AGAINST THE NEOCONSERVATIVES AFRICA: WAR AND REVOLUTION
Thion, Serge
1: Revolution in Mozambique It is a little too easy to take the speeches and proclamations of African leaders for gospel truth. When somewhere, in one of those old colonial cities lost in the...
...This could have been judged necessary before discreet pressure from its allies led the Ethiopian government to the negotiating table...
...Sometimes there is the palpable influence of former landowners who have taken refuge in the city, or of parties that, like the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary party (PRP), are leading a fight to the death against the regime...
...What my reader wants to know is not whether or not I killed or gave birth...
...To save its independence—and it was the only independent state in Africa—it made concessions and allowed the French, Italians, and British to take over its coast and control its mountain passes...
...outside interventions might alter the situation, but Maputo seems not to want anything of the sort...
...This gives events in Ethiopia the dimensions of a genuine social revolution...
...In the main, the conduct of these "natural allies" is prompted by the small group that constitutes the South African Communist party, also in exile...
...Accordingly, the EPRP opted for radical opposition, and the Meisone for a tactical support that some of its members challenged in August 1977...
...An active Arab and Persian commerce had developed along the coast in ancient times...
...Our good readers aren't fooled by phonies who do not bother to write over their fakeries: a novel...
...What is left is the bitterness of exile, nourished by the trickle of clandestine emigres...
...The ANCs operations abroad do not present a very bright picture...
...Some people bemoan it, some rejoice, but, generally they prefer to accept the wordplay rather than weigh the social realities it ill conceals...
...it will be bestowed upon the country by a good government that is mindful of morality and economic efficiency...
...Nonetheless, there exists a striking community of history and a close relationship in languages and customs...
...Today it is true that these fine constructions are crumbling to make way, among British and South African Marxists, for a blooming of hyper-Maoist or neoAlthusserian analyses...
...There was a self-seeking confusion between a policy of conquest carried out by the Ethiopians (and, in this region, also by the Turks) and the extension of the Ethiopian feudal system that, in very much the same way, was exploiting the whole of Ethiopia to the greatest profit of a managerial class formed, essentially, of Amharas or Amharacized groups...
...The crucial problem that the Africans must resolve is this: what organization must they establish for themselves in order to convert potential strength into effective strength...
...A chance for a negotiated settlement was narrowly missed late in 1974, but extremists on both sides prevailed...
...This expansionist movement contiues today...
...The mobilization of peasant communities provided a fresh elan, with one clear objective: the Portuguese must get out...
...Young and jovial, he moved quickly into the crowd...
...the 1974-78 development program estimated foreign financing at 76 percent...
...However, a few months later guerrillas seem to have reappeared in small numbers in the Ogaden...
...it is noticeable in Kenya...
...Face it: we are part of the entertainment industry, we make good our readers' temptations...
...In summer 1978, the Ethiopian army, reorganized and supplied with heavy equipment of Soviet origin, undertook an offensive that aimed at reestablishing a military equilibrium...
...The powerful northern and central tribes tolerate a regime that is in the hands of persons from tribes of inferior rank because the nationalist administration insures the income of the big stockbreeders...
...It has faithfully followed all the shifts in Soviet policy and, lacking its own means for action, believes that by brushing aside the ANC it may acquire a mass movement that it can use...
...The great celebration took place in Town Hall Square (Place de l'Hotel-de-Ville...
...But what it will be when a new order is established no one can foresee...
...In this flammable situation, irridentist militants coming chiefly from religious and small business milieus found it easy to mobilize the disaffected herdsmen...
...Albeit in an archaic form, this uprising was a sign of a nascent nationalism...
...but if our wares are halfway decent, the reader will be convinced for a while that our characters are real—the angel, the magus, the smiling child in the manger...
...Questions of land, of pensions, and of various caste privileges continue to be highly controversial, and several Dergue members who spoke up for the army were liquidated, like Lieutenant Colonel Atnafu in November 1977...
...Indeed, officials and Party members have flowed into the mold of the old provincial bureaucracy with disconcerting ease...
...It took the Fremlino several years to emerge from its internal crises, its military inexperience, and its failure to recognize back-country realities...
...as of 1975, the wage-earning class included only 21,000 persons out of a population of 3 to 4 million...
...Apart from Ethiopian products in transit, the region exported incense, myrrh, and Bantu slaves...
...It was also necessary to display prudence in matters concerning the status of women and Islam...
...The Africans have consistently made their dissent clear...
...It is clear that the present regime's doctrine can only push it into the worst mistakes...
