Surrender or Starve

It was a typical U.S. performance: bighearted, extravagant, and, ultimately, somewhat naïve. Close to forty tons of durra were being anchored onto cables that dangled from three Boeing 107 helicopters, hovering several hundred feet in the air over the Sudanese town of Nyala, 600 miles west of Khartoum in the very center of the African continent. It was late August 1985, and although the drought had broken, the desert of western Sudan had been transformed into a vast arterial watershed by the heaviest rains in more than a decade. Tens of thousands of starving peasants were trapped by floods in the weeks prior to the harvest, and because many airstrips were washed out, the only way to get food in was by costly, fuel-consuming helicopter drops. On this particular day, August 29, the durra was being flown into the savanna region of Buram, one hundred miles south of Nyala, which had gone without grain deliveries for almost three months. On hand to take part was USAID administrator M. Peter McPherson.

The suspended durra moved through the air at a crawl. After an hour and a half of flying, small clusters of wattle huts began appearing amid the flood-soaked, green desert canvas below. Using a VHF radio, a Save the Children Fund field officer guided the pilots toward the drop zone, which we could see was filling up with dark, seminaked figures running in the same direction as our helicopter. McPherson and I already were on the ground when the second and third helicopters released their loads. Had the scene been staged in Hollywood it couldn’t have been more stirring: mobs of barebreasted women, armed with spears, tore into the mountain of grain, fighting over the individual sacks while shrieking “esh Reagan” (Reagan’s bread). There practically was a riot. Within a minute or two, every sack was gone. McPherson, an old Peace Corps hand, was ecstatic. I still can picture him sweating in his white shirt and exclaiming how happy President Reagan was going to be when he heard about this. McPherson said something to the effect that these people were going to remember what the United States did for them for years to come. Later, in Washington, another USAID official actually described the Buram peasants as new political allies of the United States.

Sending a squad of helicopters to deliver a relatively small amount of grain to a few thousand hungry Falata tribespeople, stuck in the middle of nowhere 115 miles from Sudan’s border with the Central African Republic, was indeed a daring and generous act. All over western Sudan as well as in Ethiopia that summer, the United States was winning hearts and minds with similar feats. According to Brussels-based columnist Giles Merritt, writing in an October 1985 International Herald Tribune, 1985 was “the year when the United States went into Africa, one of the few remaining areas of the world it had managed to stay out of. In the past Washington has been glad to leave much of Africa under the influence of the former European colonial powers. But three million tons of U.S. food aid… changed that.” Merritt feared that such a generous outpouring of emergency aid was bound to get the United States involved in “the quagmires of African politics. The sacks of emergency grain and the seed that the Sudanese have named ‘Reagan’ may prove as sure a hook as President Kennedy’s handful of military advisors in Vietnam.”

If only the columnist’s fear had been borne out! For if the United States had become a factor in “the quagmires of African politics,” then the helicopter drops might not have turned out to be one-time-only, quixotic acts that had no effect on the destiny of the region. Even though U.S. aid in Ethiopia and Sudan, on account of the famine, shot up fourfold in one year and cost almost $1 billion, in political terms the aid achieved nothing. At the same time that the United States was putting food into the hands of starving peasants in the wilderness, Libya was putting cash into the hands of Sudanese politicians in Khartoum. As it turned out, 1985 was the year when both Libyan and Soviet influence in the region, already substantial, increased dramatically, while U.S. influence actually decreased, despite the fact that the Libyans and the Soviets provided almost no relief aid.

There was nothing ironic or contradictory about this. Famine aid helps peasants, who in postcolonial Africa have no political power. In fact, it is largely because peasants have no power that famines occur in the first place. The urban elites who run African nations know that peasants do not start coups. Coups are started by disgruntled city dwellers. One way African politicians keep city dwellers satisfied is by providing them with cheap bread obtained from peasant farmers who are forced to sell their grain at artificially low prices. (In Ethiopia, as we have seen, this economic exploitation has overlapped with the imperial strategy of the ruling ethnic group.)

African rulers by and large—unlike the bureaucrats at USAID—are not interested in the kind of rural development (the building of roads, drainage systems, and grain storage facilities) that helps peasant farmers feed themselves and the rest of the country even during times of flooding and drought. For three decades, African rulers have been more interested in brutally maintaining power. The Soviets and their allies simply have created opportunities for themselves by becoming directly involved in either supporting or putting down the rebellions that arise in response to this brutality.

Despite what African rulers say, the lack of an imperial tradition in the United States has hindered, rather than helped, its ability to be a force for positive change in Africa. For instance, in recent years, France intervened in Chad more boldly than did the United States in Angola, yet France suffered far less opprobrium, even though the Marxist government in Luanda that the United States has been trying to topple is more ill-suited than Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya to better the lives of the people under its control. The drama played out between the United States and Libya in the mid 1980s in Sudan highlighted the tactical disadvantages of employing only humanitarian means to deal with problems that are in essence humanitarian, even if they have been narrowly defined as “strategic.”

Sudan, like Ethiopia, although for different reasons, never has been a nation in the modern sense. While Addis Ababa functions not only as the capital of a country but of an empire, Khartoum, at the other extreme, functions as neither. Khartoum, a dust-ridden city of 2.5 million at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles that teems with hungry beggars and Mercedes Benzes is more a trading post than a political center, a base from which Arab merchants traditionally have exploited the seminomadic tribal configurations, some Arab and some not, in the vast stretches of desert under their tenuous control. Although Sudan is as large as the United States east of the Mississippi River, the sole bond joining a place such as Buram, in the westernmost province of Darfur, to Khartoum is an arbitrary line on a map drawn by a European colonialist at the end of the last century. The physical and psychological links between the famine-stricken west of Sudan and the capital of Khartoum are infinitesimally more slender than, say, the links between New York City and the Midwest corn belt. As a Western diplomat said, “The people of Akron, Ohio, care more about the people of Darfur than do the people in Khartoum.” Or, as a certain politically active, Khartoum University professor said to me on the eve of the April 1985 coup that toppled President Jaafar Nimeiri, “We don’t care if millions starve, so long as we get rid of Nimeiri.”

Libya, in every sense, acted according to an understanding that Sudan was a country in name only, whose politicians could be bought for a price, which was best paid in military assistance to fight southern rebels rather than in food for drought victims. The United States, which saw Sudan in more charitable terms, was no match for such a strategy. As a result, by 1987, Darfur peasants were in an even more pathetic position vis-à-vis their own government than they were at the start of the famine in late 1984. From then on, the most humane thing the United States could do for Sudan was to work with the Egyptians to replace the democratically elected regime of incompetent, insensitive landowners with a more efficient group of politically moderate soldiers, who, because they would be more dependent on U.S. support, might be forced to help peasants in a manner that Western donors always have recommended.

Call this interpretation cynical, meanspirited, or right wing if you like, but first take a look at what actually has happened in Sudan: for at least twelve of the sixteen years that Jaafar Nimeiri held power, he was, by the continent’s own dismal standards, one of its better rulers. His May 1969 military coup was popular at the time because it ushered in a period of relative stability after five changes of government and two general elections in five years. Democracy may have been wonderful in the abstract, but for a sprawling, largely illiterate country fractured by tribal divisions it meant stagnation, chaos, and death. Although Nimeiri came in as an Arab radical, in 1971, after surviving a Soviet-inspired attempt to topple him, he turned toward the West, and the following year, by granting local autonomy to the black south, he managed to end a seventeen-year civil war that had cost more lives than had all the Arab-Israeli wars put together. Throughout most of his rule, Nimeiri’s dictatorial style was generally benign. Despite having ninety-eight Libyan-backed mercenaries executed in 1975 for trying to depose him, three years later he granted an amnesty to all his political enemies and allowed them to return home from exile abroad. From the vantage point of 1980, Los Angeles Times Africa correspondent David Lamb was able to write in his book The Africans that “while other presidents have solidified their power, Nimeiri has loosened his…. He… has given his people a precious gift, a sense of unity and purpose that grew from the ashes of a shattered nation.” During the middle period of Nimeiri’s rule, Sudan was closer than it ever had been to achieving the illusive goal of becoming a real nation.

By the early 1980s, however, ten years of absolute power had taken its toll on Nimeiri’s personality. He was becoming increasingly cruel, corrupt, and paranoic. Had African or Arab politics evolved to the point where rulers could safely hand over power after a limited period in office, Nimeiri might have gone down in history as one of the continent’s few political success stories. But it was not to be. Looking back, September 1983 is as good a date as any to mark Nimeiri’s transition from a U.S. asset to a U.S. liability. That was when Islamic Sharia law, henceforth known in Sudan as “the September laws,” took effect. Banks no longer could charge interest. Anyone convicted of stealing the equivalent of $50 could have his right hand amputated at the wrist. Even non-Moslem foreigners could be whipped in public for being found in possession of alcohol. (Not only liquor, but rubbing alcohol became difficult to obtain.) Nimeiri sought to apply the Sharia statutes in the non-Moslem south as well as in the north. This and his inexplicable decision to abrogate the 1972 autonomy agreement with the non-Moslem south helped ignite a renewal of the civil war in 1984. When I interviewed Nimeiri in December of that year, a few months before his overthrow, he was a hated and desperate figure. I remember him leaning back in his chair behind his desk eyeing the entrance to his office with the look of a punch-drunk prize fighter. Bedecked with medals and slurring his words, he seemed like the worst, comic book stereotype of a Third World dictator. When I asked him about Islamic law, he delivered what amounted to a temperance lecture about the hazards of alcohol consumption.

