The Third World War: August 1985

CHAPTER 3: Cradles of Conflict — Middle East and Africa

When asked by his major what history would say about all his comings and goings, General Burgoyne replied without hesitation, ‘History, sir, will lie!’ Gentleman Johnny knew what he was talking about.

Historians seem likely to fix the beginning of the Third World War as a day in 1985, but as far as the people of Africa and Arabia were concerned it had already been in progress for more than a quarter of a century. By the summer of 1985 the war was being conducted in a score of countries with a variety of motives, methods and participants which was remarkable even in a continent renowned for variety. Nowhere were the participants so divided, the results so inconclusive or the military operations so bizarre as in the Horn of Africa.

Events there hinged round Ethiopia. The Soviet Union’s plan for a federation had of course come to nothing. There was too much to quarrel about. In Addis Ababa the Soviet puppet General Madkushu had succeeded in retaining power, but very little else. He presided over anarchy. He had had his greatest rival Colonel Abnatu executed and in this way had secured his position within the Dergue. But his position in the country as a whole had never been more insecure. It was no more than his just deserts. Sudden in his judgements, a revolutionary for the sake of revenge, a military leader for the sake of oppression, he was singularly well qualified to fulfil the role of dictator and devastator of his homeland. He had been given arms and assistance enough by the Soviet Union, but had succeeded in little more than the terrorization of the central area around Addis Ababa. He had failed in the prosecution of operations against Eritrea and Sudan, and Kenya’s support, more real than visual, availed him nothing. Madkushu could not even reassert the central government’s authority over the dissident provinces of Tigre and Bagemder. Soviet troops, and Cuban advisers, training teams and troops might advise, train and assist, but they could not overcome sloth, indifference, tribal rivalries and sheer incompetence.

In spite of deep divisions within the various factions of the Eritrean Liberation Front, one figure continued to stand up as the only one likely to command support general enough to be able to forge some unity — the veteran leader Suleiman Salle. His strength lay in the support afforded him by the Sudan. Training, weapons, ammunition and, if necessary, refuge — these were powerful magnets. The other Eritrean separatists, while no doubt playing their own waiting games, could see no one else whom they could use to paste over the cracks. Suleiman Salle became the first President of Eritrea. Elderly he might have been, but the world abounded with encouraging instances of longevity at the seat of authority. Madkushu may have condemned him and sworn all sorts of vengeance, but the distractions of DJibuti and the further separatist movements in Tigre and Bagemder were enough to prevent his mounting anything other than murderous guerrilla sorties into Eritrea. Even after Ethiopian reoccupation the Ogaden continued to provide a threat to his security. How, Madkushu asked himself, could the Soviet Union first support Somalia against himself and then himself against President Sarrul of Somalia, when they themselves were such implacable enemies? The answer, of course, was that it was because they were implacable enemies. If you back both sides there is a better chance of winning: heads, I win; tails, you lose — it worked very well.

Once the French garrison had been withdrawn in 1977, and with the compliance of Hassan Guptidan and his Issa supporters, the Somalis had no difficulty in establishing themselves at Djibuti. In spite of disagreements, the temporary expulsion of Soviet and Cuban advisers, and capricious fluctuations of support — in spite, even, of helping Ethiopia against them — the Soviet Union had returned to Somalia in strength and had continued to supply arms and aid. In return the USSR exacted absolute security for their air and sea bases at Berbera and Kismayu. If this was an important requirement in a period of what the world called detente, it may be imagined with what speed and decision the Russians fastened their grip upon the Horn of Africa in war. With 10,000 of their own troops and some 2,00 °Cubans redeployed in Somalia, this was not difficult. Equally total was their control of the other side of the Gulf of Aden, where we shall shortly make our way.

