Real War (5 page)

To most Americans, the map of Africa is as unfamiliar as that of Antarctica. Most would not know Mali from Malawi; nor would they have any idea where Somalia is, or Eritrea, much less why events there may be shaping the future of the world. Nor could they place such neighboring locales as South Yemen or Oman, or the Straits of Hormuz, Bahrain, or Qatar. Yet these places, and others like them, are vital to America's interests and those of the West. They are central to Moscow's drive for strategic dominance, and American ignorance or disinterest gives the Soviets one of their greatest advantages.

The ghosts of the colonial past haunt the leaders of many African nations today. Precolonial African politics were tribal; after the European conquest they became imperial; today they are a unique combination of the two.

The boundaries of most present-day African states make little sense from a nation-state point of view. They do not correspond to natural or tribal lines; they remain drawn where the armies of the colonial powers halted or where mapmakers in Paris or London chanced to place them. African countries often consist of twenty or thirty tribes, a mishmash of many mini-nations, while many tribes have been cut in two by inherited colonial boundaries. The resulting lack of national unity makes democracy almost an impossibility, economic development a distant dream, and internal tension a constant fact of life. Many African heads of state want only to maintain themselves in power and to keep their nations from disintegrating.

This is where the Soviets come in. They are masters of empire, virtuosos in the art of smashing nations and establishing totalitarian control over the remains. As Edward Luttwak, a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies, has pointed out, postcolonial African politics are not the “politics of prosperity” that we are accustomed to, “but rather the politics of power accumulation.” And in this respect the Soviets, experts at gaining and retaining power, have much more to offer than the United States.

When the leaders of African nations go shopping, the Soviets offer them a tempting grab bag. The Soviet military-industrial complex runs overtime, so they always have ample supplies of weapons to offer, sometimes at bargain prices, and without the delays occasioned by debates over the “morality”
of trafficking in arms. The Soviet catalogue lists many other accessories for the dictator: East German “security” experts, Cuban troops, timely tips from the Soviet intelligence network, and, as Luttwak neatly puts it, “The broad support of Soviet propaganda, which will ceaselessly proclaim their virtues, even if they do have a weakness for executing people at random.” Aggressive marketers, the Soviets have recently taken to shipping their clients whole proxy armies as well. They demand payment for their goods in the currency of power.

The Soviets have not made the naïve mistake of assuming that African leaders automatically care most about economic development for their people. From their own experience the Soviets know that the first priority of many of these leaders is to maintain themselves in power, and they, not we, offer the most effective “foreign aid” for this purpose.

They have been remarkably successful salesmen. Despite Russia's being a newcomer to the African continent, Moscow and its allies now supply more than 75 percent of the weapons going to Africa, and their sales quotas are surely being revised upward.

When they go to take a bite out of the world, the Soviets are not fussy eaters. It matters little to them whether an African or other client regime is “socialist,” “communist,” or, indeed, capitalist in the way it arranges its internal economic affairs. What does matter is that the regime exercise effective, preferably totalitarian, control over its people, and that it conduct its foreign and military policies in a way that serves the Soviet national interest. The key is
interest:
what matters is that the regime be a compliant client, whether or not it happens also to be doctrinaire communist. “Radish communists,” red on the outside but white on the inside, taste as good to the Soviets as red tomatoes. Lately the Soviets have been seen picking their teeth in the Horn of Africa, sampling first one dish and then another. In the process, they have shown how rapidly their “friendships” can shift as new opportunities arise.

•  •  •

Until September of 1974 Ethiopia was a firm friend of the West. Under the rule of Emperor Haile Selassie, it had long been one of the closest U.S. allies in black Africa. Meanwhile, for years the Russians had watched eagerly as their allies in
Cuba and others had fueled an armed secessionist movement in Eritrea—the strategically located northeastern province of Ethiopia, just across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia.

Then, in the wake of a devastating famine in 1974, the military overthrew Selassie. A radical group within the military established its own dominance within the revolutionary government. The new rulers cut the country's Western ties and established Eastern ones. As Moscow's new friendship with Ethiopia warmed, its friendship toward the Eritrean rebels cooled; the Eritreans not only lost their Cuban support, but they soon found themselves fighting against Soviet-sponsored soldiers from that Caribbean country where they themselves had recently trained.