Nimeiri, at this point, was being kept in power by the thirty-thousand-man Al Amen al Goumi (the State Security Force), a financially pampered group of plainclothes thugs, whose budget was as large as the sixty-five-thousand-troop regular army. With 6,000 cars and 400 safe houses, the security force was described in Sudanese as “a holy state within a state.” But in comparison with other Arab and African security forces, the Sudanese force was a group of choirboys. Disappearances, torture, and executions were rare. The newspaper articles and human rights reports about Islamic law far outnumbered the actual number of amputations, which was about fifty in the eighteen-month period between the implementation of the September laws and Nimeiri’s overthrow. Although Sudan in the last days of Nimeiri’s rule still was one of the freest societies in the Arab world, nearly every Sudanese I met in Khartoum in December 1984 heaped abuse on him. The fact that they were able to do so without risking prison proves my point. I cannot imagine anyone so openly criticizing a ruler in Libya, Syria, Iraq, or Saudi Arabia in the company of a foreign journalist. Yet to read what was being written about Nimeiri in the foreign press, one would have thought he was infinitely worse. One of Nimeiri’s last acts before being toppled was to turn a blind eye to the transfer of seven thousand five hundred starving Ethiopian Jews to Israel via Sudan. After the coup, when Nimeiri’s vice president and security chief, Omar el Tayeb, was dragged off to jail for his role in the operation, he had less blood on his hands than almost any other security chief in the entire Moslem world.

Nimeiri’s overthrow was more like an abdication. On March 27, 1985, the day after taking the financially practical but politically dangerous step of removing the subsidies on basic commodities, Nimeiri—dressed in a white suit and Panama hat—flew off to Washington. As his presidential jet wheeled over Khartoum and adjacent Omdurman, “bread riots” already were in progress. Peaceful, well-organized demonstrations by under-paid urban professionals followed a few days later. The United States could do nothing to save him. Khartoum, in the throes of revolt, paid no attention to his audience with President Reagan. The $60 million in aid that finally was released to Nimeiri following the meeting did the embattled Sudanese leader absolutely no good because he never had admitted to his own people that the aid had been withheld in the first place. As for the awarding of an additional 225,000 metric tons of wheat and sorghum to Sudan while Nimeiri was in Washington, this also had no effect because a famine hundreds of miles away in the far west of the country was making no impact on strike organizers in the capital. During the three weeks I spent in Khartoum before, during, and after the coup, I rarely heard any discussion about the famine among Sudanese. At Khartoum University, the center of political activity, the students and professors hotly debated everything, except the famine. While millions were dying from hunger in Darfur, Khartoum’s educated elite spent hours discussing the type of democracy a country that still was almost totally illiterate should have. It was a noble preoccupation, but a selfish and unrealistic one, too. While journalists like myself, in the 100-degree heat of the moment, were emphasizing the noble side of the whole drama, diplomats and aid experts already were worrying about it being too noble.

Painted in the broad brush strokes of newspaper copy, the unfolding events in Khartoum should have heartened U.S. policymakers. The 1985 coup was about as bloodless and orderly a transition of power as Africa ever has seen. No radical elements, either Islamic or secular leftist, played a significant role. Nimeiri never returned and instead went into exile in Egypt. Power was transferred for twelve months to a military council headed by General Abdul Rahman Swareddahab, who deliberately maintained a low profile and proved sincere in his pledge to hold parliamentary elections the following year. After twelve days of orderly voting in April 1986, in the freest elections ever conducted in the Arab world, the Umma (Nation) party leader, Sadiq al Mahdi, was chosen prime minister. Sudan couldn’t have done better, at least so it seemed. A former prime minister in the 1960s who was pardoned by Nimeiri after leading the 1975 Libyan-backed coup attempt, Sadiq—as he is known in Sudan— had more political savvy than did any other Sudanese politician and by 1986 had clearly established a reputation as a political moderate and Islamic modernist. During his years in exile in London, Oxford-educated Sadiq had spoken out on such matters as the nature of Islam (about which he contributed an essay for a Festschrift in honor of the late Jordanian prime minister, Abd al-Hamid Sharaf), and he was on record as favoring the liberalization of the harsh Sharia code promulgated by Nimeiri. Sadiq also had personal magnetism based on inherited historical legitimacy. He was the great-grandson of the fabled Mahdi, whose Ansar warriors ejected the British from Sudan in 1885, killing General Charles George Gordon in the process. From a distance of a few thousand miles, Sadiq certainly must have appeared as the very culmination of a Western Arabist’s, or Africanist’s, dream come true. The manner of Sadiq’s ascension, and the résumé he brought along with him, provided an answer to all the mudslinging about the Arabs’ and Africans’ penchant for violence and tyranny and their inability to create modern political systems.

During this momentous period in its history, Sudan in fact became one of the few countries in the Third World to be praised by Amnesty International for a dramatic improvement in the human rights situation because of the release of political detainees and the banning of amputations and other extreme aspects of Sharia law after Nimeiri’s departure. But while the new, liberal procedures may have directly benefited a few thousand people, if that many, millions of others suffered. What from a comfortable distance was a textbook case of political modernization was in point of fact causing chaos in the relief effort, penetration by hostile neighbors, and the total abdication of responsibility regarding economic and agricultural reform.

Nimeiri’s ouster did not satisfy the strike leaders. A few hours after the coup was announced, a political science professor from the black Christian south, Kunijwok Gwado Ayoker, told me, “We have knocked two teeth out of the monster’s mouth; now we have to knock out the other thirty.” The strikers eventually forced the ruling military council to disband the State Security Force. This made a lot of people feel good, including myself, who along with three British journalists had been detained for several hours and held at gunpoint by Nimeiri’s strong-arm men prior to the coup for the crime of watching an anti-Nimeiri demonstration. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that I actually was lucky. Had I been in any one of several other countries in the region, the circumstances of my detention almost certainly would have been far worse. But nobody, except for a few diplomats, was doing any serious thinking during those first, heady days of democracy.

Nobody realized then that among the first people to take advantage of the freer political climate in Khartoum would be the Libyans. The State Security Force, which had a strong presence at Khartoum airport in addition to having the task of monitoring foreigners inside the country, was the only organized line of defense against Gaddafi’s advance men. After the security force was disbanded, the Libyans poured in by the hundreds and set up “revolutionary committees” that operated slush funds for aspiring Sudanese politicians. In their “surly, unctuous” manner, as a Western ambassador described it, the Libyans had a good streetwise understanding of local politics; they knew that behind the breezy statements about democracy and nonalignment lay many a broke politician and political party sorely in need of ready cash for an election to be held within twelve months. One man whom the Libyans were rumored to have quickly placed in their pocket was the new defense minister, Brigadier Osman Abdullah Mohammed, who spent more than a week in Tripoli after the coup and returned home with a “protocol” providing for Libyan help with “logistics, transport, equipment, training programs” and “aspects of navy and air defense.” Brigadier Mohammed told Sudanese journalists that Libya also would be helping to arrange peace talks between the Khartoum government and the rebel SPLA.

Following the coup, everyone assumed that the SPLA would call a truce because the overthrow of Nimeiri was what its leader, John Garang, had been demanding. But Garang, a U.S.-educated Dinka tribesman, obviously was not going to be satisfied with one group of northern Arabs replacing another in the presidential palace in Khartoum. Garang, whose African southerners for years had been supported by Gaddafi against the pro-U.S. Nimeiri, called the new regime “the hyena with new clothes” and went on fighting. The civil war, rather than dying down, dramatically intensified. The military council responded by marching a four-thousand-troop unit of the Sudanese regular army northward from Juba, the capital of Equatoria Province, in order to capture the SPLA stronghold of Bor. The operation was a “total, utter failure,” according to one Western diplomat. Garang, whose total forces numbered less than twenty thousand, attacked the government column, and those soldiers who weren’t killed refused to march any further. Sudan Airways stopped flying for a time to Juba, and the only way in and out of the city was by chartered plane. Next came an SPLA attack on Renk, barely 250 miles south of Khartoum on the White Nile, the closest the SPLA had ever come to the capital. Garang then appeared capable of cutting off Khartoum’s power supply by blowing up transmission lines connecting the city with the Roseires Dam to the southeast. The government could do nothing; it had virtually no air force and was so short of fuel that it had to requisition diesel fuel from famine relief organizations to run military patrols.