...Pretoria, the capitol, behaves as if nothing has happened in Mozambique: it has kept to the agreements relative to the railways and the supplying of electricity from the Cahora Bassa dam, and it continues to export equipment and food to Mozambique...
...The leaders in exile have believed their best move would be to play the card of their "natural allies," the Soviet-Cubans, who so unexpectedly settled the Angola problem and who will do as much, they hope, for the South African problem, with little cost to the liberation movement...
...Are there troop movements along the frontiers between Mozambique and South Africa...
...There is a strong worker component in South African racist extremism—rather as in Nazism and Fascism—and the CP has had to indulge in some veritable contortions in order to elaborate a theory of a "colonialism of a special kind...
...Some degree of modernization is possible if it does not upset the basic channels of nomad trading and the hierarchy of clan prestige...
...He needs them all because they are present in him, too...
...After all, if the revolution must come from above, it will take some time to arrive...
...Mozambican society has reacted indolently, as if relieved by this unexpected alleviation of its situation...
...Such comparisons are not silly, they are merely incomplete...
...a single party in "the van of the peasant-worker alliance...
...IN A COUNTRY where a modern economy has functioned unevenly, the differentiation among classes continues to be embryonic, having scarcely evolved beyond the familiar matrix of peasant self-sufficiency and the extended kinship network...
...The eternal kulak question looms on the horizon once again...
...The Somali also infiltrated coastal cities—Mogadisho and Brava...
...It is not sure of surviving a defeat that would appear too humiliating in a desert world that prizes above all warlike virtues and its own savage poetry...
...it has been evidenced by the territorial claims of the young Somali state...
...Obviously, this is the realistic course to follow...
...To proclaim a people's republic, to transform a liberation front into a MarxistLeninist party, was a matter of words and nothing more...
...In substance, the concessions are not of capital importance, but the fact that they are made is important: no longer can the government gain anything from the outbreak of a "racial riot...
...Insofar as Ethiopia is achieving the status of a mythical country, the painful complexity of its political problems becomes more and more elusive...
...A special camp was opened where all government employees had to undergo instruction...
...A small clique of bureaucrats, corroded by internal quarrels, rules over camps in which hundreds of militants dream of fighting, although the last word on this score hardly lies with them...
...Many men had to leave for the South African goldmines...
...The violence of the Dergue's reactions is also to be accounted for by its uncomfortable position: it was born of the army through a rather complex, semidemocratic process...
...they avoided the total destruction of their army only by precipitate retreat...
...It is useful, therefore, to restate several facts: Whereas Ethiopia is the product of the almost bimillenary evolution of a state, the Somalis appeared in history only toward the 16th century, in the form of a small tribal federation formed in the back country behind Berbera...
...This was to be a people's war, since the recipe had proved successful elsewhere...
...Their diplomacy was paralyzed...
...There was a great explosion of speeches, decrees, and campaigns offering guidelines and explications...
...However, as a result, there are thousands of political prisoners— according to a Meisone communique released in Paris, some 18,000...
...Here one quickly understands that the fate of the rural subcolony that is Rhodesia is secondary...
...These powers will bring themselves to take extreme measures only if the South African economy threatens to sink into chaos or to come under the authority of Eastern Europe...
...The government, he added, would vigorously encourage the collectivization of agriculture...
...But in the field, the Ethiopian army's successes were quite limited, and its attempt to loosen the ELF's grip on the Massawa and Asmara areas proved fruitless...
...The farce of the military disguised as militants has ended, as it always does, in the crash of 221 twisted steel and the silence of calcined bodies...
...On September 12, 1978, during the celebrations of the fourth anniversary of the revolution, Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu underscored the difficulties in supplying the cities with foodstuffs, and attributed them to peasant "individualism" and the inefficiency of the distribution apparatus...
...this is the center where the power deploys its techniques and works its will...
...An ANC delegation went to Versailles in 1918, but obviously was not heard...
...He seized the loudspeaker, reeled off a few slogans, sang a song or two, and, in high glee, disappeared to the relief of his bodyguard...
...The government is incurring short-term debts, and one does not see how it can set aside the surplus needed for capital investments from the labor of a cautious and notably unproductive peasantry or from a microscopic working class, which continues to be, in the main, integrated into the economic apparatus of South Africa...
...luxury shops display a few job-lot styles, but in front of the doors of the new cooperative stores, the lojas do povo, there are long lines of housewives...
...and the national exchequer is certainly in no condition to finance a prolonged war...
...Second, the frontier is ridiculous...