The abrupt change in its relationship with Ethiopia had its cost to the U.S.S.R. For years, neighboring Somalia had been Russia's chief base of influence in the area. Although it had not fallen completely into the Soviet orbit, Somalia had a treaty of friendship with Moscow and had been armed by the Russians, and it had been a loyal Soviet agent on the Horn of Africa. But Somalia had its own bitter territorial dispute with Ethiopia. Somalia claimed Ethiopia's Ogaden province. Moscow had supported that claim. Now Russia began retreating from that support, and Somalia's leader, Siad Barre, shopped for friends elsewhere.

In the summer of 1977, Barre launched an invasion of the Ogaden. At first, Barre's troops routed the Ethiopians. But then the Soviets sent nearly 20,000 Cuban troops to Ethiopia, which were deployed against Somalia as well as against the Eritreans; they also airlifted $2 billion worth of arms and 3,000 Soviet military technicians to Ethiopia. These turned the tide. In early 1978 Barre withdrew Somalia's troops from the Ogaden desert.

In terms of cold cost-benefit calculations, the Soviets had come out ahead. Barre retaliated against the Soviet help to Ethiopia by throwing the Russians out of Somalia; but the Soviets had created a political junkie out of Ethiopia. To survive, Ethiopia's regime needed a continuing “fix” of Soviet weaponry, as well as thousands of Cuban and Soviet personnel. The Soviets had traded a country of three million for one ten times
its population. They had lost the naval base they had built in Somalia, at Berbera, but they had gained the Ethiopian port of Massawa, where a new and more strategically located base will soon be completed.

What kind of regime were the Soviets bankrolling? The
American Spectator
put it graphically:

A knack for imaginative and effective leadership is what the Soviets prize most in their African allies. In this respect, Colonel Haile Mengistu Meriam of Ethiopia—who in 1977 walked into a cabinet meeting and shot all of his erstwhile colleagues—is a model ruler.

Mengistu has not confined his attentions to Ethiopia. Sudan's borders have been violated, and it has had to absorb more than 300,000 Ethiopians who have fled Mengistu's “red terror.” A new seed of unrest has been planted in African soil and nurtured by Moscow. The Soviet Union has gained potential bases, ports, a staging area for Cuban troops, and a strategically situated funnel to the rest of Africa. The only African country except Liberia that never lived under European colonial rule has fallen to communist imperialism. Of potentially even greater concern, Saudi Arabia is threatened: the Horn of Africa forms a claw with its pincers around the Arabian peninsula; the Ethiopian highlands look down menacingly on the desert sands of Saudi Arabia, just across the Red Sea.

•  •  •

Soviet activities in Africa underscore one of the great strategic changes of recent years: the emergence of the U.S.S.R. as a global power exerting direct pressure not just on contiguous territories, but wherever the opportunity presents itself.

Using Cuban troops transported in Soviet aircraft, Moscow has been leapfrogging national boundaries to strike deep in the heart of Africa. Now that European colonialism has disappeared from Africa, Soviet imperialism is moving to replace it. The new nations of Africa are particularly tempting because they control raw materials vital to a modern industrial society, and particularly vulnerable because of their instability and the priorities held by so many of their leaders.

•  •  •

In 1975, four centuries of Portuguese colonial rule ended
in Angola and Mozambique. Now, instead of colonial ties to Portugal, both countries have “friendship treaties” with Russia; they bristle with modern Soviet weapons and threaten the whole of what Brezhnev so covetously referred to as the “mineral treasure house of central and southern Africa.” Together, they border on every key country in that “treasure house.” Just as the Soviets had their eyes on the oil of Arabia when they moved into Somalia and then Ethiopia, they had their eyes on these mineral resources when they moved into Angola and Mozambique.