Financed by Gaddafi and headquartered at Itang, just inside the Ethiopian border, the SPLA was a creature of two Soviet allies. It was to them that Sudan’s new leaders were forced to make obeisance—not to the United States, which only was helping to feed starving peasants, a matter farther down on the list of Sudanese government priorities. Neither Libya nor Ethiopia was about to let up the pressure just because Sudan, in the words of some Western commentators, was on the road to becoming a “fledgling democracy.” Quite the contrary: for Gaddafi and Mengistu, a weak new government in Khartoum, which by its own definition was only “transitional,” represented an easy target rather than a credible negotiating partner. It was about this time that the Sudanese defense minister went to Tripoli to sign the “protocol.” Meanwhile, the United States, which was occupied with helicopter drops and other acts of mercy in the far west of the country, was merely a bystander to this whole process.

The Libyans also were active in the west; they took bold, strategic advantage of the famine while U.S. citizens, journalists in particular, were looking the other way. On the Sabbath Friday, August 23, 1985, six days before the Buram helicopter drop, a Libyan relief convoy of forty-three trucks and trailers, escorted by Libyan soldiers, rolled into the Darfur capital of El Fasher with an undisclosed number of weapons hidden beneath sacks of grain and dried milk powder. Around the same time, tribal chiefs from other parts of Darfur and adjacent Kordofan were being invited to Tripoli as guests of Colonel Gaddafi. There was nothing inspired about Gaddafi’s designs on western Sudan, a forward base for his ill-fated adventure in Chad and a place from which to outflank Egypt. It is a tract of desert whose seminomadic Arab and African inhabitants are more likely to know the names of their tribal heads than that of the current ruler in Khartoum. “No umbilical cord links us with the central government,” explained the commissioner of northern Darfur, Abdul Hafiz, who was communicating with Khartoum by radio from El Geneina, a beau geste town about fifteen miles from the Chad border. If not for relief flights operated by international agencies, it would have taken Hafiz nearly a month to travel by land to Khartoum.

Gaddafi couldn’t have picked a more logical target. Darfur was the last unconquered part of Sudan and had resisted all foreign invaders, including the French based in present-day Chad, until May 1916, when an Anglo-Egyptian force of more than two thousand troops backed by airplanes finally defeated the Fur tribespeople of Sultan Ali Dinar. Darfur thus became the west-ernmost province of British-controlled Sudan, rather than the easternmost province of Chad. Afterward, the British gave the local tribal chief complete control of internal affairs. “It was a government within a government,” recalled the present sultan, Abdul Rahman, who occupies a dilapidated villa in El Geneina overlooking a cubist landscape of whitewashed walls and desert. Even today, the people of Darfur harbor little loyalty toward Khartoum. Economically, the flow of people and goods is more in the direction of Libya than of Sudan’s Nile River heartland. The goods on sale under the wattle stalls in El Geneina’s market come by way of Libyan and West African ports, rather than via Port Sudan. Many a woman in El Geneina has a husband working in Libya, where oil wealth makes the salaries much higher. Of course, the United States, because of famine aid, also was making friends in the region. But the U.S. presence was transitory, and in any case, the power in Darfur, as everywhere else in Africa, lay in the bigger towns, such as El Geneina, El Fasher, and Nyala, where nobody was starving except Chadian refugees, about whom none of the locals really cared.

The void in the western desert that the Libyans planned to fill had been deepened by the drought and famine of the past several years, which had forced the migration of Kababish tribes-people out of the area toward the Nile in the east and the savanna lands in the south in search of food and water. Many of these fabled desert warriors, who had a historic tradition of fighting rival Libyan tribes, would not return to their homes. So if Gaddafi decided to invade, he would have found this quadrant of Sudan emptier than ever.

The Libyan convoy that stormed into El Fasher in August 1985 stayed for about a year. It was forced out not by any U.S. pressure, which would have proved useless, but by intimidating French air sorties carried out from bases in Chad. However, by the time the Libyans had left El Fasher, they had installed themselves elsewhere in western Sudan as part of a front against French-backed Chadian government troops. The most unsettling aspect of the whole affair was the speed with which the convoy was able to get to El Fasher: it took only twelve days to cover the fourteen-hundred-mile distance from the Mediterranean port of Benghazi. In the same period, USAID was taking two weeks to bring food to El Fasher from Khartoum, only six hundred miles away. The Libyans had the advantage of driving through areas unaffected by flooding. However, no roads were available for much of the journey from Benghazi.

Libya apparently was having an easier time of it in Darfur than was the United States, whose helicopter drops were among the few bright moments in a season filled with frustration. Flood conditions were so bad in places that a truck convoy with emergency grain supplies took the better part of a month just to travel from El Fasher to El Geneina, a distance of less than two hundred miles! Other convoys were being attacked by Bedouin bandits, and relief organizations funded by USAID even were having trouble finding local drivers willing to attempt the journey out west. Expanding the scope of the helicopter operation was impractical because of the tremendous fuel costs involved. As the Libyans proved, only an army could move supplies on land great distances in such a place, and the Sudanese army, strained to the limit battling the SPLA, was practically useless—even more so after the coup.

The root cause of these logistical difficulties was USAID’s naïve reliance on Sudan Railways. Jonathan C. Randal, the senior foreign correspondent of The Washington Post, in a memorable dispatch from Khartoum described what happened.

In a word, countless peasants lost their lives because USAID officials were insufficiently cynical about the local reality. The railway union members who held up emergency food deliveries in order to put pressure on the government were among those in the streets of Khartoum demanding a return to democracy. But what value can democracy possibly have in a culture where civic responsibility does not extend beyond the bounds of tribe and kinship? The lethal impotence of the regime that replaced Nimeiri was clear for all to see on May 26, 1985, when General Swareddahab traveled to Nyala to witness the arrival of grain supplies on Sudan Railways. When the train pulled into the station, the freight that it unloaded was not grain, as was expected, but sugar for use in making the pastries and candies eaten by city dwellers at the end of the Moslem feast of Ramadan. Had the much-hated Nimeiri still been in power, the United States at least would have been in a position to bully the government and the railway into partially living up to their commitments. In Kordofan, several weeks before Nimeiri’s overthrow, Vice President George Bush was able to make a triumphant visit to the provincial capital of El Obeid because massive amounts of U.S. grain had arrived just in time to avert a catastrophic famine. The difference between Kordofan in the winter of 1984–1985 and Darfur the following spring and summer was that in the latter instance, U.S. officials in Sudan were under greater constraints because of a new, widely acclaimed regime that insisted on more nonalignment in foreign affairs. Tens of thousands of peasants died proving this point.

In the fall, a bumper crop saved many lives, but not nearly as many as it should have because much of the grain was hoarded by local merchants in order to boost prices, thus denying food to the very people who desperately needed it. In Khartoum, meanwhile, the political situation was becoming increasingly chaotic, with communists, Baathists, Islamic fundamentalists, and Libyan-backed elements holding demonstrations and positioning themselves for the coming elections in April 1986. The Washington Post’s David Ottaway reported that the worsening security atmosphere forced the U.S. Embassy to take “extraordinary” precautions to protect its staff. The transitional military government informed the United States that it was unable to keep track of all the Libyans and their Sudanese allies filtering in and out of the country. In one instance, a U.S. official told Ottaway, “a plane arrived from Libya with 100 people on it, only 80 of whom had passports. The others slipped through the relaxed security at the airport.” At this point, dozens of senior Sudanese officials were going back and forth to Tripoli, where they were being entertained in luxury hotels and guesthouses. Thousands of other Sudanese, including former members of Nimeiri’s State Security Force, were being given salaried jobs in Libya. Libyan oil was pouring into the country to prop up the economy, which was collapsing because the transitional regime—paralyzed by strikes and demonstrations in the weeks prior to the elections—took no effective countermeasures. U.S. personnel were reduced to throwing their hands up in the air and barricading themselves inside the embassy compound while taking different routes to work each day. Said one diplomat in an exasperated tone, “The only thing worse than an African government that says it is going to hold elections and doesn’t is one that says it is going to hold elections and actually does!”

The Libyans were less fatalistic. They acted. In March, as election fever mounted, the Libyans pulled off a brilliant campaign stunt. The SPLA had seized the important outpost of Rum-beck in the Bahr el Ghazal region of southern Sudan and then threatened to launch an offensive against the government. Having assisted the SPLA for many years, the Libyans now turned against their former allies and attacked the rebel-held town with two Tupolev-22 bombers. In the words of a senior U.S. State Department official, it was the old “good cop–bad cop” routine. No amount of helicopter drops could have impressed the politicians in Khartoum as much as did this air raid. In the midst of the April elections, the Libyans shot a U.S. Embassy communications clerk, which along with anti-U.S. demonstrations in Khartoum engendered by President Reagan’s bombing of Libya, forced the evacuation of 250 U.S. citizens, many of whom were USAID personnel who had helped with the helicopter drops and other aspects of the relief effort and who still were vital to it. The gift of “Reagan’s bread” was of little relevance to those urbanites shouting anti-U.S. slogans in the capital because these Sudanese never needed the bread in the first place.