...Because of these inner disputes, the Dergue was led to recruit among village militias and to establish a "parallel army" led by a few noncommissioned officers...
...This has resulted in an autocracy unevenly modified by local freedoms...
...One year later, General Mohammed Siad Barre, president of 218 the Supreme Revolutionary Council, declared: "We solemnly and resolutely proclaim this to be a Socialist state...
...The fact remains that these small groups, whether they oppose or rally round the Dergue, manifestly belong to the same social class...
...Appearances to the contrary, the junta exercises only uncertain power...
...The infrastructure was embryonic...
...THE NATIONALIST UPRISING that was readying itself in the 1960s had its origins in the African lower-middle class, which had worked for the colonizers, and in peasants' memories of wars of resistance the tribes had waged when the Portuguese first were establishing themselves in the country...
...Also, in the course of a brief campaign, the misdeeds of tribalism were denounced, but quite quickly the government confined itself to forbidding any reference even to the existence of tribes...
...Or is it a question of their revolution...
...the domestic political struggles within Ethiopia...
...we make him believe our masks, then go ahead and deprive him of his certainties— let him make love to, or break off with, our hallucinations...
...the departure of the Portuguese opened the way to promotions or new careers for the recent products of the last governors' educational efforts...
...Finally, the old regional rivalries in the new guise of pan-Arabism also fanned the dames, without regard for the fate of the Eritreans themselves...
...After 1945, when it became clear that they would not return either as colonizers or trustees, the Italians threw in the sponge...
...This democratic choice, which became a sham as 213 soon as one moved higher up in the hierarchy, completed the installation of the new government, which is called "popular" or even "government of the worker-people...
...at the very least, the stakes are now clear: a Bonapartist regime greedy to control everything—or a crumbling in the face of centrifugal pressures from below...
...In Botswana, for example, there are four to five hundred youthful moving spirits of the Soweto movement...
...Circumcision and infibulation of women continues, as in the past, but no one speaks about it...
...They managed to save what was essential, and even to reoccupy some southern areas over which they had lost control after the great Galla invasions...
...Their good conscience gives the measure of what can be granted by a government without means, in which everything is decided at the highest level by a select group of some 15 persons...
...Translated from the Hungarian by IVAN SANDERS...
...Our good readers know that their families and colleagues are also characters out of a novel, and smile when those people forget who they are...
...Soviet relief, both military and economic, is slowly being replaced by Western aid (it was Saudi money that prevented bankruptcy...
...Everything has been gradually falling into place...
...Anti-imperialist" Somalia begs for arms in Riyadh, from the Saudis...
...The central government will have its influence on the countryside, and this the ideologues of all persuasions have very well understood...
...The great drought that brought about the fall of the imperial regime also exacerbated latent conflicts between nomads and settled groups...
...the Eritrean question...
...The opposition of the EPRP and of the Meisone was broken by what their leaders called the "red terror," which then moderated somewhat...
...It will not change because a few public benches have been repainted or a flag is given to a few creatures of the Bureau of Bantu Affairs...
...Businessmen wanted to get rich, and the workers wanted to break their employers' game while doubling their own wages...
...Banking on the collapse of the old Empire, the officers in Mogadisho, who had been swearing for eight years that they sought only a peaceful solution, launched their troops in July 1977, thanks to equipment the Soviets had liberally supplied...
...Localized wars in the 19th century were followed by political demands and, in 1912, the creation of the African National Congress...
...They do everything...
...That is where one finds the only true revolution, the burial of a very old feudal agrarian world...
...Once dominated, these people were soon linguistically and culturally assimilated...
...But by around 1971 the Front began to make real military progress in the field...
...The South African CP is the oldest on the continent, but it has never succeeded in gaining a real foothold among Africans or even in recruiting members among the working class...
...The experiment has been launched blindly, with no analysis whatever of peasant realities, and was initially carried out among displaced person, former war refugees, and flood victims...
...The peasantry was clamoring for nothing but an end to forced labor and taxes...
...The Eritrean Question THE ERITREAN QUESTION is certainly much more complex and painful...
...In the course of the many incidents this provoked, the new Ethiopian authorities seem to have opted to protect the sedentaries...
...The Empire had always federated a range of social groups...
...Their more or less exacerbated nationalism puts them in line with what the ANC stood for until it was suppressed...
...Quite a few people in Europe and Africa consider Mozambique a revolutionary success story...
...They are separated only by the question of independence, which to the one side is unacceptable and for the other a prerequisite to discussion...