It was in Angola that the Soviets first used Cuban troops to impose Russian rule in Africa. For more than a decade, during the independence struggle, Moscow had been funneling aid to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), a Marxist guerrilla force. When the Portuguese left, two other groups were also contending for power in the newly independent nation: the FNLA and UNITA. Fighting among them continued. In the final showdown the United States cut off aid to the pro-Western groups, while the Soviets airlifted in 15,000 Cuban troops to help MPLA. Not surprisingly, MPLA won. Angola became a Soviet outpost.

In late 1979 Jonas Savimbi, the leader of UNITA, was in the United States seeking support for his continuing guerrilla war against Angola's new masters. Savimbi earned his credentials by fighting for freedom from Portuguese rule; now he is fighting for freedom from Russian rule. Lamenting that in the United States “there is a total absence of resistance to Russian and Cuban aggression” in Africa, he complained that “a new form of imperialism is dominating our continent.” The Russians and Cubans, he said, “who were supposed to be our friends and who did give us help in our struggle against the Portuguese, are now bringing us a new style of slavery.”

Commenting acidly on the lack of American support for Savimbi,
Francis X. Maier, editor of the
National Catholic Register,
noted that Savimbi is “a witness to the fact that, somewhere along the way, the United States has lost the ability to distinguish our natural friends from our natural enemies. It's another curious irony of the late twentieth century—and a hint of our moral disarray—that the only ‘freedom fighters' we will
not
wine and dine are those who profess our own values.”

In Mozambique, since 1978 East German military advisers have trained guerrillas for infiltration into Zimbabwe Rhodesia. Guerrillas are being trained in Angola for use in Namibia to the south; already guerrillas from Angola have twice been sent north into Zaire, where they invaded Zaire's mineral-rich Shaba province. In their 1978 Shaba raid, the guerrillas slaughtered European technicians and their families in the key mining town of Kolwezi. Since then few Europeans have been willing to return to Shaba, leaving its copper and cobalt production 50 to 80 percent below normal. Copper is essential to Zaire's economy; cobalt, now critically scarce, is essential to jet aviation, and Zaire has 65 percent of the free world's supply.

Just as Ethiopia to the north, these former Portuguese colonies to the south are key outposts of Soviet empire. Like a cancer that gets into the system, Soviet influence spreads out from these and Russia's other African outposts. In Zambia, Tanzania, and elsewhere, Cuban troops and Eastern bloc “technicians” are becoming as familiar as Western colonialists used to be.

•  •  •

If the U.S.S.R. continues to succeed in its penetration of Africa, it will have come a long way in its larger strategy of encircling the world “city”—of cutting off the industrialized West from the resources without which it cannot survive. Even the resource-rich United States depends heavily on imports for several of the basic minerals vital to a modern economy. Chromium offers an example of the hidden dangers of this dependency.

Most people, when they think of chromium, think of the fancy trim on automobiles. But to strategic planners chromium means such things as ball bearings, precision instruments, and missiles. A single jet aircraft requires more than 3,600 pounds of chrome. As one expert has put it, “If you don't have chromium, you don't have top-quality aircraft engines.” Stainless steel cannot be made without chromium. The National Research Council recently concluded that the U.S. long-term vulnerability in chrome is greater than in petroleum. Chromium is already in short supply, and we desperately need it to rebuild our armed forces. Our domestic supplies of chromium ore are small in quantity and low-grade in quality; 92 percent of our
chrome must be imported. And our two principal sources have recently been South Africa (33 percent) and the Soviet Union (25 percent). Furthermore, of the world's known reserves of chromium, 96 percent are in the Union of South Africa and Zimbabwe Rhodesia.

This vital dependency illustrates why the Soviets have particularly targeted for interference that portion of the continent that intensely engages the emotions of many in the West: southern Africa. The Soviet Union seldom acts without a purpose, and its purposes are always strategic, never moral. Thus its persistent efforts to stir further the already troubled waters of southern Africa have to be viewed against the backdrop of the resources in that part of the world, and of the importance of those resources to the West. By one authoritative estimate, the Republic of South Africa alone possesses a tenth of the world's asbestos, three fourths of the world's chromite ore, more than half of its platinum group metals, half of its gold, a third of its manganese ore, a fifth of its uranium, and a third of its diamonds: a mineral treasure of almost incalculable strategic and economic importance.