For the United States, Sadiq al Mahdi’s election as prime minister was the only positive development in the midst of all this humbling chaos. But anyone who had ever spoken with Sadiq and his followers at length could have foreseen that this was a misplaced hope. My introduction to the political values of Sadiq al Mahdi came on a September night in Khartoum, in the late summer of 1985, at the Syrian Club, where I and Jonathan Steele, a senior foreign correspondent for The Guardian, had been invited for dinner in order to meet several Umma party notables, in preparation for our interview with Sadiq. Over hoummous, tehina, delicious goat’s cheese, and other delights of Middle Eastern cuisine we talked for several hours around a simple foldout table in a garden under the stars. I do recall spending almost all of the time discussing three subjects: the Umma party’s strategy in the elections the coming spring, the civil war in the south, and Islamic law. Regarding the civil war, I remember thinking that our hosts were making no attempt to empathize with the feelings of non-Moslem Africans in the south of the country or to even accept the fact that only half of Sudan was Arab. The subject of the famine, I believe, never was raised by our hosts. When Steele or I brought it to their attention, a few words were uttered, and that was that.

Steele, for some reason, could not be present at the interview with Sadiq. So I met with Sadiq alone, in the dim salon of his villa on the other side of the Nile in Omdurman. We spoke for about an hour. His sharp gaze, white turban, graceful, gesticulating hands, and excellent English made quite a regal impression. Sadiq certainly seemed to have an aura about him, and he sometimes spoke with poetic elegance: “democracy in Sudan is a lone bird surrounded by vultures interested in its flesh.” On the question of Islamic law, he was intelligent and subtle. He said that although drinking alcohol was immoral according to Sharia precepts, it need not be illegal for those who do not agree that it is immoral.

On the famine and the future of the peasants Sadiq showed little interest, however. His answer to my queries about these issues came in a single sentence: “it is no longer a serious problem because international aid has been forthcoming.” He considered famine a problem the wealthy West was obligated to solve, thereby leaving him free to deal with other matters, such as Sharia law and the war with the SPLA. As to the African southerners, he appeared to have no better understanding of what really bothered them than did his Umma party colleagues with whom I had met several nights before. I had the distinct feeling, which many other foreign observers also shared, that in all the years of his intellectually active London exile, Sadiq had not formed a specific blueprint of what he wanted to do once he returned to power. In short, he was very much the quintessential Arab politician—a man who used flowery speech to maneuver around difficult and complex issues without confronting them head-on.

Like every Arab ruler, Sadiq never seemed to doubt the primacy of his own ethnic and religious group over others in the nation. This was no particular flaw for a politician in Libya, Syria, Jordan, or other Middle Eastern countries. But fate had cast Sudan as a polity that was ethnically and religiously split to a degree greater than any of these other places. Sudan lay across the fault line separating the Arab and African worlds, but its Arab politicians, of which Sadiq was typical, refused to countenance this fact. Sadiq also had one more unfortunate trait that was typical of his part of the world: he was an urbanized landowner with a demonstrated lack of interest in the problems of the peasants. All the tragic weaknesses of Sudanese society were summed up in this most respected of Sudanese politicians.

Once Sadiq assumed power, absolutely nothing changed. It was as if General Swareddahab—an honest, well-meaning, but completely ineffectual man—never had departed. Sadiq simply made no impact. Order broke down further. Strikes remained common. Ministerial directives counted for little, and bureaucrats lower down were not listening to those above. Advice from the International Monetary Fund was ignored. Subsidies and commodity price-fixing, which virtually stole income from peasant farmers, continued. Import-export controls increased, and the currency remained overvalued. In their speeches, Sadiq and the other members of the cabinet hinted at all the right measures, but deeds never followed. Said a Western aid expert, “We don’t see anything resembling a rational economic plan that could serve as a reference point for donors.” The prime minister’s policy seemed to consist of making trips abroad in order to hold out the begging bowl. He tried Moscow and Tripoli first, looking for aid and help against his nemesis, Garang and the SPLA. In Moscow Sadiq got little, except a promise for deliveries of gas containers and soybeans, which some people in Khartoum said, only half-jokingly, were radioactive. The Soviets, who had a larger embassy staff in the Sudanese capital than the British had—but did no relief work—were playing it smart. Why should they supply arms and substantial assistance to a sinking ship, whose descent was being deliberately quickened by its Libyan and Ethiopian allies?

The Ethiopian air force had been dropping weapons and other supplies behind SPLA lines inside Sudan, which was helping to tip the balance in the civil war more and more in favor of Garang. In mid-September 1986, Colonel Gaddafi made his second visit to Khartoum since the overthrow of Nimeiri. Several hundred Libyan security personnel, each armed with both a pistol and an assault rifle, preceded him unannounced and without bothering to get airport landing clearance. Throughout the visit, Libyan planes constantly were landing and taking off. Although Gaddafi’s retinue was disarmed of their assault rifles, no one knows if other arms entered the country.

But Sadiq’s slippery and insubstantial political style seemed to be perfectly suited to handling the Libyan threat. Sadiq dealt with Gaddafi the same way he did with all the Western diplomats, financial experts, and relief officials who came into his midst: he whispered sweet things in Gaddafi’s ears and did nothing. A less experienced and less sophisticated politician might not have been able to generously accept Libyan aid while keeping Gaddafi at bay the way Sadiq did. In this regard, if in no other, the great-grandson of the Mahdi served his country well.

After Sadiq’s visit to Washington in October 1986, about fifty of the U.S. personnel who had been evacuated the previous April were allowed by the U.S. State Department to return to Sudan with their adult dependents, which meant children had to be left behind. It was an impossible situation and reflected the ambivalence of the Washington bureaucracy to the atmosphere in Khartoum. Although the Libyan presence seemed to be diminishing slightly, Sadiq had not lived up to his promise to eject several known Libyan terrorists who were in the Sudanese capital. Because Sadiq also had not lived up to his pledge to present Western donors with an economic reform and development package, Washington took another half-measure: it released $71 million of money previously appropriated to Sudan in order to pay for food imports, but refused to appropriate any more funds.

As 1986 drew to a close, it was God who came to Sadiq’s rescue in the form of the second bumper harvest in two years. Starving Sudan suddenly was drowning in grain, although as usual a lot of it was in the hands of rapacious merchants instead of hungry peasants. Nevertheless, in the opinion of most Western observers, the extra food stocks gave Sadiq another year in which to do nothing before the hangman appeared at the door.

In April 1987, on the second anniversary of the coup that toppled Nimeiri, the peasants of Sudan, the largest country in Africa, had little hope. Western-style parliamentary democracy had produced only another government of corrupt landowners. This government was worse than Nimeiri’s, because at least Nimeiri, who did nothing for his people in his final years in office, did not hinder the United States and other Western nations from doing something. Under Swareddahab’s and Sadiq’s leadership, Western relief workers were encountering one bureaucratic and security hurdle after another in their attempts to get internal travel permits, to import supplies into the country, and to do other tasks vital to helping people whom the Sudanese government ignored.

On the other hand, the storm cloud raised by Gaddafi could very well vanish with the eternally shifting desert winds. In the first weeks of spring 1987, French-assisted Chadian government forces virtually ejected Gaddafi from the north of their country, and inside Libya itself, the mercurial colonel was facing what appeared to be an inexorable, albeit gradual, buildup of internal opposition. However, even if we should all wake up one morning to hear that Gaddafi has been overthrown, his bold moves to take advantage of a vacuum of power in Sudan in the mid 1980s should cure those in the West of the delusion that humanitarian means are sufficient to achieve humanitarian ends in Africa.

USAID officials have pointed out to me that the equation I make is an unfair one. Humanitarian assistance, they say, by its very definition is designed to have a humanitarian impact, not a political one. The real-life facts on the ground prove, however, that such logic is a cop-out because, first, it lets Third World leaders morally off the hook. If leaders like those in Khartoum and Addis Ababa placed as much priority on the well-being of their peasants as the United States does, there would be no question about granting a political payoff commensurate with the amount of U.S. famine aid.

Second, I believe the U.S. experience in Sudan, Ethiopia, and elsewhere forces the nation to question the very meaning of the term “humanitarian.” Is it humanitarian to allow people like the Libyans or the Soviets to establish a foothold in a given country when experience demonstrates that the individual inhabitants, especially peasants, in their zone of influence tend to have far fewer freedoms than do those in the U.S. zone of influence (alarming exceptions such as Chile in the 1970s notwithstanding)? Experience likewise demonstrates—protestations of humanitarianism to the contrary—that relief aid to a politically powerless sector of a Third World population cannot compete in terms of influence with military and other kinds of assistance to the politically powerful. The argument that the West has an advantage in the Third World because it presents a more viable model for economic development is nonsense because the Eastern bloc provides a more viable model for political control, which is what ruling elites are interested in.