...One should note that the Eritreans, like the Somalis, may have gambled too much on the disintegration of the Empire and underestimated the ability of Ethiopia to survive amid its own chaos...
...The plot had originated among the Mijurtine, a large tribal group in the north...
...During the last 15 years, the ANC's work abroad, presided over by Oliver Tambo, has confined itself to a kind of diplomatic lobbying...
...Because the Somali irridentists have never been able to emancipate themselves politically from Mogadisho, they no longer have very clear political perspectives...
...As in Maputo, Addis Ababa, and Aden, national policy in Mogadisho is conducted in the name of "scientific socialism...
...nobody really expects them to be...
...There were also, perhaps, some proto-Somali or Somali groups there as well...
...They reached the Juba toward the end of the last century, then, in small detachments, descended toward what today is northeastern Kenya, pushing the Galla and Bantu ever westward...
...Coming from student milieus actively opposed to the former regime, various little Marxist groups have believed they were invested with the mission of educating and leading the "great masses...
...Islam was also a homogenizing force...
...What makes a war improbable today is the disproportion in strength...
...In Maputo, one can still meet South African technicians and businessmen...
...The issue centers on the peasantry's capacity to resist authoritarian measures decreed from on high and also on 224 customers in Bangkok, Dubrovnik or Mallorca, we, too, can guide ours through our internal masks—let them laugh, let them be horrified...
...IN THIS CONTEXT, what is there to the Somali claim on the Ogaden...
...The one alternative to total submissiveness was, then, the riot, and those responsible for public order hopefully awaited just that...
...It is up to the peasant collectivity to find a political and economic solution that simultaneously conforms to the revolutionary principles now operative and to conditions bequeathed by the past...
...Some elements in the Dergue unquestionably favor a very brutal policy...
...Differences in the way they analyze the situation, the nature of the Dergue, the linkage of tactical phases, and the status of the class struggle are not very great, but they have led these groups into ferocious confrontations...
...At the end of the trip he'll be a little more mask-sensitive, which may be the only moral gain to be had from literature...
...it has been reduced by the liquidation of several of its members...
...They are well placed to measure how dependent the Mozambican economy is, and what profits can be derived from it...
...and it has watched the army move gradually away from the revolution, as many officers came to judge revolution incompatible with their middle-class aspirations...
...they enslaved the laggards and the cultivators who had settled in the valleys of the great She belle and Juba rivers...
...In the communal culture of the Ethiopians there is room for these long interregnums in which the powerful contend with each other and the poor suffer...
...As recently as 20 years ago, one could still fire into a crowd of strikers, and the next day the rural unemployed would appear to replace missing workers...
...The rest is peripheral...
...on the contrary, it fears it is no longer able to maintain control...
...These hastily recruited troops got themselves butchered in Eritrea, and maneuvered poorly when facing the Somalis, thereby causing the loss of Jijiga...
...this is borne out by the numerous caravan routes serving the south of Ethiopia...
...The Somali junta had played all its cards by turning its alliances around and imperiling its fragile economy...
...When enough blood flows to make profit rates drop, we may bet that our good fairies will hover attentively over the problem...
...Above all, one abstains from establishing a military force that would antagonize one's formidable neighbor...
...These struggles draw the attention of foreign observers...
...The authorities in Mogadisho can turn themselves inside out to prove their country's great antiquity, but prior to 1960 no Somali state had ever existed, which fact does 220 not prejudice the legitimacy of the present state...
...Their traditional spokesman, the ANC, has disappeared under blows that have brought exile and deportation...
...It seems that the Dergue is not pressing to impose a solution that nonetheless it finds preferable to the status quo...
...We can be murderers and suicides, seducers and cuckolds, great men and little men...
...The junta was unable to prevent the hatching of a military plot, which, however, it foiled on April 9, 1978...
...In Africa today that makes it something of an exception...
...The paradox lies in the fact that the political lines of the government in Addis Ababa and of the dominant group in Eritrea, the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) are very close, and that on this basis they could collaborate...
...Then, the blunders, brutalities, and unkept promises of the Emperor helped to deepen the chasm...
...By invoking the need for "concrete analysis," they became divorced from reality...
...This autonomy may extend as far as some degree of opposition or, let's say, the refusal to enforce certain measures that have been decided upon in Addis Ababa...
...Small clandestine groups formed to carry out economic sabotage have been promptly balked by the highly skilled police...
...Whites and Blacks in South Africa TO COME from Mozambique, or from the verdant plateaus and neglected small cities of Rhodesia, to South Africa's great mining metropolis of Johannesburg, with its American-style ways, is like a change of continents...
