The Soviets' African Waltz

...At the center of this new group is the only man to whom Jimmy Carter has said he owes anything for his election: Ambassador Andrew Young...

...By now, the establishment of an Nkomo government by the end of the year appears almost certain...

...The clumsiness of Soviet diplomacy at a personal level is counterbalanced by the growing conviction that the West can be trusted not to resist Soviet advances and that the path to safety lies in maintaining or extending links with Moscow...

...Hardly any state in Africa had been so reviled in Soviet literature under Khrushchev in the 1960s, but when civil war broke out in 1967, the Soviets filled up the anti-insurgents' arsenals...

...as they had eliminated the nobility and rid the country of potential "imperialist stooges," no matter how competent, so had the Dergue...

...Ghanaians dress fashionable...

...But the Politburo cast the winning vote, and chose Ethiopia, ten times as big as Somalia, almost as well located for dominating the Persian Gulf, and better located for intimidating Saudi Arabia, across the narrow Red Sea...

...and perhaps the overthrow of Nkrumah's tyranny promised a return to more congenial and more democratic values...

...It is, at a bare minimum, to gain control of the source of the West's critical minerals and, as extra insurance, control of the sea routes along which these are transported to Western Europe and America...

...Africans seemed to be coming to their senses after their early flirtations with the Soviets after independence...

...The results are evident elsewhere too...

...Until this spring, Young exercised more influence than anyone in shaping U.S...

...The thin veneer of Western institutions is crumbling very quickly in Africa today...

...All through 1977 its spokesmen talked of the Soviets' "Vietnam," until sometime at year's end it suddenly occurred to them that the Russians had positioned themselves to do precisely what Carter's most severe critics had predicted in February...

...Unlike the process of self-flagellation that took hold in the United States after Vietnam, this was undertaken from the rather sensible point of view: "How do we prevent imperialism from outmaneuvering us next time...

...That the Soviets had overlooked this in the case of Ghana was no doubt due in part to their earlier success in making an ally of Cuba...

...Coups have been attempted in Somalia...

...The administration flailed away with words, words, and more words, while the Soviets acted, continuing to overfly Turkey and Iran illegally, continuing to build up a vast arsenal of tanks, artillery, and ammunition in Ethiopia, and routinely bombarding rebel-controlled Red Sea ports to get their lethal shipments in...

...In early 1977 the Soviets still hoped to have it both ways on the Horn, to be the supplier and protector of both Somalia and Ethiopia (not in itself any more unthinkable than the 30-year-old relationship of the United States with Greece and Turkey...

...and when the Cubans resisted moving into Eritrea—the other Ethiopian territory in rebellion, where Africa's most genuinely revolutionary movement has been organizing the former Italian colony since 1962—the Soviets stepped up their direct support...

...Khrushchev had concluded that he could easily find more Cubas, and more Castros, in Africa...

...Then, in early 1977, emerged the most important similarity...

...His successors, after the loss of Ghana, were more sensitive to the special circumW . Scott Thompson is associate professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and the author of Ghana's Foreign Policy...

...That presented Moscow with no difficulties so long as Ethiopia was a de facto ally of the United States...

...By the early 1980s they will be able to sterilize America's nuclear deterrent and strangle its economic lifelines...

...The new policy first paid off with the Nigerian civil war...

...If Joshua Nkomo takes over Rhodesia, and Sam Nujomo Southwest Africa, both the likely result in part of American diplomacy, a belt of Marxist and Marxist-oriented states will border South Africa...

...There is, first of all, the pursuit of strategically important countries in Africa and the abandonment of them when the strategic picture changes...

...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...

...They will sit down and analyze their mistakes here—and Pravda won't have to mention this monumental humiliation...

...The fall of South Vietnam in 1975 pushed Moscow's African door wide open, as it revealed the unwillingness of the United States to save its allies, let alone distant friends...

...In other words, reap what benefits are available from any state that really matters whatever its ideology...

...Under these conditions, it seems doubtful that the South Africans could hold out for very long, at least in such a manner as to preserve economic stability in the region...

...We are providing a much better model...

...And Mengistu's Marxist rhetoric has grown in purity with the growth of Communist assistance paripassu...

...It is worthwhile getting the answer straight...

...The new administration in Washington watched from the sidelines, a fact which Moscow duly noted...

...But that question, by the time Mengistu had allied himself with Moscow, was as pointless as the question of whether Castro was truly a doctrinal Marxist when he came to power: For Mengistu, like Castro, was certainly a de facto Leninist...

...Again the Carter administration scoffed...

...the Carter administration saves them the trouble...

...ut why should African leaders want to exchange one set of masters for another...