Apart from West and North-west Africa, the quietest part of the continent, sandwiched between two large areas notable for their turbulence, was East Africa. Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Malawi were enjoying not only tolerably harmonious relationships with one another, but also a degree of internal placidity unknown since the days of British guardianship. While Tanzania continued to support FRELIMO and to deploy troops in northern Mozambique, the others did not allow this harmony to be disrupted by what was happening in Mozambique or to interrupt their own assistance to the enemies of FRELIMO. It was a game that everyone played — on both sides. The succession in Kenya of a military council after Kenyatta’s disappearance from the scene, some years before, was matched in smoothness by the skilful manipulative powers of Tanzania’s ruler, who, while accepting Cuban military assistance in the training of his armed forces, resolutely refused to accept the political advice which was offered with it. Malawi went its own way, and since the demise of the tyrannical Field Marshal Omotin, even Uganda, under its newly designed federal government, was beginning to re-establish a degree of confidence and prosperity, with plentiful Western Aid.

The last rash actions of Omotin in the first years of the eighties had left their scars, of course. His decision, in a fit of pique and desire for that military glory which had evaded him in Zaire, Zimbabwe and the Sudan, to invade Kenya was disliked by all those of his senior advisers whose experience entitled them to an opinion. But such hostile unanimity did not deter the Field Marshal from embarking on his own chosen form of Blitzkrieg. At the same time the admirable and ubiquitous intelligence service built up by the Kenyan armed forces enabled them to bring about the dissipation of Omotin’s forces and hopes alike. Omotin based his stroke on the supposed invincibility of his Soviet aircraft and tanks. The tanks were reduced to flaming dustbins by the skilfully operated Milan anti-tank guided weapons, the MiGs plucked from the sky by Kenya’s Rapier and Blowpipe missile systems.

The crowning humiliation was the capture of Omotin himself, not by the declared enemy but by some of his own people, the Acholi and Langi tribesmen, to whom he had displayed the utmost extent of his spite and vindictiveness. Trusting his bulk to an Agusta-Bell helicopter in a supposedly morale-raising visit to his troops, the morale of both Kenya and his own countrymen was greatly raised by the news that he had fallen into the hands of his former victims after a forced landing. They had taken their revenge by blowing him from the muzzle of a 76 mm gun.

North of East Africa was the distressed and turbulent Horn; south of it lay the yet unfinished struggle for Southern Africa. One battle-the battle for Zimbabwe — was over. The white Rhodesians had gone, and in the main had been absorbed into the Republic of South Africa. The much more serious battle for South Africa itself had by 1985 not yet got properly under way, in spite of all the skirmishings and preparations and promises. In Zimbabwe itself, Bishop Zilothi of the United African National Council had triumphed. He could not have done so without the allegiance of the powerful Karanga tribe and the former regime’s black troops and policemen. Nor could the help provided by Mozambique, Zambia and Botswana be forgotten. Indeed the leaders of those countries were determined that it should not be. Zambia’s and Botswana’s leaders, both nominal and actual, were easy to identify; Mozambique’s less so.

The great issue for Southern Africa, indeed for Africa as a whole, was widely thought to be how and when the confrontation states would subjugate the remaining white power there. Three of the four states concerned, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Namibia, had not only their own resources and experience of fighting for independence to draw on. Outside support was plentiful and urgent. In Mozambique, Soviet, Cuban and Somali troops were equipped with tanks, aircraft and missiles; in Zimbabwe were the amalgamated regular army, guerrilla forces and police; and in Namibia, Cubans, Nigerians and Jamaicans were well supported by Soviet advisers and Soviet weapons. On paper it appeared to be only a matter of time, of where, when and how, rather than whether. Soviet policy had had an unending run of success in Southern Africa. What was to stop it now?

But the white South Africans had not allowed the veldt to grow under their feet. Ever since the formation of Zimbabwe, they had embarked on the creation of a levee-en-masse to form a kind of Volkssturm, which would combine firepower with speed of movement, a proper intelligence system with security of military resources, and a rigorous training cycle. There were two big questions. How would they find weapons if the US and UK (and possibly even France) denied them? And what would the inhabitants of the Bantu homelands and the black population remaining in the white homelands do about it all?

