Notes:
[1] Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 365.
[2] Radoslav Yordanov, The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa during the Cold War (Lanham, Lexington Books, 2016), 192.
[3] Marvine Howe, “Ethiopians Are Suspicious of Big U.S. Radio Base,” The New York Times, 28 August, 1970. https://www.nytimes.com/1970/08/28/archives/ethiopians-are-suspicious-of-big-us-radio-base.html. “National Security Study Memorandum 39,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume XXVIII, Southern Africa. “NDSM-231: Ethiopia – Kagnew Station and Military Assistance,” Richard Nixon Presidential Library, Box H-208, August 14, 1973.
[4] Derg is Amharic for “committee.” Sam Wilkins, “Buried in the Sands of the Ogaden: Lessons from an Obscure Cold War Flashpoint in Africa,” War on the Rocks, 6 September, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/09/buried-in-the-sands-of-the-ogaden-lessons-from-an-obscure-cold-war-flashpoint-in-africa. See also Michael Ghebrenegus Haile, The Downfall of an Emperor: Haille Selassie of Ethiopia and the Derg’s Creeping Coup (Trenton, New Jersey, Africa World Press, 2018).
[5] The most critical of these rebellions were the Tigrayans and Eritreans in the Northeast and Ogadenis in the East. Luis Woodroofe, Buried in the Sands of the Ogaden, 104.
[6] While the United States wound down its arms supply in the wake of blatant human rights violations by the Derg forces using U.S.-provided weapons in Eritrea, the Soviet Union jumped in to expand its relationship with the new leftist regime in Addis Ababa. See Westad, The Global Cold War, 280. Nancy Mitchell, Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2016), 105.
[7] Somali irredentist claims on the Ogaden are baked into its creation. On Somalia’s national flag—a five pointed white star on a sea of light blue—one of the points of the star represents the Ogaden.
[8] Sam Wilkins, “Détente Under Fire: Contrasting Approaches to Cold War Strategy and Crisis Management in Africa,” The Strategy Bridge, 5 November, 2020, https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2020/11/05/dtente-under-fire-contrasting-approaches-to-cold-war-strategy-and-crisis-management-in-africa.
[9] Gebru Tereke, “The Ethiopia-Somalia War of 1977 Revisited,” The International Journal of African Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3 (2000), pp. 639.
[10] Yordanov, The Soviet Union in the Horn of Africa during the Cold War, 190.
[11] Dan Oberdorfer, “The Superpowers and the Ogaden War,” The Washington Post, 5 March, 1978.
[12] Over 1,000 Soviet advisors and 17,000 Cuban troops fought in Ethiopia. This Soviet intervention made President Carter appear helpless in the face of Soviet aggression. The media blasted the Ogaden War as “Carter’s Angola.” Paul Henze, the National Security Council staff officer responsible for the Horn of Africa wrote angrily in a memorandum to Brzezinski, the “Soviet involvement…and Cuban expeditionary force was sent in made us look like a frustrated, helpless giant…The worst thing about all this is that it adds to the impression, at a time when he least needs it, that the President is leading an amateurish, inept administration that neither knows what it wants nor how to go about getting it.” Henze to Brzezinski, Mar. 10, 1978, NA Staff, Horn 2, Jimmy Carter Library. Tareke, “The Ethiopia Somalia War of 1977 Revisited,” pp. 635-667. Westad, The Global Cold War, 280.
[13] “Record of a Special Coordination Committee Meeting, 2 March, 1978,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1977-1980, Volume XVIII, Horn of Africa, Part I.
[14] Dan Oberdorfer, “The Superpowers and the Ogaden War,” The Washington Post, 5 March, 1978.
[15] For an excellent case study of the Ogaden War in military terms, see Kenneth Pollack, Armies of Sand (Oxford University Press, 2019).
[16] In Hargeisa in Somalia’s north, 80 Somali National Army officers from the Isaak clan were executed by their commanders after vocalizing their opposition to the conduct of the war. “A Government at War With Its Own People: Testimonies About the Killings and Conflict in the North,” Africa Watch, January, 1990, 27.