...The difficulties of grappling with the colonial succession, of making rules stick, and of legitimizing patterns of governance make a harsh ideology attractive to such insecure leaderships...

...As Max Beloff said recently: "The Russians have realized that what Third World regimes want to know is not who is going to be nicer to them, but who is going to come out on top...

...Andrew Young with appropriate solicitousness because of their strong need to insist that American "capitalists" are simply using him to buy support from the independent black states, so as to preserve access to critical minerals...

...It explains that "neo-colonialism" and "imperialism" are still conspiring against the poor Third World...

...The American Spectator November 1978 9 II When the Soviets say that Communism is the wave of the future, and that someday they expect Moscow to have preponderance in world affairs, Americans tend not to take them very seriously...

...This is not to say that Mengistu had good Marxist credentials when he seized power...

...There is an additional benefit...

...Thus, instead of fretting over the survival of a regime like little Mali's, or coining new categories of socialist standing so as to include its party in the Communist pantheon, they cultivated big states that mattered...

...Perhaps one gets a taste of what is to come if one looks at reported Soviet preemptive purchases of cobalt (of which Zaire has over half the world's supply) prior to the Shaba II invasion in February of this year...

...That meant making sure there was a Leninist mentality present in the leadership and lots of imported Communist advisers in the cadre...

...Moreover, while the KGB fed weaponry to insurgents throughout the continent and nurtured friendly regimes, the United States, trying to extricate itself from Southeast Asia, was ignoring Africa almost altogether...

...In southern Africa, of course, the Soviets can operate free of cost, as they have no interests there for the moment other than promoting instability...

...As a result, Moscow shifted its attention to Somalia and refused to buy off Sadat...

...In 1974 Portugal's regime collapsed, and with it its African empire...

...At the same time, the post-Khrushchev leadership was determined to narrow the gap in diplomatic clout between itself and America...

...policy in Africa...

...The Soviets made a killing, while raising the question of whether they and their allies had foreknowledge of Shaba II...

...They crowd market and buy old missionary clothes from America," an elderly matriarch mumbled at me...

...In Lisbon, as well as in the colonies, Moscow of course had been doing its homework...

...Such has been the operational premise of American inaction in Africa...

...One could say that from some point of view, any African state is strategically useful and therefore fits into a pattern...

...We do have, however, a surprising store of goodwill and potential influence almost everywhere, if only because "the masses," when they look outward, in fact look to us for their models in everything from education to fashion...

...Had she realized how much better these cast-offs from Kansas were than what was available in Kiev or Smolensk she might have been more charitable...

...Why such leadership...

...But that begs the question...

...This was the course of Soviet policy through the early seventies...

...The answer lies in the unstructured character of African states...

...One officer proved himself willing and able to take the "hard decision," the essential, Leninist chore: ruthlessly eliminating all those colleague-opponents at the top who could not stomach the "revolutionary" road...

...I watched with mild amusement as busload after busload of expelled Russians headed for the airport, now that the new men in charge had decided to end Ghana's growing dependence on Moscow...

...They will come back wherever there is the opportunity, until they have got control, from a strategic point of view, of the whole continent with its absolutely indispensable mineral wealth...

...What emerged in the way of a policy toward Africa was at once a new flexibility at the purely diplomatic level and a far stricter ideological standard for full engagement...

...By February 1976, while throwing a few sops at the American press and administration about negotiated settlements (only to gain time for the consolidation of military advances), the Soviets and their Cuban allies succeeded in installing the MPLA in power...

...It was events outside Africa that gave Moscow its long-awaited • The Russians lost a great deal with the change of government in Ghana —including a strategic airbase that had NATO strategists nervous...

...Angola led to Shaba I, in the spring of 1977, when mercenary-gendarmes from Zaire, who had fought with the MPLA, invaded Zaire's mineral-rich Shaba province...

...At the intelligence level, KGB and East German agents had been able to recruit operatives within Ghana (from among both the natives and the numerous, ever-present pan-African freedom fighters...

...While Castro has survived courtesy of Moscow's help at the most sensitive levels—along with massive economic assistance to compensate for his disruption of the Cuban agricultural system—Mengistu is even more dependent on East German, Cuban, Polish, Hungarian, and Soviet aid...

...And their timetable in Africa seems to be coinciding neatly with their achievement of a massive superiority in strategic arms...

...The first is the isolationist reaction to Vietnam—what an important Asian intellectual-diplomat has called our "over-reaction to an over-reaction," and what has led congressional leaders to deny the importance of Soviet activity in Africa from Angola onwards...

