Moscow Backing to Both Sides in N.e.african Wars

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The bloodthirsty, Soviet-supported military junta which rules Ethiopia (known as the Derg or Dergue) is fighting desperately for its political life.

Last month it instituted a more or less total mobilisation of the population under its control into the state militia in order to step up its resistance to a multi-pronged military attack-from the liberation movements in Eritrea in the North, from the West Somalia Liberation Front and the Somalian government in the East, from the rightwing Ethiopian Democratic Union and the left-wing Ethiopian Popular Revolutionary Party in various other parts of the country.

The historical origins of these wars goes back to the imperialist scramble for territory in Africa. Since the fourth century a Christian kingdom existed in this North-East part of Africa.

CLASHED Through bloody conquest this teudal kingdom expanded over the centuries and was still doing so in the 19th century under Emperor Menelik. Menelik clashed with the advancing European imperialists and inflicted a major defeat on the Italian army in 1896.

But the imperialists were after the coast of the Horn of Africa which lay beside the all important route from the Suez Canal (opened in 1878) to India and the east.

Menelik was not strong enough to resist them and was forced to make treaties which granted the occupation of Eritrea and part of Somalia to Italy, Djibouti to France and the rest of Somalia to Britain.

The imperialists ceded the inland terntory to the Ethiopians, including Ogaden, a largely desert area occupied by nomadic Somali people, which in 1897 the British ranted to Menelik.

The imperialists and the successors of Menelik cemented their rule in the area until 1935 when Mussolini's fascist Italian armies invaded and occupied E hiopia.

The feudal Emperor Haile Selassie fled to exile in London *here this murderous autocrat was eted for years by the British ruling class.

The British and other imperialist cowers made half-hearted and atterly ineffectual efforts to smoke Mussolini out of Ethiopia by economic sanctions organised through the League of Nations.

Haile Selassie's fight with the Italians incidentally became grotesquely distorted symbol of black resistance to white oppression among groups who established the Rastafarian cult in the Caribbean (Selassie's name had been Ras Tafari).

BRUTAL

The future of the whole area called the Horn of Africa was once more thrown into the balance by the Second World War. In 1941, British troops drove the fascist Italian army out of Eritrea and began their own brutal occupation.

The British used the post-war cemen: to restore the despotic L=5::30 emperor Haile Selassie Siad Barre (who called himself Lion of Judah and King of Kings) along with his feudal aristocracy to power in Ethiopia.

The imperialists and the Soviet Union had conflicting plans for the area.

Stalin wished to make the states of the whole imperialist-dominated region as weak as possible He wanted Eritrea to be a separate state from Ethiopia and for Ethiopia to retain the Ogaden which virtually cut in two the area that was to become Somalia (an amalgam of the British and Italian colonies).

The British Labour government and the United States had other ideas.

The United States particularly wanted to establish two strong states controlling the two coasts of the Horn-Ethiopia including Eritrea and Somalia, including Ogaden.

The eventual settlement was a compromise between Stalin and the imperialists which worked to the benefit of Haile Selassie's brutal despotism.

Eritrea was forced into a federation with Ethiopia, which later MASSAWA JAN I BEGEMDIR GOJJAM ADDIS ARRAR KENYA NAIROBI fully incorporated it. And Ethiopia also kept possession of Ogaden, though it was not until the mid1950s that its control of this largely desert area was first really established.

In 1960 Somalia became independent under a pro-imperialist government. But in 1969 a military coup brought to power a group of petty bourgeois army officers under Siad Barre proclaiming themselves "socialist" and yet remaining firmly tied to the Islamic religion and maintaining a strong bureaucratic control over the Somali masses, partly through the Somali Socialist Revolutionary Party.

The USSR seized the opportunity that Barre's government provided to gain a foothold on one of the imperialists' most important trading and military supply routes.

The Soviet Union started flooding Somalia with economic and military aid. Somalia became the first African • country with which the Soviet Union signed a friendship treaty. And Somalia in return gave the USSR extremely valuable facilities for its rapidly expanding navy.

BETRAYED Somalia, then, played a significant role in . the noticeable shift of the last few years in the balance of power between American imperialism and the Soviet Union, especially in Africa.

So when Somali President Siad Barre returned from Moscow two weeks ago after seeing Premier Alexei Kosygin it was with the countenance of a betrayed friend.

His former Soviet protectors until recently implicitly supported his territorial claims to the Ogaden and the other territories (Northern Kenya and the recently independent micro-state of Djibouti). Now they are feeding his enemies.

Red Sea SAUDI ARABIA NORTH YEMEN TIGRE ADEN: Guif of Aden ADJIBOUTI 'BERBERA OGADEN C

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