...In reality, the colonial administrative apparatus passed into the hands of a small group that was united ideologically but did not represent much socially...
...After the economy's brutal fall, it appears to have stabilized...
...The peasants, who have traditionally lived in a widely dispersed habitat, are being urged to gather together in communal villages (aldeais comunais), where collective labor will subsidize the establishment of the village, its social services and, above all, an improvement in the standard of living...
...I should like to clarify somewhat this muddle of wars and revolutions...
...At the grass roots, the questioning did not lack liveliness...
...Such black sheep were thereupon ignominiously turned out...
...So far, beyond a rhetoric replete with good intentions, the regime, authoritarian as it may be, does not impose itself brutally and is not known to have carried out any bloody purges...
...On the South African side, the vexation of seeing "reds" set themselves up five hours away by car from the industrial heart that the Witwatersrand constitutes could be eased by the awareness of the enormous difference in military potential...
...One abstains from furnishing South African 215 militants any opportunities whatever for hostile moves...
...Lacking the proper means themselves, they granted the right to exploit the best land to international companies or impecunious little colons...
...Their calculations were grossly mistaken, as the Somali leadership recognized by the end of 1977...
...Not for a second do we maintain that our stories are true...
...meanwhile life goes on...
...It now is a hundred years ago that international capitalism began to invest in South Africa, and the result is evident: it has adapted perfectly to the old master/slave-relationship system, established by Dutch colonists in the 17th and 18th centuries, and from that it draws quick and substantial profits...
...A creeping rebellion has continued to manifest itself among young people in the black townships...
...The Strange Conflict in the Ogaden: Somalis, Ethiopians, and Others AFTER AN INTENSIVE preparation by the guerrillas of the WSLF (the Western Somali Liberation Front), the Somalian army invaded the Ogaden and, almost without striking a blow, seized Jijiga, cut off the Franco-Ethiopian railway, and struck at the defenses of Harer...
...Private merchandise stalls, often run by Indians, are better supplied but more expensive...
...On the other hand, the Ogaden is a complementary economic area bridging the high plateaus and the coastal region...
...Two among them, at least—the EPRP and the Meisone (Pan-Ethiopian Socialist Movement)—still have some influence, particularly among students...
...Here, in Johannesburg, is where the historic and economic thrust operates...
...For the readers' sake—and perhaps not only for theirs—we enliven and enhance ourselves...
...The most embittered and rebellious groups are those that are most closely integrated into the urban economy and best placed to profit from privileges that are grudgingly conceded to them in dribblets...
...Channels of communication between whites and blacks were systematically reduced...
...It is a classic scenario: each new generation has a "right" to its moment of psychological liberation, which is immediately followed by a brutal repression calculated to discourage the rioters from commencing afresh...
...Independence was proclaimed on June 25, 1975...
...The government in Mogadisho (capital of Somalia) initially refused to admit that its troops had penetrated a territory so ardently claimed...
...The revolution is not being effected overtly in the social body...
...Boosters of the regime fell into the trap of these fine speeches...
...No serious political work has been done within the country, where the name of the ANC is no more than a dim memory...
...President Samora Machel's speeches receive slowly rising quotations on the revolutionary theoreticians' stock exchange...
...political upsets occur, either because the leadership of a committee suffers a political setback, or power relations in the region change, or the Dergue intervenes to cause the imprisonment or liquidation of persons who have fallen under its suspicion...
...for example, it was explained that in certain circumstances the army could, by transmutation, become the avant-garde of a proletariat that did not yet exist...
...The latter, however, no doubt considering the situation a bigger bite than they could chew, have always evidenced extreme moderation, not to say passivity...
...he wants me to help him imagine what giving birth or killing is like...
...This Horn of Africa has been the living space of a single civilization with internal diversities...
...More concretely, the future of the Ethiopian revolution is at stake in the peasant committees...
...The regime, which unquestionably has its authoritarian and bureaucratic aspects, must make a show of tolerance in the face of the eclectic positions taken by the peasant committees if it wishes to secure their political and even military support in the struggles that go on in the cities and in the corridors of government...
...Mozambiques's extreme destitution and the drop in production, caused by the departure of the Portuguese, certainly do not permit it to expose itself to the risk of a confrontation with the most powerful industrial nation in all of Africa—a nation that, furthermore, has been preparing for war for 15 years...
...We may have killed someone, or we may not have...