...By the time the coup occurred, a group of senior Ghanaian officials was working, under instructions from Nkrumah, to change Ghana into a "scientific socialist" republic on the "Eastern" model...

...Western observers noticed that the Dergue, the group of officers that came to power in 1974, was composed of vicious men, that warfare existed on the streets of Addis Ababa, that the empire of Haile Selassie was falling apart, and that the country's few competent administrators would be the first to go...

...Marxism-Leainism provides an excuse, once again, for failure—this time for economic failure...

...Africans are coming to realize that Russians are just gun-swingers...

...The Soviets had been deeply involved in Somalia since 1962...

...When the Soviets were forced to make a choice, it appears that their general staff opted to keep the bird in the hand—Somalia, with its secure Soviet-controlled naval bases and airstrips...

...Their objective was to win, which they did in the largest military operation in Africa since Rommel...

...Vladimir Sverchkov, had been allowed to set up a Technical Unit ("#3") to tap buildings where visiting heads of state and other dignitaries stayed...

...Their leaders are hommes serieux...

...Kissinger of his notion of Africa's unimportance...

...So too with their reporting on southern Africa: They have been unwilling to treat Mr...

...In the intervening years, the Soviets ceased to worry excessively—if at all—about small African states, except where strategic advantage lay (as with Somalia and Guinea, whose leaders allowed the Soviets to build base facilities...

...There is probably only one state in Africa that, by classical definition, merits the term "nation"—and that one, Somalia, is a further anomaly in that many of its people lie outside its boundaries...

...The Somalis were decimated—the back of their army broken in ten days...

...Still young and naive, I turned to a European diplomat-friend, who had been around Africa a long time, and suggested that perhaps this signalled the end for Russia in Africa...

...The rest are, in varying degrees, plural states with rival ethnic groups vying for top position—winners using it to the disadvantage of the rest...

...The United States and its European allies, alas, have no such ready-made answers to these almost intractable African problems...

...The Soviets noticed something completely different—certain crucial similarities with their own history (and, interestingly, seasoned Marxists like Italy's Napolitani saw it in precisely the same way): Just as they themselves had murdered the Romanovs, the Dergue shot most of the royal family and let the Emperor waste to death rather quickly...

...But consider what the Soviets themselves say: If there is one constant in their reportage, it is that African minerals and Saudi-Iranian oil are critical to the survival of Western capitalism, imperialism, neo-colonialism, and so forth...

...many Westerners still ask (after twenty years' opportunity to answer their own question...

...At the moment, the nationalist holdouts to the MengistuSoviet assault are falling...

...no matter that such intentions appeared to violate (as the Soviets pointed out, after they switched sides) the African norm of not disturbing the artificial, colonially-derived borders...

...for Castro at least had a popular following of sorts in the wake of Batista's removal, and no regional dissidence as such...

...And the Soviets were in no hurry to disabuse Mr...

...As Saudi power began to tower over the rest of the Middle East, the Russians concluded that Ethiopia—across the Red Sea from the oil kingdom—could better serve Soviet interests than Somalia...

...as they themselves had accosted the Russian Orthodox Church and broken its back, so had the Dergue broken the Coptic church...

...Appetite grows with eating...

...It became increasingly apparent that the Somalis were prepared to grant base privileges to Moscow only if they themselves could be heavily armed for their own, quite different, strategic reasons—regaining the Ogaden province of Ethiopia, or Western Somalia as it is called in Mogadishu...

...stances of the Cuban situation: its unique geographical position and hence its great dependence for survival on Soviet support...

...The price of cobalt to the West quadrupled...

...Then came the flip-flop in Mozambique, where a pro-Chinese Marxist party suddenly turned pro-Moscow--it saw which way the wind was blowing...

...Yet perhaps it is all fortuitous...

...Two KGB agents, Robert Akmerov and Col...

...They struck in mid-February 1978, ana the tactics they chose showed no regard for loss of life or hardship...

...In the long run that will pay off...

...Before long Moscow was flying anti-submarine warfare (ASW) planes out of Luanda, and was sitting in an excellent position to interfere with the enormous shipments of oil and minerals rounding the Cape of Good Hope...

...10 The American Spectator November 1978...

...unlike Angola's Augustino Neto or Guinea's Sekou Toure, he had received no ideological training...

...In the first place, "Africans" nowadays means Idi Amin, Joshua Nkomo, Augustino Neto, and Haile Mengistu Meriam...

...Indeed, in Angola it had a genuine ally in the MPLA, a Marxist party it had been aiding for 15 years...

...Since the end of that war in early 1970, the Soviets have enjoyed highly useful relations with Nigeria, of great utility in generating parliamentary majorities at continenal African (and UN) gatherings where Nigeria's influence is great...

