idealistic, yet naïve, approach of Jimmy Carter’s State Department that contributed to a situation in which hundreds of thousands of people would later be killed.