At the same time, calling certain kinds of humanitarian assistance “strategic” gives rise to another confusion. “Strategic” connotes a sinister intent because the word alludes to military, even nuclear, conflict. “Strategic” also implies a certain willingness to accept in the abstract that places like Ethiopia or Sudan, to say nothing of places like Iran, will be required for the defense of the Western world, an abstraction that many in the United States do not accept. It needs to be emphasized that what is “strategic” is also “humanitarian” and is often the most effective form of long-range humanitarian assistance. Conservatives trying to sell the Reagan Doctrine are a good example of this confusion in labeling. They sometimes have mistakenly marketed their product as a “strategic” response to Soviet expansionism. Although each individual case has to be considered on its merits, as a general rule, the Reagan Doctrine also can be called a “moral” response, which would be more attractive to the U.S. public at large. Otherwise, by declining to take direct action against aggression by the Soviets, the Libyans, and others, the United States in effect is consigning helpless people around the world to an awful fate.

No group of people was more ignorant of these hard facts of life than were elements of the foreign policy team of President Jimmy Carter in 1977 and 1978. No one mentioned during the famine emergency that the wholesale loss of human life—not to mention the disregard of human rights—had important antecedents in the Carter human rights policy, in which abstract moral precepts became a barrier to the kind of action necessary to save a population from being swallowed whole by the shadow of totalitarianism. Much of what has transpired in the past decade in the Horn of Africa can be traced to that folly of good intentions.

The Horn of Africa is a powerful allegory of U.S. foreign policy weakness precisely because what occurred there in the late 1970s was so entirely typical of how the United States, the Soviet Union, and Third World elites behave and interact. The United States was reactive and internally divided; policymakers argued about what forceful measures to take without actually taking any and expected the USSR to act as the United States would in the same position. The Soviets did not oblige. As is their wont, they employed proxy soldiers—in this instance, Cubans and South Yemenis—as tools in a crude, brazen, and not-altogether-well-thought-out policy. Despite what U.S. conservatives like to believe, there was no detailed Soviet game plan. The Soviets improvised as they went along. But because U.S. policy was based on and constricted by moral precepts that Soviet and African rulers only preached, the Soviets were able to operate in a vacuum of U.S. inaction that made it seem as if their moves were part of a bold, brilliantly conceived strategy. The behavior of the emergent Ethiopian strongman, Mengistu Haile Mariam, also was not unique. He was neither a religious fundamentalist nor at the time a Marxist ideologue. He was simply the number one thug on the lookout for an alliance that would best serve to consolidate his control. He found it.

The Horn also was a pure, essentially in vitro case study of liberal foreign policy notions at work in the real world. It was the first turf battle between the United States and the Soviet Union after Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as president, and as a consequence, Carter’s team was fresh and relatively undistracted by other crises. By the time that the shah’s regime in Iran began to unravel in mid 1978, and certainly by the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Jimmy Carter, hardened by his experience in the White House, was less of a liberal than he was when Ethiopia and Somalia grabbed his attention in early 1977. In Iran, Carter, whatever else his faults, eventually tried force to free U.S. hostages, something for which the conservative editorial writers of The Wall Street Journal praised him. In Afghanistan, he took the unpopular, highly symbolic decision of boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics, despite little support from much of the Western world. Ideologically, the president’s behavior in these later crises was harder to categorize. But in the Horn, the liberals and Africanists had their chance. In comparing what they predicted in the late 1970s with what had transpired by the late 1980s, they have nothing to hide behind.

In his memoir Hard Choices, Carter’s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, recalled that “we in the State Department saw the Horn as a textbook case of Soviet exploitation of a local conflict. In the long run, however, we believed the Ethiopians would oust the Soviets from their country as had happened in Egypt and Sudan.” Carter’s U.N. ambassador, Andrew Young, agreed with Vance, arguing that the Soviet presence in Ethiopia was not only temporary, but self-defeating because the Soviets would get bogged down in internal African problems. Young, who because of his passionate public interest became extremely influential regarding U.S. relations with African states, advised Carter not to get involved as the Soviets had. After all, Young was quoted as saying, U.S. policy toward Africa was now “more wholesome and healthy than it has been in a long time.” Basically, Young and Vance wanted Africans to decide matters for themselves. If the Soviets were foolish enough to continue their military adventure, area experts in the U.S. State Department predicted that the Horn might become the USSR’s Vietnam. According to a Baltimore Sun editorial (November 15, 1977), the United States “may yet come out with enhanced influence for non-involvement” in the region. One of the only dissenting voices was that of Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who advised force as the only effective measure to counter the Soviet gambit. Brzezinski brought up various military-related options and recommended linkage between events in the Horn and progress on nuclear arms talks. Regarding the Soviets, Brzezinski wanted to be tough, while Young and Vance wanted to be reasonable. Reasonableness won out at every turn. Brzezinski’s tragedy, as the Ethiopia-Somalia crisis was the first to reveal, was that of being a hawk in an administration dominated by doves.

Of course, “in the long run,” as Vance put it, the Soviets will be forced to leave Ethiopia. As everybody knows, nothing is forever. But to judge Vance and Young by their own standard of concern for Africa and its peoples, even if the Soviets were ejected tomorrow, it would be too late and therefore irrelevant. One million Ethiopians already have died as a result of famine and of forced collectivization, which would not have occurred had the Soviet Union not implanted itself in Ethiopia to the degree that the Carter State Department was willing to allow.

Vance’s belief that the Soviets would be ousted from Ethiopia the way they were from Egypt and Sudan was at no point a serious possibility simply because the Soviets weren’t involved in Egypt and Sudan to the extent that they were in Ethiopia. In Egypt, from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, the Soviets gave substantial military and economic aid to a sympathetic regime, but they never sought to create a communist satellite as they did in Ethiopia. Moscow’s involvement with Sudan in the first years of Nimeiri’s rule was less dramatic than in the case of Egypt. But not only was Vance guilty of a false comparison, but of a particularly U.S., and even more particularly liberal, tendency of ascribing the lessons learned from one’s own experience to that of another nation. The futility of seeking permanent domination over an African country was what the United States learned from the USSR’s misadventures in Egypt and Sudan, not what the Soviets learned. What they learned was quite the opposite. As the French political philosopher Jean-Francois Revel explained in How Democracies Perish, “The expulsion of Soviet advisers from Egypt by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s successors was a lesson to Moscow that no country can be held permanently unless it is given a Communist regime wholly shaped in the standard satellite mold. …In the Soviet view, the case simply proved that half measures can never guarantee anything.”

The fact that Moscow was attempting to create a presence in Ethiopia so soon after the failures in Egypt and Sudan should have been a warning signal to Vance, and to Young, too, that this time the Soviets could be expected to be even more heavy-handed in their involvement. Rather than seek to create another Egypt, they would seek to create another Mongolia or Vietnam (in the sense of a Soviet satellite)—which they did. But neither Young nor Vance ever appeared to be thinking along those lines.

A still-existent nineteenth-century empire, Soviet Russia, was grafting itself onto another still-existent nineteenth-century empire. Amhara-dominated Ethiopia, and old world notions of power were all that came into play. Yet the West was led by idealistic theoreticians who eschewed not only the use of force and punitive measures, but even the threat of using them. Young and Vance wanted an African solution for an African problem, which given the unpleasant realities of Africa meant a Soviet solution because the only Africans who mattered in Ethiopia were the kind who were more impressed by the Soviet concept of power and control than by the U.S. one.

The groundwork for appeasement already had been laid by the time Jimmy Carter took office on January 20, 1977. Unfortunately for the mass of Ethiopian peasants, the political cataclysms that were shaking their country had caught the United States in a mood of distraction and self-defeat unequaled since the country formally became a superpower at the close of World War II. The first phase of the Ethiopian revolution corresponded with the last phase of Watergate. Haile Selassie was forced out of the emperor’s palace only a month after Richard Nixon was forced out of the White House. The final months of the emperor’s life and the consolidation of the Dergue’s power in Addis Ababa and other cities occurred concomitantly with the fall of South Vietnam in early 1975. The following year, Tom J. Farer wrote in War Clouds on the Horn of Africa that “in the wake of Vietnam, the air is filled with tests of will looking for somewhere to settle. The Horn is not an especially hospitable setting for human habitation. But as a venue for confrontation by proxy, it now shows real promise.” There was a fear among the public that the United States might get entangled in another fruitless confrontation in the Third World. Hesitancy, coupled with a distinct lack of confidence, became the order of the day. Rather than fine tune its manner of involvement in distant corners of the globe, the United States chose not to get involved at all. For Americans, this was certainly convenient. For Ethiopians and others, it was not.

As Paul B. Henze, a Carter-era National Security Council staffer, wrote in The National Interest (Winter 1985–1986), “The biggest gain for the Russians was the withdrawal syndrome that set in among Americans. Technological advances had made U.S. communications facilities at Asmara redundant by 1971, and a decision was taken to phase down operations. Ethiopia was not officially informed. One school of thought in the State Department held that Ethiopia would no longer be of importance to the U.S. once the Eritrean sites were closed.” So when Mengistu and the Dergue came to power, the United States, under President Gerald Ford, began to distance itself from internal Ethiopian politics. William G. Hyland, a deputy assistant to President Ford for national security affairs, reported that

The United States already was beginning to forget the laws of nature. A regime that was executing and purging its own followers and threatening to execute the royal family was not a regime that was about to fall; rather, it most surely was going to survive against all comers, even if it had to execute half the population to do so. Didn’t the Bolsheviks do the same during their first years in power in the USSR? Wasn’t it apparent that given the kill-or-be-killed atmosphere in Addis Ababa, and the professed ideology of the combatants, that the individuals who were going to emerge on top at the end of all the bloodletting were going to make perfect bedfellows for the Soviets? The United States was dealing with professional murderers, and the only leverage it had over them—their well-grounded fear of an invasion from historically hostile Somalia—was not utilized.