Nor was this last the only question the confrontation states had to worry about. Their own internal problems were legion. Events in Mozambique continued to show that numerous and ruthless guerrilla forces were not the monopoly of Marxists. The Marxist President Sathela hardly knew from one day to the next whether he would be president in a week’s time. The Soviet military advisers were strangely indifferent to his apprehensions. Perhaps it was because they were more concerned — and their concern was to turn into assurance with the arrival of further Cuban contingents — about the security, for their own subsequent use, of the new air base at Buzaruto, some 150 miles south of Beira, and of the harbours at Maputo, Nacala, Porto Amelia and Beira itself. This apart, Sathela was able to console himself with the thought that his own bodyguard was composed largely of East German and Portuguese mercenaries. As long as their pay was forthcoming, his own prospects were at least a talking point.

As for Zimbabwe, the patterns of power and intrigue almost defied even the Soviet passion for faction and counter-faction, revolution and counter-revolution. One principal thread was discernible — the uneasy alliance of Bishop Zilothi and the main guerrilla controllers. How long the alliance would survive raised the question of the extent to which Zimbabwe would commit itself and its forces to the struggle for South Africa. This was a matter for the High Command of the Confederation of Africa South People’s Army (CASPA) to examine.

If enthusiasm for CASPA were to be measured solely by military contributions to it, Botswana would have rated low among the front-line states. Indeed, she had virtually no armed forces which could be despatched outside the country. How different was the capability, if not the intention, of Namibia.

In Namibia SWAPO (South-west Africa People’s Organization) had won, though not without outside help. The intervention of strong Nigerian forces from Angola had been decisive. It had enabled a coalition between SWAPO’s leader, the Chief of the Hereros, and the Ovambos, the most numerous tribe of Namibia, utterly to destroy the Nationalist Party’s influence, with the result that, as in Zimbabwe, most of the white population, in this case about 100,000, had gone to South Africa. SWAPO troops had tasted blood. Admittedly supported by Angolan MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) forces, Cuban troops and the Nigerians, they had turned out of Namibia a total of 50,000 South African soldiers equipped with modern weapons and aided by fighter aircraft. They were not likely to forget it. And they had got their hands on one of the world’s main sources of uranium. This too they did not intend to forget. Namibia’s president, SWAPO itself and the bulk of its Ovambo troops were all committed to the crushing of South Africa, and it was from Namibia and Mozambique that the main invasion forces would come.

South Africa itself was to become an important battlefield of the Third World War, outside Europe, another being the Persian Gulf and southern Arabia. But South Africa had not been softened by twenty-five years of changing opinions, by what was thought of as the treachery of the United States and the degeneracy of Europe. These years had hardened its white population, and had made them realize that unless US policy changed to the extent of a total reversal no succour was to be had there. They would have to do it with their own resources, their own people and their own pluck. They had not wasted time. From the very moment of the creation of Zimbabwe in 1979 and the loss of Namibia a year later, preparations had proceeded night and day. The independence of the Bantu homelands had made it easier, for the strongholds of white supremacy, reliant though they were on black labour for both urban and rural endeavour, had shrunk to the white homelands of the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, Natal and the Cape Province. There were nearly 4 | million white people in these provinces, about half that number of coloured, and a quarter that number Asian; the blacks totalled some 7 million.

What had been done militarily within the homeland had been done elsewhere by the Swiss and the Israelis, but by few others. All male and most female citizens underwent initial training as recruits for six to twelve months. Refresher training for up to one month each year was the rule for all up to the age of fifty. South Africa’s regular armed forces were by 1985 about 60,000 strong with reserves about equal in number. The combined LandwehrlVolkssturm, which could be mobilized in forty-eight hours, was nearly half a million. Of this well over 100,000 were Kommandos with their own air, armoured and communications units, organized into brigade-like formations of several thousand each. The Boers were not going to be caught napping. What is more they had absorbed 250,000 white Rhodesians and 100,000 white refugees from Namibia, who did not intend to pack their bags again. They were further strengthened by plentiful volunteers from Australia and New Zealand.