...Initial responsibility goes back to Italy, which had imposed its presence there at the expense of Ethiopia and counted heavily in the development of the pro-Independence movement...
...There will certainly be no lasting settlement in Eritrea that comes from armed force alone...
...Strategists on both sides have made the most prudent calculations...
...It is precisely because the Ethiopian peasantry is not being led by a party or any group that would try to take over or dress it up in some hypothetical avantgardism that the peasants have some small chance of making a revolution that will be their own...
...Yes and no...
...In Mozambique, the seizure of power by revolutionaries who had propelled the movement of armed struggle against the colonial presence was accomplished in two phases: April 25, 1974 saw the collapse of the Salazar regime and opened a transition period long enough for the Fremlino (Liberation Front of Mozambique) gradually to take over the levers of command...
...II: Southern Africa— Waiting for the Implosion A revolutionary state at the gate of the white man's bastion...
...To reassure religious circles, Somalia went so far as to join the Arab League, of which it was the sole non-Arab member...
...Despite an enormous buildup, the repressive apparatus has been only moderately useful in coping with the new problems posed by the progressive integration of a large number of African workers into a more modern and complex production apparatus...
...diplomatic considerations carry little weight when it is a matter of the herds' survival...
...We have known enough other examples of these infatuations in which the political intelligentsia is prone to see what it searches for: a rhetoric and a system of symbols that fortify its orthodoxies...
...in some cases, the poorest peasants are dominant, while in others the well-to-do farmers hold the reins...
...First, the inhabitants of the Ogaden have unquestionably suffered under the imperial Ethiopian regime from the arrogance and brutality of its administrators...
...Worried critics see this as a frustrated lower-middle-class response verging more or less on racism...
...But for a country that aims to be revolutionary, and has a war in progress on one of its frontiers, the atmosphere is relaxed...
...One can certainly credit them with a new efficiency in government—which was demonstrated during the emergency-aid operations on behalf of nomads threatened by the 1975-76 drought—and with launching the transcription into the Latin alphabet of the heretofore unwritten Cushitic language...
...In 1969 these officers, dissastisfied with parliamentary intrigue and corruption, seized power...
...Clubbings produced at least 40 fatalities, but they did not convince those who had survived the clubbings...
...Given the composition of the Somalia's population—two-thirds, if not more, being nomads, the rest divided between small farmers and tradesmen, with a thin middleclass layer left behind by the colonial ebb— there was only one solution: to teach socialism, since it was unknown in the country...
...Is tension mounting...
...Of course, notorious opponents and those who yearn for the good old colonial days run every chance of finding themselves in a reeducation center, where they will be joined by dishonest judges and pimps...
...The nomads move about at the whim of the rains...
...The political center of this vast human ensemble has always been what used to be called Abyssinia, and today is known as Ethiopia...
...Officers and young intellectuals who had rubbed shoulders with the Italian CP during their studies in Italy ensured the "correct" ideological direction...
...III: The Horn of Africa, or, the Muddle The events that continue to unfold in the Horn of Africa are becoming part of contemporary political mythology, witness such signs as sensational headlines like "RED TERROR," "A NEW CAMBODIA," "A NEW VIETNAM FOR THE SOVIETS," and "AFRICA'S BIGGEST WAR...
...There is still a lot of money to be made in South Africa, and the big foreign firms are not about to deprive themselves of it...
...Nor is anyone in a position to impose it today...
...Also, they would constitute the pond from which the higher echelons would be fished, including members of the National Assembly, itself little more than a rubber-stamp body...
...The simplest method is to examine in succession the three conflicts that, although continuous, differ in nature: the war in Ogaden and the Somali-Ethiopian confrontation...
...Here they introduced some political practices that today would elicit cries of colonialism...
...This causes much grinding of teeth among those who have been waiting for the proletariat to arrive and what arrives instead is a gentleman with an English education, a member of a royal family, a man who talks with the government, with Tambo, Andrew Young, with tribal chiefs and labor leaders and students...
...The old feudal Ethiopian empire, already rocked by domestic quarrels, struggled, fought, and temporized in turn, seeking to divide the foreign powers that encircled it...
...The machinery of the government seems solidly in the hands of Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu and his close associates in the Dergue...
...wide-spread politicization, often called "consciousness-raising...
...The word "annexation" was carefully avoided, and nothing was said about the status Mogadisho would like eventually to be assigned...
...Although the Somalian "Socialist" experiment is little known abroad, it does have its heralds and admirers...
...The claim is based—according to the official line—on an incredible series of historical falsifications...