[17] The U.S. also replaced the Soviets at the naval base in Berbera, in northern Somalia. Woodruffe, Buried in the Sands of the Ogaden, 266. See also US Security assistance per year totals via SIPRI arms transfer dataset at https://armstrade.sipri.org/armstrade/page/values.php.
[18] Westad, The Global Cold War, 287.
[19] Westad, The Global Cold War, 287.
[20] In the countryside, the economic situation was characterized by contradictory systems and initiatives. See Paul Henze, Ethiopia in Mengistu’s Final Years, Volume 1: The Derg in Decline (New York: Shama Books, 2007) and Paul Henze, Ethiopia in Mengistu’s Final Years, Volume 2: Until the Final Bullet (New York: Shama Books, 2007).
[21] See Paul Henze, Ethiopia in Mengistu’s Final Years, Volume 1: The Derg in Decline (New York: Shama Books, 2007) and Alexander De Waal, Evil Days: Thirty Years of War and Famine in Ethiopia (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1991).
[22] BBC journalist Michael Buerk quoted in Yordanov, The USSR in the Horn of Africa, 233.
[23] Joseph Berger, “Offers of Aid for Stricken Ethiopia Are Pouring into Relief Agencies,” The New York Times, October 28, 1984.
[24] Yordanov, The USSR in the Horn, 224. Meanwhile, the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs Africa Department believed that the West exaggerated the scale of the famine in order to woo Ethiopians to the Western camp and “tarnish the Ethiopian regime.”
[25] The most notable of which was the March 1985 “We Are the World” concert fundraiser. For more, see Gavin Edwards, “We are the World: A Minute by Minute Breakdown,” Rolling Stone, 5 March 2020, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/we-are-the-world-a-minute-by-minute-breakdown-54619/.
[26] The Soviets eventually responded at scale to the famine by providing 24 Mi-8 helicopters, 300 All-Terrain Vehicles, and 12 AN-12 transport aircraft to assist in food distribution, in addition to over $393 million dollars in food aid. After BBC reporter Michael Buerk famously described the situation as “a biblical famine in the 20th century” during a 1984 visit, Western aid organizations scrambled to assist. These massive international efforts eventually helped stabilize the situation. Yordanov, The USSR in the Horn of Africa, 233.
[27] Soviet assistance was badly wasted or stolen by corrupt and incompetent administrators. One episode that is illustrative of this tragic era regards 5,000 tons of Cuban sugar donated to Ethiopia for famine relief. Instead of disbursing the sugar to famine-struck regions, Derg officials sold it to Djibouti, to the immense frustration of Soviet and Cuban officials. Yordanov, USSR in the Horn of Africa, 225.
[28] For more on the broader reconsideration of Soviet Foreign policy under Gorbachev, see Robert English, The Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (Columbia University Press, 2000).
[29] Yordanov, The USSR in the Horn of Africa, 225.
[30] Georgii Mirskii, a prominent Soviet foreign affairs expert, noted in World Economy and International Affairs in 1987 that “our scholarship, with its emphasis on the role of class factors, has shed no light on Asian and African peoples’ internal ethnic and religious diversity.” Assistant Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Kolosovskii echoed these concerns: “We need a view of the developing countries that is to a considerable degree de ideologized, and that recognizes the uniqueness of processes at work there, and their independence of the rivalry between the two socioeconomic systems.” Westad, The Global Cold War, 286, 383 and Westad, The Cold War, 487.
[31] Yordanov, The USSR in the Horn, 237.
[32] Yordanov, The USSR in the Horn, 225.
[33] Andrew and Mittokhin, The World was Going Our Way, 436. Cost imposition represented a key component of American strategy for hawks within the Reagan administration. However, this goal of bleeding the USSR in the Third World was not universally shared across the U.S. government or implemented in an integrated manner. For more on these debates from Reagan-era practitioners, see: Chester Crocker, High Noon in Southern Africa: Making Peace in a Rough Neighborhood (New York: WW Norton and Company, 1992), Herman Cohen, U.S. Policy Toward Africa: Eight Decades of Realpolitik (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2020), and Peter Rodman, More Precious than Peace: The Cold War and the Struggle for the Third World (Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York, 1994).