The antipathy of many in the world outside South Africa to the policies pursued there towards coloured peoples and the consequent deep reluctance of the US and British governments to give military aid to South Africa, even in a struggle against the spreading power of the USSR, meant that no forces from either country could be expected to come to help her in war, and there was little prospect of significant military aid from any other Western source. They were on their own. There was by the end of the seventies no longer even the hope of procuring military supplies in any quantity from other Western sources. Some were had from France but not enough. South Africa turned to Japan and her associates in South-east Asia. By the beginning of the eighties the trickle of military equipment which began to come in at the end of the seventies had become a flood. Compelled to rely solely on her own manpower for her defence South Africa had now no need of Western hardware to equip it.

In Angola there was the greatest Soviet presence and at the same time the greatest anti-communist activity. The battle for Angola was not yet over. Harassed by UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), mauled by Zaire, Sovietized by Russian masters, and manipulated by Cuban puppets, the reign of President Ageto had stumbled to a humiliating conclusion, replaced by a coalition of his rivals, still essentially Marxist, propped up by the Soviet Union and Cubans. The Cuban and Nigerian military contingents were now increased to 40,000 and 20,000, respectively, with two battalions of Jamaicans. The Soviet advisers numbered some 15,000 and included radar, communications and industrial technicians plus port-operating experts. But even all this foreign support could not alter the fact that UNITA’s forces in the south were growing in strength and now numbered about 25,000, that Angolan National Liberation Front (FNLA) forces were still active in the north, and that the Cabinde Liberation Movement, with Zaire’s assistance, was gaining support. Whatever the difficulties of establishing absolute control over the whole of Angola, however, the Soviet Union was clearly determined to keep a grip of what she most wanted — the ports, the airfields, the jumping off ground for driving through Namibia to South Africa, and a general area which could be used as a relatively secure base for her proxy troops to go anywhere in Southern, Central or even West Africa. In strategic terms the Soviet victory in Angola had been of immense significance. South Africa’s Prime Minister at that time had seen it as the whirlwind before the storm, as simply one exercise in a series of exercises aimed at providing bases for black guerrilla troops and Soviet proxy mercenaries to launch their attack on the final target of South Africa.

Of all the black African countries and their leaders which most wished to tread the path of moderation and evolution, Zambia and President Luganda stood out from all the others. He had wholly supported the creation of Zimbabwe. He was not sure, even in 1985, that the time had come to deal with South Africa, for he felt that the African front-line states could not do it without enormous and prolonged Soviet and Cuban assistance and that to tolerate the presence of these in Southern Africa on the scale required would simply be to exchange one sort of subjugation for another. Nor with armed forces numbering a mere 8,000 and growing concern about Zambia’s borders with Angola, could any troops be spared from Zambia for the great trek south.

In neighbouring Zaire, in spite of greater resources, both in raw materials and men, there was little enthusiasm for waging war outside the country’s own territorial limits. Their experience of communist intervention in the latter 1970s had not endeared the Soviet Union or her proxy soldiers to the rulers of Zaire any more than the uses made by these of Katangan rebels. The former president had long since retired to his retreat on Lac Leman. The new president of Zaire had been in office for nearly five years; during this time he had reorganized the armed forces, and had turned more to France and Belgium for economic aid, shunning the Soviet Union’s attempts to include Zaire in their haul of Marxist states. After all, with its diamonds, copper, oil, cobalt and zinc, and with its 30 million people, Zaire was a rich land. Frontier forays had gone on — from Angola, from Congo-Brazzaville and from Burundi. The army had not succeeded in controlling the Simba rebels on Zaire’s eastern border. But all in all Zaire had reason to be content.

Soviet, Cuban and Jamaican influence and presence did not stop short in Central Africa. They had established themselves almost everywhere in West Africa. In Equatorial Guinea, Sierra Leone, Guinea itself, Nigeria and Mali, instructors, advisers and troops at once represented and encouraged the growth of Marxism.