...When the heavenly surprise of the Lisbon coup occurred, the Fremlino came to power on a flying carpet...
...Latent conflicts between the small and more or less enclosed rural societies broke out into the open...
...And repeatedly thereafter he undertook to explain that this was not a matter of some local variation but of "true" socialism...
...the hot harbor streets are deserted...
...These are highly regarded people, known for their honesty and devotion...
...Furthermore, according to recent estimates, the settled groups in the Ogaden outnumber its nomads, and the total population is larger than that of all Somalia...
...Ethiopia, armed by the U.S...
...Its context, however, gave it a special resonance...
...These overlapping claims of villages and of people clinging to their land has been woven by a long and often violent history...
...The principal item of export continues to be livestock to Saudi Arabia (62 percent...
...IF THE SOMALIS' BRIEF is rather slight, there remain two facts that merit consideration...
...In every locality, people had come together to elect the members of their local popular assembly...
...Widespread distrust prevails with regard to everything that comes out of Addis Ababa...
...These edifying psychodramas, "oriented" (that is the official term) by the Fremlino party, were intended to secure the masses' ratification of the regime...
...Boer nationalists took care to dismantle the ANC when they came to power in 1948...
...As for the rest, the economy has shown modest progress...
...The EPRP considered the Dergue the political expression of a lower middle class 223 that was incapable of bringing the revolution to term—achieving that is, the "dictatorship of the proletariat"—and judged that it would be tempted to appeal to the bureaucracy and the army in order to impose its will on the masses...
...France in 1789...
...But the moment Ethiopian troops mounted a counter-offensive, Mogadisho protested the threat this posed to Somalian territory...
...they supply the guidelines for all problems, travel everywhere to explain them, and personally keep tabs on how they are being applied...
...The African guerrillas are unanimous in saying that the Russians are worthless when it comes to training troops...
...In its ever more simplified version, socialismo cientifico is reduced to economic moralizing...
...Today, the color bar has been raised—often unobtrusively—by several rungs of the labor hierarchy in several areas of work...
...Internal conflicts among different levels of the peasantry are often of importance...
...The elected candidate would have a small role to play in the management of local affairs...
...They formed the bulk of the lineages and tribes of inferior status...
...And they deduce that these people are incapable of managing the revolution...
...No decisive step has yet been taken in this direction...
...Up to that point, what is today Somali territory seems to have been inhabited chiefly by Galla shepherds and Bantuspeaking farmer-hunters, who were celebrated in Muslim chronicles under the name of Zendj...
...Although there are still very few Somali books to be found in Mogadisho bookstores, this is a development of considerable importance...
...As happened in the big strikes in Natal in 1973, the government has had to limit its use of force and to make concessions to the Africans...
...In this connection, it should be noted that in the region of Harer and in southern Ethiopia, Mogadisho is claiming territory that has not yet been Somali-ized but where the Galla, who inhabit it, are hard put to it to contain the pressure of tribes coming from the desert...
...We make no secret of the fact that we are maskmerchants...
...There was a great influx of people into government work...
...214 For the rest, one notices considerable passivity and even traces of distrust among the peasants, who have not been overwhelmed by the change in the color of their rulers' skin...
...Courses and seminars in political doctrine were multiplied feverishly...
...The situation is not too promising: the countryside is not feeding the city, which still depends almost entirely on foreign sources...
...Soviet aid, which is resented by career officers who are quick to criticize both the material and the mentality of their "advisors," is surely intended in part to keep these two forces in hand, and to prevent this or that unit from risking a coup—a possibility that cannot be entirely dismissed...
...This nationalist group still has to consolidate its ties with other social groups—the metis, the Indians, unionized labor, and the peasant and tribal leaders on the Reserves...
...And then, in June 1976, the rules of the game were not respected...
...The New Ethiopia: Birth Pains THERE IS NO SCHEME into which one can easily fit the events that have taken place in Ethiopia over the last five years...
...THE PRESENT GOVERNMENT, directed by the Dergue, has played the committee-autonomy card (within certain limits) and also the provincial-autonomy card because it recognizes that here is the source of its power...
...What had happened in this immense savannah, on the shores of which for many years Lusitanian navigators had put in only to take water and trade a bit...
...Before casting their ballots under the vigilant eye of the Party, they were called upon to denounce all those voters or candidates who had a murky past or known vices or propensities for corruption...
...Several thousand turned out to admire folk dances, sports demonstrations, a drum-andbugle band, some karate-trained policemen and, above all, President Samora, who came to shake hands with the successful candidates...