...They were stopped short—that time—by Moroccan troops flown in French planes, but it was just a probe...

...What the Soviets' published lessons reflect is their realization that great dangers lay in involving themselves too deeply with a state whose ruling party was not "tied deeply to the masses" (to use that very special euphemism for ironclad control), or whose leadership was not in some way critically dependent on Soviet support...

...But it was in the Horn of Africa that two decades of Soviet learning experience came together...

...W. Scott Thompson The Soviets' African Waltz A knack for imaginative and effective leadership is what the Soviets prize most in their African allies...

...But while Europeans for the most part, and France most emphatically, have kept in mind the distinction between the short-term needs of the rulers and the long-term aspirations of the people, American policy in Africa has derived from two reinforcing, allegedly moral, but thoroughly wrongheaded, impulses...

...A Colonel Haile Mengistu Meriam simply walked into the cabinet room and shot everyone in cold blood...

...But then came the Ethiopian "revolution...

...Leninism is nothing if not a requirement to be ruthless to one's opponents: History and the masses demand and require it...

...Independence solved few economic problems in Africa, often it worsened existing ones...

...The second is the attitude of the new, young members of the Carter administration, who are determined, it seems, not only to atone for Vietnam, but to reenact their earlier experience in the civil-rights struggles of the south...

...The Soviets are serious people, and they mean what they say...

...That this premise is, of course, entirely false is something the Africans and the Russians have no trouble seeing...

...Maybe not to Ghana, but wherever there is chaos—and of that there will be plenty...

...Small advances were made here and there, small losses were sustained from time to time, but the balance sheet showed a slow but inexorable gain...

...While the West was filled with revulsion, the Soviets busied themselves planning the largest arms shipment in African history...

...Crowds of Ghanaians jeered at the Russians, who had won no more points for good manners or style here than elsewhere...

...8 The American Spectator November 1978 opportunity for large-scale involvement...

...And the Russians will be ready to come back...

...It was in the center of Accra, 1966, just a few days after Ghana's armed forces had overthrown the "Osagyefo" (Redeemer) Kwame Nkrumah...

...Thus Mr...

...This way there was a chance of getting Somalia back, creating a Pax Sovietica in the entire Horn...

...But the patterns in Soviet political-military policy in Africa and the analyses in the Soviet press of Western (and their own) moves on the African chessboard fit together a little too congenially for such statements to be dismissed as "mere propaganda...

...Mengistu had needed no instruction in Marxism, apparently, to learn the game of politics in Ethiopia, where politics is taken very seriously: But Moscow had found its man...

...New, even less sophisticated leaderships will need new guidelines for governance, of which nothing is more serviceable than Lenin's green light to any kind of tactic for sustaining power...

...Following their expulsion, the Russians did indeed convene conferences and study groups to examine their failings...

...How attractive such an ideology must be to a Western-educated leader, eager to jail his opponents, afraid of losing Western approbation if he tries...

...No good person buy used clothes...

...Vance tries to persuade the moderate Rhodesian coalition to sign its death warrant and cede power ("negotiate") to the Soviet-armed "Patriotic Front" (in particular, the Soviet favorite Joshua Nkomo), on the argument that otherwise the Soviets will get themselves ensconced in Rhodesia too...

...how irresistible to a second-generation leader, lacking even a veneer of education, eager to get on with personal rule...

...Russian-supplied patrol boats, used not by the navy, but by a presidentially-directed border guard unit, carried arms to opposition groups in neighboring countries, where Ghanaian and Russian interests ran parallel...

...The Russians will be back," my friend said...

...The Soviets no longer even have to send expeditionary forces to trouble spots...

...If one considers what Moscow might do when southern Africa is entirely in "friendly" hands and Zaire has been, finally, dismembered, one then understands Soviet strategy...

...Genocide is not ruled out...

...Egypt's strategic value was obvious until 1972 when Moscow saw, before anyone else, the rising importance of the Persian Gulf...

...Angola and Mozambique, situated along Western sea lanes, are highly strategic pieces of real estate—especially considering the 40-fold increase in the amount of oil flowing around Africa since 1965...

...Guinea was pursued relentlessly despite setback after setback, since it could be used for ASW operations against American submarines hovering in that area...

...That policy, as he once characterized it, is to be "nice guys...

...but if you are going to get deeply involved, make sure that you can control the situation insofar as it affects Soviet interests...

...While the American press treats Shaba's importance to Western industry almost as something to be ashamed of, certainly to be thought about as little as possible, the Soviet media harps on this relationship...

...The results have been eloquent...