If we leave aside the strategic value of ports, airfields and communications southwards, the principal factor in West Africa was, of course, Nigeria, with a population of some 70 million and armed forces of nearly 250,000. Her army had tanks and heavy artillery; her navy had frigates and landing craft; her air force had interceptors, ground attack and transport aircraft and helicopters. What is more they had battle experience spreading over twenty years — civil war, battle in Central Africa, the great triumph in Namibia. Guided, equipped and encouraged by the Soviet Union and Cubans, they would be a force to be reckoned with in the coming struggle for South Africa. The head of state, formerly Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces and a declared radical, had in the end found his own presence at the summit of affairs to be preferred to a return to constitutional rule. The fact that Nigeria supplied an increasing share of US oil imports was no small factor in the situation. Nigeria may have been a long way from Pretoria. It did not intend that distance should muffle its voice or lessen its hostility.

North-west Africa was mercifully free of much of the turbulence which prevailed in the central, southern and north-eastern areas. Most North-west African states had had their struggles for liberation from the colonial powers; they had had their internal struggles for governments of their own; they had had their experiments in external fishing in troubled waters; they now wanted to be left alone. At the same time they did not wish to be totally excluded from the luxurious game of not letting others alone. Morocco was prepared to offer both advice and troops. But the likelihood of Moroccan troops being deployed as far south as the new seat of war was not great. In any event, quarrels with Algeria and Mauretania, never far below the surface, were simmering once more.

Algeria herself was the joker in the pack. She was not willing to risk a single Berber or a single dinar in a cause that could be of no direct and immediate economic or political benefit to herself. It was not for nothing that the Algerians had understudied the French for so long.

Libya was totally different again. Incredibly, Colonel Farouk, Libya’s radical nationalist leader, had survived. Most of the countries in which he had attempted to intervene had shrugged off his intervention. He was always seeking out trouble but never taking up arms; always meddling and threatening, but never acting; never in battle, but never out of it.

All this was bound up with what was happening in Egypt. President Hassan el Samdi had long wanted to have a proper hold on his paymasters — Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Gulf states. It was not for him but for his successors to achieve this. When President el Samdi was removed as a result both of food riots and of public disillusion over the Israeli settlement he was succeeded by the somewhat unlikely coalition of the Vice-President, Ahmed Mohamed and the War Minister and Commander-in-Chief, General Aziz Tawfik.

It was almost a repetition of the Neguib-Nasser relationship. Mohamed was the comparatively respectable front man of the team, even keeping up normal relations with the conservative ruling families of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Tawfik, on the other hand, had the wholehearted backing of the younger elements in the armed forces and of the intelligence services. The latter, chafing at the restraint imposed on them by the previous government, came forward with ambitious plans for creating by subversion a new and grander United Arab Republic, to embrace this time not the maverick Libyans or the ungovernable Syrians, but the sources of Arab wealth in the Arabian peninsula.

There was one problem: these ambitions could only be realized with massive Soviet help, both to provide the means of military takeover and to stave off any American attempt to intervene in favour of the status quo, and to preserve the supply of Middle East oil to the West. This would be a major change in Egyptian foreign policy, but Egypt was not renowned for consistency in these matters. The adoption of Russian support in the fifties and the repudiation of it in the seventies had been equally sudden and surprising. Egypt had breathed a great sigh of relief at the ending of the state of war with Israel in 1980. But the resulting relaxation of military effort had not released enough industrial resources to match the inexorable increase in population. Moreover, with the reductions in the armed forces many officers lost their jobs and formed a discontented group, only too ready to look to new external adventure to restore the power and privilege which they had once enjoyed.

Peace had not given bread to the masses or adequate employment to the intelligentsia. Renewal of hostility with Israel seemed to promise no better results than on previous occasions, especially with the Arab world even more fragmented than before. The overriding need seemed to be to create, if necessary by force, a centre of Arab strength to which the other quarrelling factions would gradually be attracted. Then at least it would be possible for the Arab world to decide where its future lay. This glamorous objective was held to justify the risks of achieving it with Soviet support.

It is still not clear whether the Egyptian services spontaneously advocated the ‘reversal of alliances’, or whether it was inspired by Soviet influence, which had retained a presence in the recesses of Egyptian intelligence even when its more overt manifestation had been brought to an end. In any event, Tawfik was persuaded, by economic necessity no less than by personal ambition, and gave covert approval to a programme of subversion, provided Soviet support could be confirmed. We shall describe later the Soviet deliberations which clinched the deal.