[34] Quoted in Westad, The Global Cold War, 383.
[35] Yordanov, The USSR in the Horn, 437. KGB reports around Mengistu’s corruption and incompetence fueled Gorbachev’s desire for a fresh approach.
[36] Rodman, More Precious Than Peace, 309.
[37] Graphs by author, using data from SIPRI Arms Transfer Database, accessible at: https://armstrade.sipri.org/armstrade/page/values.php
[38] See “200 Days in the Death of Asmara,” Human Rights Watch Archives, 20 September, 1990, https://www.hrw.org/reports/archives/africa/ETHIOPIA909.htm.
[39] As Mengistu rebuffed Soviet efforts to encourage negotiations, the EPRDF won a series of battlefield victories over the first three months of 1988. Tobias Hagmann, “Twenty Years of Revolutionary Democratic Ethiopia,” Journal of East African Studies, Vol.5, Issue 4 (2011), pp. 580.
[40] Westad, The Global Cold War, 383.
[41] Westad, The Global Cold War, 383.
[42] Westad, The Global Cold War, 383.
[43] A subsequent visit by Deputy Foreign Minister Anatoly Adamishin in January 1989 reinforced the urgency of seeking a negotiated solution to the war in the northeast. Ibid., 384.
[44] Despite these machinations, his position continued to erode as Soviet frustration with Mengistu’s delaying tactics grew.
[45] Andrew and Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way, 479.
[46] In February 1990, Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front forces captured the critical port of Massawa, capturing massive stocks of Soviet-provided equipment and opening the rebellion to exterior support from the sea. “Ethiopian Rebels Capture Critical Red Sea Port,” The Los Angeles Times, 11 February 1990, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-02-11-mn-1051-story.html.
[47] Nevertheless, high level engagement with Barre continued. See Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, “Remarks by President Reagan at photo op with Ambassador Designate Somalia,” 4 June, 1981. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/161343656
[48] SIPRI Arms Transfer Database, Accessible at: https://armstrade.sipri.org/armstrade/page/values.php
[49] Graphs by author, using data from SIPRI Arms Transfer Database, accessible at: https://armstrade.sipri.org/armstrade/page/values.php
[50] The signing of the 1988 tripartite agreement that concluded superpower intervention in Angola’s civil war is generally considered by scholars to mark the conclusion of the Cold War in Africa. William Claiborne, “Cuba, Angola, South Africa Sign Accord,” The Washington Post, December 14, 1988. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/12/14/cuba-angola-south-africa-sign-accord/3269b973-4180-4c23-972b-179674f9e09b/.
[51] Two additional headwinds bashed into Barre’s fragile state apparatus – a regional economic downturn and a rise in underground remittance payments into the country from a growing expatriate population. The remittances went directly to families and clans – eluding the state’s taxation system. The convergence of these factors meant that Barre could no longer afford the security rents needed to maintain the loyalty of Somalia’s diverse population. Alex De Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War, and the Business of Power (New York: Polity Press, 2015), 45.
[52] In Somaliland, Barre’s regime faced its most potent challenge. Barre’s security apparatus responded harshly to protests by local clans, employing “mobile military courts” to quickly dispatch scores of Somaliland’s Isaak peoples to prisons—where many were killed. See Robert Gersony, Why Somalis Flee: Synthesis of Accounts of Conflict Experience in Northern Somalia by Somali Refugees, Displaced Persons and Others (Washington, DC: Bureau forRefugee Programs, Department of State, 1989).
[53] Peter Schraeder, “The Horn of Africa: US Foreign Policy in an Altered Cold War Environment,” Middle East Journal Vol. 46, No.4 (Fall, 1992), pp.579.
[54] See Yordanov, The USSR in the Horn of Africa, 284 and Westad, The Global Cold War, 385.
