Dilemma of the Horn

Andrew Lycett

The hostility to French activities in Africa shown by delegates at the recent summit conference of the Organisation of African Unity was not just because of the arms sent to South Africa or the Peugeot cars to Rhodesia. It was stimulated also by the fact that decisions taken in Paris recently threaten to alter the shape of the Horn of Africa and hasten the break-up of what used to be the Ethiopian Empire. The French government agreed to reverse its policy in its last surviving African colony, the Territory of the Afars and the Issas (TFAI), commonly known as Djibouti.

No longer will France use her influence to keep the minority Afar leader, Ali Aref, in power, as she has done at elections and referenda in the past. Instead she will nurture a new coalition of parties which will include representatives of the majority Issa tribe who are of Somali stock. This coalition, acting through the African Popular League for Independence, led by Hassan Ghouled, will treat with the French on the issue of Djibouti's forthcoming independence.

The consequences are much feared by the Ethiopians. For the TFAI will not stay directly under French tutelage as it would have under Ali Aref. Increased Issa involvement in government will push the territory closer to Somalia, who, in spite of OAU strictures and commissions on the subject, has never given up her claim to Djibouti, or what she prefers to call French Somaliland.

Somali influence in Djibouti could be the fuse which sparks the very combustible state of relations between Ethiopia and Somalia. For Ethiopia cannot afford to let the TFAI pass into the hands of a country which stares hostilely at her across the drought-ridden Ogaden. She depends on Djibouti as the outlet for 60 per cent of her trade. And that dependence is likely to increase as the civil war in Eritrea takes its toll on Ethiopia's other two main ports, Assab and Massawa in that province.

Already numerous incidents have been reported in the Eastern provinces of Ethiopia of well-armed and uniformed Somalia insurgents attacking villages or blowing up roads. These are not official Somalia army regulars, but Somali-supported guerrillas fighting for the Bale Liberation Front, one of the numerous self-styled liberation forces which abound in Ethiopia.

Little appears to go right for the Provisional Military Administrative Council which overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie two years ago. Its only notable success is that it continues to sell Ethiopia's excellent coffee profitably on the world market. In March, a year after a potentially disastrous leap into land reform, her foreign exchange reserves stood at $500 million, the highest in black Africa after Nigeria.

Her body politic is imperilled, however, by her government's failure to heal longstanding sores. The most debilitating and fatal of these is in Eritrea where the revolt in this province once administered by Great Britain smoulders on. The Ethiopians control the towns and the two guerrilla parties rule the countryside (with such efficiency one field command member told me in Khartoum recently that they can drive from the Sudanese border to 'within twenty kilometres of Asmara').

The Ethiopian government, known as the Derg—the Amharic word for 'shadow'— now admits that the Eritrean rebels are more than the mere 'bandits' it insisted on calling them last year. But it cannot acknowledge it is fighting a major war to keep Eritrea Ethiopian and why. For if Eritrea became independent, taking Assab, Massawa nad her considerable industrial base with her, and if Djibouti followed soon after, Ethiopia would become land-locked. No longer would she be able to trade her valuable coffee. The Eritrean success would encourage other centrifugal tendencies within Ethiopia which before long would be reduced to her very core, the Shoa Socialist Republic around Addis Ababa.

The Derg's almost unhealthy need to succeed in Eritrea does not help the clear thinking of its members, who have yet to come to ideological terms with their elevation from the ranks of the armed forces to the leadership of a great Christian nation of proud individualists. It adopts contradictory tactics which foster mistrust and confuse any party it wishes to treat with.

At the same time that the Ethiopian government issues a long declaration spelling out its intention to discuss regional autonomy with 'progressive elements' in the provinces, it is found to be organising a 40,000-man Peasant March into Eritrea to loot the countryside and hold it forcibly within Ethiopia.

The mediaeval concept of the march indicates how far Ethiopia has advanced down the path towards socialist democratic revolution. A political scientist at Addis Ababa University (an institution, incidentally, still without students, since they remain out on Zematchew or campaign in the countryside until the autumn when they may or may not agree to return to their studies) told me, 'This is exactly how the Emperor Menelik used to wage his wars in the nineteenth century. The government is offering the opportunity for a bit of looting and scavenging in the few weeks before the rains come at

the end of June and the peasants must be back in their fields sowing their new crops.'

There was little real secrecy about the march, although its existence was vehemently denied by the Derg. Doctors and nurses were seconded to Asmara, radio communications were banned for non-government personnel, thereby restricting the scope of the search party put together by the British Embassy to look for three Britons supposedly lost in the Danakil Desert, buses and lorries were commandeered and parked on the Old Airport in Addis to be driven away on the two roads northwards through Mekele in Tigre and Gondar in Begemder and Gojam.

Peasants undoubtedly joined the March, some willingly, others not so willingly. As some of them travelled through Tigre towards Eritrea they were resisted by the local farmers who enjoy their own ambitions of independence and hold some sympathy for the Eritreans. The marchers camped on the Tigre-Eritrea border for a while, before making their way sorrowfully homewards, as the government's enthusiasm for this now public display wanes.

When on 16 May the Derg reinforced its New Democratic Revolution programme with an offer of 'immediate regional autonomy' for Eritrea, the Eritreans were reminded of General Aman Andom, who, as Chairman of the Derg in 1974, had tried to make peace with the secessionists in the North, and was murdered by his subordinates for his efforts. They could only say, 'The Derg is at its tricks again.'

This confusion and failure of tactics in dealing with Eritrea carries over into the Ethiopian government's attempt to evolve a stable quasi-democratic base for its power at home. On the one hand the Derg has recalled Hailu Fida, a French-educated Marxist, from abroad to direct the People's Provisional Political Office as a kind of party which will educate and politicise the public and prepare the way for a return to democratic rule.

On the other hand, the Derg is increasingly disliked for its abuses of power. At the May Day demonstrations in which shots were fired and a student killed, there were cries of 'Hang Hailu Fida' and 'Down with the Fascist Military Dictatorship'. The government remains in power (and can raise a force to march into Eritrea) because the peasantry is still grateful for its legislation on land reform and is only just beginning to wonder why redistribution is not yet proceeding apace.

Opposition to the Derg in Addis Ababa is remarkable though uncoordinated. In the shadow of the Itegue Menen hotel, where Evelyn Waugh stayed when he visited Addis Ababa for Haile Selassie's jubilee celebrations, a fifteen-year-old Eritrean persuaded me to pay for his school books. He told me how three times a week he and his fellow pupils are handed underground newspapers as they leave their classes. They spend a long time, he said, discussing such journals as

Goh, the clandestine organ of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP), Which tells them somewhat fancifully of the success of the opposition in forming a broad front, and of the imminent fall of the Derg.

It is not only underground that opposition to the Derg is found. Many government officials make it known that they think the government's antics are ludicrous, while a substantial proportion of the rest is unable to talk or, more important, act because of

the lack of decisiveness in the country. Even government papers such as Addis Zemen reflect the general anticipation for reform in editorials lauding the virtues of civilian rule.

The curious thing about Ethiopia today, as in the time of Haile Selassie, is that it has not already fallen apart. Last February diplomats in Addis were predicting the fall of the Derg within two weeks. Today they are still forecasting its demise, but they do not set a time limit.