The outgoing secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, tried to keep an iron in the fire by continuing military assistance to Ethiopia, even after the overthrow of Haile Selassie. Liberals, quite legitimately, questioned this approach. The Dergue had renewed the military conflict in Eritrea and from the very beginning had been treating its people with extreme barbarity. But Kissinger, at least, seemed to realize that if the United States completely forfeited its presence in Ethiopia, rather than hold its nose for the time being at the awful violations of human rights, the eventual result would be not only a strategic gain for the Soviets, but a more drawn out suffering for the people of the region.

Exit Ford and Kissinger. Enter Carter and Vance, with Young at the United Nations adopting a high public profile on African affairs. They wanted a policy that would demonstrate greater U.S. concern for black Africa, while being less heavy-handed at the same time. In the Horn, this immediately translated into asymmetry because the Soviets were starting to be more enterprising and aggressive than ever.

When the Carter team took over the State Department, the Soviets, who had made Somalia into a regional military power far out of proportion to its size, already were beginning to sense opportunities next door in Ethiopia. Somalia was an example of how the Soviets, contrary to popular belief, understood Africa better than the United States did. The United States gave millions in development aid after independence in 1960 and then in 1962 offered Somalia $10 million in security assistance. The Somalis said no thanks and took a $32 million offer from the Soviet Union instead. Moscow used its entrée to develop ties within the Somali officers’ corp. In 1969 came General Siad Barre’s coup, which the Kremlin very well may have had a hand in, and Soviet-Somali relations blossomed. Soon U.S. Peace Corps volunteers were being stoned in the streets of the Somali capital of Mogadishu thanks to a Soviet disinformation campaign. Between 1970 and 1975, the Somali army was increased from twelve thousand to twenty-three thousand soldiers. The Soviets supplied hundreds of tanks and fifty-five combat aircraft.

The presence of ethnic Somalis in Ethiopia’s Ogaden desert made Somalia an irredentist state, and the Soviets obviously were taking advantage of Siad Barre’s dreams of conquest and a Great Somalia. The six thousand Soviets in Somalia strutted about as if they owned the place. Naturally they were hated. It didn’t matter. Their bull-in-a-china-shop approach never betrayed them. Although the Soviets eventually would leave Somalia, it was only because they had decided to jump ship to Somalia’s number one enemy, Ethiopia, thus giving Siad Barre no choice but to accept the Americans as sloppy seconds.

As the revolution began to devour its children in Ethiopia, both the Soviets and the irredentist Somalis sensed great opportunities for themselves. Armed to the teeth by the Soviet Union, General Siad was finally in a position to attack his historic enemy, now weakened by revolutionary violence and turmoil. The Soviets, however, were becoming more and more intrigued by a different kind of opportunity: the line of bodies in Addis Ababa was forming a road for them to enter on. Ethiopia was always the prize of the region, which the United States had and which the Soviet Union now wanted. Somalia was but a country of three million people, mostly illiterate nomads, who lived and worked as if hypnotized by the merciless sun and humidity of the Indian Ocean. Ethiopia had ten times as many people, and many of those people were hard-working and culturally developed highlanders, whom the Soviets knew would make excellent fodder for the kind of mechanized African satellite state that they hoped to build. Regardless of a country’s size and place on the map, in the final analysis it can be judged only by the talent of the people who live in it. (Israel is a perfect example.) The Soviets knew what every experienced Africa hand had long been aware of: that the highland Ethiopians—whether Amhara, Tigrean, Eritrean, or Oromo—were the hard-working, efficient people of black Africa. Somalia, a steamy, barely populated hell-hole, never could be anything but a strategic bit of real estate suitable for a naval base or a landing strip. But Ethiopia… now there was a place that could be made into something!

The Kremlin initially thought it could create an entente between the two sworn enemies, with the Soviet Union guaranteeing the sovereignty of Ethiopia and Somalia under an umbrella of military aid; sort of like the arrangement the United States had with Greece and Turkey, both of whom were forever quarreling yet never actually went to war because each was dependent for supplies on the United States, which had bases in both countries. As with Greece and Turkey, the Kremlin wanted to make Ethiopia and Somalia part of a larger alliance that would include Marxist South Yemen and hopefully, someday, North Yemen and Djibouti as well, thus effectively choking off the West at its Red Sea oil windpipe.

In December 1976, the final month of Henry Kissinger’s reign as the vicar of U.S. foreign policy, the Soviets offered $385 million in military aid to the Ethiopian Dergue while trying to reassure the Somalis at the same time. By this time, the Dergue already had switched ideological gears by declaring a commitment to “scientific socialism.” But checkmate was still at least several moves away. The Dergue still was receiving M-60 tanks and F-5 warplanes from the United States, courtesy of Kissinger’s foresight. Consequently, Mengistu was hesitant about going through the disruptive task of switching armorers for an entire army. Moreover, the Dergue still was receiving weapons and U.S. spare parts from an important U.S. ally in the region, Israel, whose position in revolutionary Ethiopia was somewhat better than its position later would be in revolutionary Iran. (The Mossad had trained Haile Selassie’s secret service, and partly for historical and cultural reasons, Israel had developed close ties with the emperor. As with Iran, the relationship existed at so many levels of the Ethiopian bureaucracy that it never was severed totally after Haile Selassie was deposed, especially inside the military. But there the similarities ended. The mass of Ethiopians—Christians and Africanized Moslems—did not hate Israel with the same intensity as did the fundamentalist Shias in Iran; thus, the links with Israel that survived the Ethiopian revolution did not have to be denied by the new regime to quite the same degree as they have been by the authorities in Iran.)

In the early spring of 1977, as the Carter team was in the process of washing its hands of Ethiopia due to massive human rights violations, the Soviets had dispatched East German security police to Addis Ababa to help Mengistu consolidate his revolution, while sending Cuban leader Fidel Castro on a peacekeeping mission to both Ethiopia and Somalia. Admittedly, Carter faced a tough choice. Given the ongoing bloodbath in Ethiopia, it is doubtful whether any administration, liberal or conservative, would have wanted to, or would have been able to, continue delivering U.S. arms at an undisturbed pace to the Dergue. But considering the stakes for the United States and the people of the region, the military aid relationship did not have to be completely severed, as it was in April and May 1977. The situation still was not irreversible, however. As the Horn moved toward a momentous sequence of events in mid 1977, the United States would have other opportunities to remain engaged.

Carter’s decision to cut off all arms deliveries apparently removed all further restraints from Mengistu and the Eastern bloc. In early April, Mengistu flew to Moscow for a week-long state visit where he signed the Declaration of the Foundation for Relationships and Cooperation, which laid the groundwork for one of the most massive Soviet arms transfers ever in the Third World. Within days, Cuban soldiers were sent to Ethiopia directly from Somalia, and tanks and armored personnel carriers began arriving from South Yemen. On May 1, the Red Terror began with the assistance of Mengistu’s newly arrived East German security advisers. During the coming months, hundreds of Ethiopian teenagers would be gunned down in the streets of Addis Ababa.

Following Castro’s ill-fated attempt at peacemaking, Supreme Soviet Presidium Chairman Nikolai Podgorny paid an official visit to Mogadishu in another effort to get the Somalis to accept the new reality—of Soviet support for both them and the Ethiopians. But General Siad was having none of it. Somalia was in a better position than ever for invading Ethiopia, and the Somali leader was willing to risk his relationship with the Soviets rather than let the opportunity pass. Although for a little while longer the Soviets would find themselves the chief arms supplier for both countries, the Kremlin already had made the decision to forfeit Somalia if necessary in return for a bigger prize.

As the die was about to be cast, the Dergue still was maintaining contact with Israel, which had just elected a new prime minister, Menachem Begin. One of Begin’s first acts was to communicate with Mengistu about the plight of Ethiopia’s black Falasha Jews. This led to a series of messages whereby the Ethiopians made it known to the Israelis that they still desired a “Western option.” In June, the long-awaited Somali invasion of Ethiopia’s Ogaden desert began; regular Somali army units crossed the border to support WSLF guerrillas. Despite clandestine Israeli assistance and the new Soviet equipment, which had just begun to arrive, the Dergue, which also was occupied with fighting in Tigre and Eritrea, was not strong enough to stop the Somali advance. When Begin met Carter in Washington in July and urged him not to close the door completely in Ethiopia, Mengistu was in desperate straits and very well may have been amenable to certain U.S. demands on human rights and other issues if Carter was willing to resume, albeit on a low level, the military aid relationship. There was no question of blackmail. This was not Iran. Ethiopia never had taken any foreign hostages, and its revolution—leftist although it was and Mengistu’s diatribes notwithstanding—was relatively devoid of anti-U.S. sentiment, despite previous U.S. support for Haile Selassie. The United States thus had no axe to grind against Ethiopia when Begin offered Carter a second chance to salvage some degree of U.S. influence in black Africa’s second most populous nation. But Carter rejected the Israeli leader’s advice.