[55] As contemporary witnesses noted, these bombing represented ethnic cleansings, and occurred “only after non-Isaaks had been evacuated.” One civilian later told Africa watch that “the artillery shelling began immediately after the non-Isaaks were evacuated.” “A Government at War With Its Own People: Testimonies About the Killings and Conflict in the North,” Africa Watch, January, 1990, 132.
[56] Thandika Mkandawire, “The Terrible Toll of Post-Colonial Rebel Movements in Africa: Towards an Explanation of Violence Against the Peasantry,” Journal of Modern African Studies, 40.2 (2002), 181-215.
[57] “A Government at War With Its Own People,” Africa Watch, 217.
[58] This shipment included 1,200 M-16 rifles and 2.8 million rounds of ammunition. Other prominent foreign donors, such as the United Kingdom, who provided $9 million in annual foreign assistance, promptly followed the U.S. cancellation of assistance and aid. Peter Schraeder, “The Horn of Africa: US Foreign Policy in an Altered Cold War Environment,” Middle East Journal Vol. 46, No.4 (Fall, 1992, pp.574).
[59] Mohamed Haji Ingiris, The Suicidal State in Somalia: The Rise and Fall of the Siad Barre Regime (University Press of America, 2016).
[60] For more on the Bush administration’s regional response to the crisis, see: George HW Bush Presidential Library, “MEMCON Meeting with Hassan Gouled, President of Djibouti,” 24 April 1991.
[61] Within Mogadishu, an intra-Hawiye civil war erupted between Ali Mahdi Mohamed and General Mohamed Farah Aided. Despite four major international military interventions over the subsequent 30 years, Somalia remains a failed state. See Mary Harper, Getting Somalia Wrong? Faith, Hope and War in a Shattered State (New York: Zed Books, 2012).
[62] Woodruffe, Buried in the Sands, 137.
[63] “Ogaden War Producing Little but Refugees and Death, The New York Times, 18 November, 1978, https://www.nytimes.com/1979/11/18/archives/ogaden-war-producing-little-but-refugees-deaths-are-put-at-60000. “Ethiopia: Red Terror and Famine,” Mass Atrocity Endings Project, Tufts University, 7 August, 2015 https://sites.tufts.edu/atrocityendings/2015/08/07/ethiopia/.
[64] Westad, The Global Cold War, 380
[65] For more, see Alex De Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War, and the Business of Power (New York: Polity Press, 2015).
[66] Mitrokhin and Andrew, The World Was Going Our Way, 478.
[67] Peter Schraeder, “The Horn of Africa: US Foreign Policy in an Altered Cold War Environment,” Middle East Journal Vol. 46, No.4 (Fall, 1992, pp.584.
[68] Mahmood Mamdani, “The Trouble With Ethiopia’s Ethnic Federalism,” The New York Times, 3 January, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/opinion/ethiopia-abiy-ahmed-reforms-ethnic-conflict-ethnic-federalism.html.
[69] See: Michelle Gavin, “The Conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray Region: What to Know,” Council on Foreign Relations, 10 February, 2021, https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/conflict-ethiopias-tigray-region-what-know?gclid=CjwKCAjwjbCDBhAwEiwAiudBy0vXjbSfVv37RUjxnwuHVRGGFyoZkL5Gkoxl5XzM6IrRjz2ADa4BGhoCw0AQAvD_BwE, “Tigray Crisis: ‘Genocidal War’ Waged in Ethiopia Region, Says Ex-Leader, 31 January, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-55877939, Lucy Kassa and Nabih Bulos, “In an Out of Sight War, A Massacre Comes to Light,” Los Angeles Times, 19 March 2021, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-03-19/ethiopia-tigray-war-massacre-bora.
[70] See James Fergusson, The Word’s Most Dangerous Place (New York: De Capo Press, 2013), Ian Livingston, “Somalia, Facing Severe Challenges, Also Shows Signs of Hope,” Brookings, 3 May, 2018.
Source link : https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2021/9/3/to-the-last-bullet-the-cold-wars-last-gasps-and-enduring-impact-in-the-horn-of-africa
Author :
Publish date : 2021-09-03 07:00:00
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.