Carter very well may have felt that considering the growing Eastern-bloc arms commitment to the Dergue, Mengistu was likely to take U.S. weapons without giving anything back in the way of policy concessions. But nor was Carter willing to put U.S. weapons in the hands of the Somalis as an alternate means of pressuring the Dergue. After all, through their own hell-bent irredentism, the Somalis now were providing Carter with yet another opportunity to muddle the outcome of Moscow’s Ethiopia gambit. Apparently to placate Brzezinski, Carter did give General Siad indications that the United States was willing to supply arms. But by August, when Somali troops were on the verge of overrunning Jijiga, fifty miles inside Ethiopia, the United States announced that so long as Somali troops were illegally occupying Ethiopian territory, Washington could not supply them with arms. The Soviets were less legalistic. They brought in Cuban and South Yemeni troops to slow the Somali advance while at the same time resuming arms supplies to Somalia and inviting General Siad to Moscow.

The Moscow meeting was a failure, however. The Somali leader, under pressure from his own conquering army and WSLF guerrillas, could not simply withdraw in order to accommodate Soviet strategy in Ethiopia. On November 13, 1977, the Somalis expelled their Soviet advisers and broke diplomatic relations with Cuba. Later in the month, the Soviets began airlifting thousands of Cuban troops to Ethiopia. During the next four months, as Tom Farer reported in War Clouds on the Horn of Africa, Moscow would deliver more than $1 billion worth of arms to Ethiopia, which was more than four times the value of all the arms the United States had delivered to the country since 1953.

The Somalis had no choice but to come running to the United States. “We advised them,” related Vance in his book, “to accept OAU [Organization of African Unity] mediation of their dispute with Ethiopia, to seek a negotiated peace, and to offer their neighbors [Ethiopia and Kenya] assurances of respect for their territorial integrity.” (This was basically what Moscow was telling General Siad to do.) The administration was taking the easy way out: preaching the Western version of morality from the sidelines while the Soviets, by trial and error, were muscling their way toward control over tens of millions of people.

At the beginning of 1978, the influx of Soviet arms and Cuban soldiers finally was taking effect. The Somalis were weakening. If the Ethiopians managed to completely eject Somali forces from the Ogaden, coupled with improved military fortunes in Eritrea, it would mean the consolidation of Mengistu’s power and that of the Kremlin’s in Ethiopia—an incredible display of Soviet military strength and determination in support of an ally. In this desperate moment, the administration, according to Vance, was only “prepared to support Somalia in a limited way, including the supplying of defensive arms, but only after the Somalis withdrew from the Ogaden.” It was a classic example of the West being too civilized to defend its own values and interests. However badly the Soviets may have looked for deserting Somalia after building it up into a regional power, at least they were acting in support of their interests.

At this point, Brzezinski was urging several available options on President Carter, including deploying the U.S. Navy in the region, providing air cover for Somali troops, giving military aid to the Somalis and Eritreans, and linking Soviet behavior in the Horn to progress on the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. None of these occurred. In his book, Vance outlined the strategy that took shape in early February.

• First, to work with our NATO allies to achieve agreed Western goals: a negotiated settlement; preventing an invasion of Somalia; preventing an increase in Soviet and Cuban influence in the area.

• Second, to ensure that other friends in the region—Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan—also understood and supported these goals and would urge them on Siad Barre.

• Third, to obtain Somali agreement to withdraw from the Ogaden.

• Fourth, to lay the diplomatic and political groundwork to help Somalia defend its territory, including supplying defensive arms after it withdrew from the Ogaden.

• Fifth, to keep pressure on the Soviets to stop the Ethiopians and Cubans at the Somali border and to support a negotiated resolution.

In other words, do little.

First, Soviet influence had grown so much in the region that the issue was how to reduce it, not to accept it at the present level as Vance indicated. Second, the “other friends” were nearly as powerless as was the United States in the face of a massive Soviet airlift of weapons and Cuban troops. Third, whether the Somalis agreed to withdraw from the Ogaden or not, the Ethiopians, Cubans, and Soviets were about to use force to kick the Somalis out. Fourth and fifth, the defensive arms that the United States eventually would provide General Siad were beside the point: the Soviets had no need for Ethiopia to invade Somalia because their position in Ethiopia would be secured merely by driving the Somalis out of Ethiopia and by turning the tide against the Eritrean guerrillas.

In mid-February 1978, the Ethiopians, fortified by Cuban armor, counterattacked. Somali forces were outflanked, and Jijiga was retaken by the Dergue on March 9. Farer wrote in his book that “President Carter practically simultaneously announced” the decision by the Somali government to remove all its troops from Ethiopia. One could say that it was a rare case of one superpower leader announcing a victory of the other. Vance still was not satisfied, however. Even after Somalia had withdrawn its troops, the United States, according to Vance, still was “not able to assist Somalia militarily at that time because Siad Barre reneged on his assurances that he would leave Ethiopia alone.” Had the Kremlin been able to draft the script, it couldn’t have done a better job.

The superpower flip-flop in the Horn of Africa now was complete. It was by no means a fair trade—either for the United States or for the people of the region. Instead of controlling a country of three million people whose nomadic lifestyle they virtually left alone, the Soviets now had control over a country of more than 30 million people, whose existences would be trampled on in the course of implementing communism. Although U.S. ideology had helped to restrain some of Haile Selassie’s excesses, Soviet ideology would serve to intensify the worst excesses of the Dergue. In Breakfast in Hell, relief worker Myles F. Harris described the difference between the two Ethiopian regimes.

Carter’s strategy emphasized human rights and diplomacy. The Kremlin interpreted this as just plain weakness. The USSR moved more than $1 billion in arms to take over a country while the United States did nothing except stand on ceremony. In coming years, hundreds of thousands would die as a result. Ethiopia obviously took up a significant amount of Carter’s time at the beginning of his term in office. But it’s difficult to find a reference about Ethiopia in his memoir Keeping Faith.

By the time Ronald Reagan took office, Ethiopia was well on its way to becoming Moscow’s first African satellite. Although the maturation of the Eritrean and Tigrean guerrilla resistances offered Reagan the chance to destabilize the Dergue through the use of proxy armies, the conservative Republican president, while willing to arm less competent guerrilla groups in other parts of the globe, did next to nothing in Ethiopia. In 1981, Reagan authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to provide $500,000 yearly to the London-based EPDA in order to distribute antigovernment leaflets and audiovisual material inside Ethiopia. The EPDA was multiethnic and democratic, but it also had few guerrillas in the field. Countering Soviet guns and East German surveillance techniques with leaflets and soundtracks was the kind of gentlemanly course of action that Carter would have employed had he been reelected in 1980.

In 1984, the famine emergency gave the United States what it thought was an opportunity to weaken Moscow’s hold over Ethiopia using peaceful means. While the Soviet Union provided less than 1 percent (10,000 tons out of 1.25 million) of the emergency food aid, the noncommunist world provided 99 percent. Mengistu was not impressed, however. During a November 1985 visit to Moscow, the Ethiopian leader, according to the TASS news agency, “expressed profound gratitude to the USSR for its… assistance in strengthening the economy and defensive capacity of socialist Ethiopia and in overcoming the consequences of the severest drought.” No similar tribute was paid to the West.

In June 1986, Ethiopia released a draft of its new constitution. Aleme Eshete, an Ethiopian scholar, described it as “almost an abridged translation of the Soviet constitution of 1977. One does not see Ethiopia in it. The chapters of the Soviet constitution are all reproduced in order.” The only major exception was the part dealing with the office and powers of the president, which was lifted almost straight out of the Romanian constitution, in order to give Mengistu the kind of absolute power enjoyed by President Nicolae Ceausescu.

The U.S. position in Ethiopia in the mid 1980s was worse than ever. Said a diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa: “We could wake up tomorrow morning and find that we’re being kicked out.” Indeed, the record in Sudan and Ethiopia had made one thing clear: in the struggle against totalitarianism, bread alone was never enough.

CODA: THE TWO YEMENS

At the southern entrance to the Red Sea, across the shark-infested waters from Ethiopia and Somalia, lie North and South Yemen. The two Yemens offer a mirror image of the reality in the Horn of Africa and therefore provide another clue as to why the U.S. position in Ethiopia is worse than it ever has been, despite the generous outpouring of famine aid.

Although one often is confused with the other, the historical experience of the two Yemens has been markedly different. In 1839, the British occupied Aden, at the southwest tip of the Arabian peninsula, where they established a coal-bunkering port for ships sailing to and from India. A debilitating form of colonialism ensued. While Aden boomed, nothing was done to develop or, more importantly, to integrate the adjacent hinterland. Order was kept by bribing the local tribal chiefs. Not surprisingly, the radical guerrilla movement that ousted the British in 1967 was dominated by up-country tribespeople, who would use extreme methods to unify what had been no more than an assemblage of separate little protectorate states rimming Aden. The preconditions for the Marxist straitjacket in the country that came to be known as South Yemen thus were formed.

But neither the British nor anyone else could ever colonize the tribespeople in the high mountains and deserts in the far north— the legendary home of the Queen of Sheba. The Ottoman Turkish hold over this region was nothing more than a four-hundred-year-long series of bloody failures. Only in 1962 was the sultanate—as medieval as the court of Haile Selassie—abolished. Even so, North Yemen remains a stronghold of xenophobic traditionalism much like Ethiopia and Afghanistan, and like both of those countries, the first group of foreign invaders able to successfully penetrate North Yemen may turn out to be the Soviets.

The similarities between North Yemen and Ethiopia are, to say the least, unsettling. In antiquity, both places shared a story-book aura as civilizations existing in mountainous isolation at the very edge of the known world renowned for their gold, spices, frankincense, and precious stones. According to tradition, the line of Ethiopian kings that ended with Haile Selassie was started by the Yemenite Queen of Sheba and the Hebrew King Solomon. Axum, the first great Ethiopian kingdom, was established by colonists from Yemen, which was known to the Romans as Arabia Felix (Fortuante Arabia) on account of its wealth. In the intervening centuries, only the most intrepid explorers were able to scale the fortress of mountains that kept both Yemen and Ethiopia locked away in a cultural time warp. Exactly like Ethiopia, North Yemen was one of the few places in the Third World that totally withstood the bastardizing influence of the West until the second half of the twentieth century and even now is an anthropologist’s dream come true. The Zaidi version of Shiite Islam practiced in Yemen was no less strange and unique than was the form of Coptic Christian orthodoxy practiced in Ethiopia. Visiting the area in the 1950s, the late British journalist David Holden wrote in Farewell to Arabia, “Secluded behind its mountain barriers, protected by its sheer lack of physical communications and the fitful hostility of its Imams, the Yemen maintained a reputation of unusual mystery, even for Arabia… a medieval survival, a kingdom of silence.”

The same could be said for Ethiopia.

I was the only U.S. journalist in North Yemen following the bloody coup and tribal war in South Yemen in early 1986, and I was allowed in by mistake—the North Yemeni consul in Greece who gave me the visa was unaware that the Ministry of Information had banned news reporters from the country. It was very much as Holden described it: a land of iron-red canyons, basalt plateaus, and beehive-like villages tripping down mountainsides whose terraced green fields exuded an almost tropical remoteness. The men wore turbans, plaid skirts, and curved daggers thrust inside their belts and retired every afternoon to chew qat, a narcotic leaf whose affect is similar to marijuana. But there was nothing exotic about the politics. As in the Horn, the great nineteenth-century game of grand strategy was in progress.

The Soviets moved into South Yemen at the same time that they were moving into Somalia. A listening post, naval anchorage, and runway suitable for long-range reconnaissance flights were constructed at Aden; while on the South Yemeni island of Socotra off the Somali coast—at the very tip of the African Horn—submarine facilities were installed.

In 1979, on the heels of their successful Ethiopia gambit, the Soviets got interested in North Yemen, which with a population three times larger than South Yemen’s was, like Ethiopia, the prize of the region. The Saudi Arabians offered the North Yemeni leader Colonel Ali Abdullah Saleh $300 million in aid to keep the Soviets out. Moscow responded with a $1 billion arms program spread over the next five years for the thirty-five-thousand-troop North Yemeni military, which consequently was Soviet trained and Russian speaking and equipped with MIG bombers, T-62 tanks, and SAM antiaircraft missiles.

Still, the Soviet position in North Yemen was insecure. True to their own past, the North Yemenis liked to keep all foreigners at bay and have accepted aid from several Western nations, including the United States, as a brake against further Soviet influence. Marxism is definitely not to the North Yemenis’ liking. Not even their own government had control over the local economy, which was based on smuggling and functions as a kind of unofficial, duty-free market: Rice Crispies and Frosted Flakes are available in corner groceries in the capital of Sana’a.

The discovery of oil in North Yemen in July 1984 by the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company made the Soviets especially nervous, according to Western diplomats in Sana’a. At the time, the two Yemens were involved in unification talks (one of many attempts throughout the years to end the official division of 1934, when the British, in Aden, were forced to recognize the imam’s sovereignty north of a line that is the present-day boundary between North and South Yemen). Moscow was worried that unification would allow the more populous, free-market country to the north, now buttressed by U.S.-exploited oil, to dominate and eventually submerge its smaller and poorer Marxist neighbor to the south.

Soon after oil was discovered in North Yemen, Moscow sent Abdul Fatah Ismail, the former president of South Yemen, home to Aden to rejoin the Politburo after a five-year exile in the Soviet Union. Even by South Yemen’s insane standards, Ismail was a hard-liner, who in the late 1970s had signed a friendship treaty with the Soviets and made his strategically located country of two million an observer member of Comecon. The Kremlin’s intention was for Ismail to sabotage the policy of rapprochement with North Yemen instituted by the current South Yemeni president, Ali Nasser Mohammed.

However, the Soviets underestimated the deep personal antagonisms, further aggravated by tribal differences, between Ismail and Nasser Mohammed. On January 13, 1986, guns were drawn at a Politburo meeting and Ismail was badly wounded. Although the details never will be known, Ismail may have walked into an ambush set by Nasser Mohammed similar to the ambush Mengistu set for his rivals nine years earlier. Fighting erupted throughout Aden, and the Soviets at first supported Nasser Mohammed, with Moscow Radio describing Ismail on three successive days as a “coupist” and “agent of reaction.” But as the revolt against Nasser Mohammed gathered steam, the Soviets quickly switched sides. According to diplomats’ accounts and published reports, Soviet ships delivered ammunition to Ismail’s Laheej tribespeople. Soviet advisers helped direct tank and artillery fire, and Soviet planes bombed the airport in support of the rebels. When the dust cleared two weeks later, ten thousand people were dead and billions of dollars worth of property was damaged. As in Ethiopia the previous decade, it was another example of the Soviets brutality working their will while the outside world looked the other way.

Ismail himself was one of the casualties. Aden Radio gave several conflicting accounts of how he died. There is a strong suspicion that he may have met his end in Moscow, where some diplomats believe he was taken after being wounded in the January 13 shootout. Prior to the official announcement of his death, Soviet diplomats in Sana’a were saying that Ismail was “finished politically” because Moscow had “no interest” in backing a man “known throughout the Arab world as an extremist.” Conceivably, Ismail was left to die, or even eliminated, once it was clear that the new, hard-line regime in South Yemen that he helped establish was firmly in place. It would not be the first time that Moscow had done in a socialist hero once he had outlived his usefulness.

At the very least, Ismail’s death was convenient for the Soviets. In place of a shrewd, powerful leader such as Ismail, the Aden bloodbath had thrown up a group of gray men who were even more subservient to the Kremlin than the last bunch had been. The new South Yemeni president was Haydar abu Bakr Attas, a man of no political talent who commanded little popular support. His first act after assuming the post was to fly straight to Moscow for consultations. The Soviets had learned well from their experience in Somalia in the late 1970s: in taking over Ethiopia they had been forced to give up Somalia because Somali leader Siad Barre was still independent enough to force the Soviets to make a choice. But the new South Yemeni leader would be no Siad Barre. In their drive to dominate the Red Sea–oil choke point, the Soviets would have fewer hard choices to make.

It was a messy operation and didn’t go according to plan. Not even the Soviets were anticipating a tribal war that would cost ten thousand lives. But in the end, they still got what they wanted—a regime in South Yemen with absolutely no mind of its own, thus leaving the Soviets free to do whatever was necessary to further improve their position in North Yemen.

The 10,000-barrel-a-day refinery that opened in mid 1986 in North Yemen, along with a planned 250-mile pipeline to the Red Sea, could be vulnerable targets for Soviet-inspired sabotage. The oil fields are in the desert near the frontier with South Yemen where the border is not always secure or even delineated. It also should be remembered that the massive Soviet military aid program means that the USSR had influence in North Yemen where it counts. Even Western diplomats in Sana’a admitted that Moscow’s intelligence sources no doubt were better than theirs.

Mengistu’s greatest fear was enacted in South Yemen in January 1986: the Soviets were prepared to shed blood, and lots of it, merely to replace one subservient ruler with an even more subservient one. Mengistu, a brawler by nature, at first fought back. In what may have been his only blatantly hostile act ever toward Moscow, for several days he supplied arms to Nasser Mohammed’s supporters while the Soviets were arming the Ismail faction. But a visit of several high-ranking Soviet officials to Addis Ababa quickly brought Mengistu into line. Given the facts of life as brutally demonstrated in Aden then, one of the last things the Ethiopian leader needed to do was to pay political tribute to the West for its famine assistance. His life depended upon what the USSR thought of him, not what the United States thought.