...The solutions that have been 222 applied to these crises have varied greatly from one place to another, since there was no preexisting political uniformity...
...One must bear in mind that Ethiopia is immense, with a wide range of climates, and that it is inhabited by a hundred or so peoples equipped with their own microeconomies yet all steeped in a common civilization...
...Somalization" is without question more a cultural than a truly demographic phenomenon...
...The centralizing traditions of both state and church had, in large measure, to adapt to local particularisms, with institutions of a feudal type serving as go-betweens...
...One denounces apartheid but abstains from speaking of commercial relations...
...Mozambique, a land long colonized by the Portuguese, appears on the list of countries that have achieved their revolution, with the attributes that go with it: mass meetings...
...Its anxiety allayed, the regime has again seized the initiative, returning to its old games— domestic repression and diplomatic overtures to Africa, without many positive results...
...They have since been trained by Cubans...
...Some public firing-squad executions provisionally brought a respite for President Siad Barre...
...This is why the demonstrations in Soweto marked an advance, even if for the 216 moment the movement seems to have exhausted almost all its potentialities...
...With each new sentence we surprise the reader...
...The unbuckling of this decrepit apparatus caused a surge of aspirations for such local freedoms and called the legality of the traditional authorities into question...
...They are more spectacular, which is to say bloodier, and they perhaps conform more to the notion one has of a struggle for power among parties...
...People who are outraged—justly—by the physical liquidation of this order of opponent must be reminded that for their part, these same opponents also attempt to liquidate the partisans of the regime, and that their political methods smack unpleasantly of Stalino-Maoism, which no doubt would make their dominion as bloody as the repression they now endure...
...The junta has made a mistake: had it supported the Ogaden's inhabitants' agitation politically, it could have helped them obtain autonomy from the new Ethiopian regime, which is granting it to numerous regions...
...This petitioning organization provided the urban lower middle classes and the peasant leaders with an outlet for voicing grievances...
...It is worth the trouble of taking a closer look at the Somalian situation...
...The century-old structure, which is based on racial discrimination, survives intact...
...So the Somalis appeared at a very recent date in history, according to the currently available documentation, as the last 219 emanantion of a broth of nomadic culture that had already given rise to the Galla and Afar tribes...
...Developments during 1978 led to a stabilization and an increased centralization of the regime...
...The South Africans, then, are practicing their commercial wiles without military threats or political relations...
...Early in this century, a religious leader, Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, led a long revolt in which thousands of warriors rose up against the foreign presence...
...predominance of the state structure...
...The duplicity of the Europeans knew no limits, but the Ethiopian aristocrats had a long experience in statecraft, war, and diplomacy...
...217 It is clear that only the international community—and above all, the United States and Western Europe—has the means to make Pretoria yield...
...had been restrained by African diplomacies from punishing Somalia too severely...
...The crucial question—the same question that has obliged all Communist regimes since 1917 to shackle the peasantry in irons—is agricultural production...
...The British put it down provisionally by using air power, but after 1945 they encouraged Somali nationalism in order to exert pressure on Ethiopia...
...No one can say what the state of mind is in the other tribal federations...
...When somewhere, in one of those old colonial cities lost in the African bush, a political party all of a sudden declares it is "Marxist-Leninist," international public opinion pretends to believe in the transmutation...
...Such are the virtues of a centralism that is called democratic only because its benefits should, in principle, embrace the entire population...
...They have to follow the path laid out by the Zulu leader Gatsha Buthelezi, who shows them how one can play with existing structures, coalesce forces, put the government on the defensive...
...Articles dealing with the Horn are unanimous in finding that the conflicts developing there and the confrontations that ensue are "absurd" and "incomprehensible...
...They drove a part of the Galla to the south and to the west...
...Socialist rhetoric is conspicuously unsuccessful in gaining any hold on a society that is dominated by a clan, pastoral, and traditional mentality...
...For example, one sees large areas in the northern part of the country refusing to put through the agrarian reform because it would challenge traditional patterns of small land tenure...
...On the agenda, and with good reason, is a bourgeois revolution...
...and intensification of a collective work effort...
...The committees are elected by the farmers (farm hands seem to have been excluded...
...A seemingly banal scene, and one that could take place almost anywhere on the continent...
...In December 1977, a huge popular celebration was held in Maputo to mark the completion of the electoral process...
...Until then it had not stirred, but now it was aquiver as the President distributed smiles and handshakes...
...the local society remained unchanged, worn down by corvees and taxes...
...The international situation in the '60s favored the formation of a liberation front...
...Let the traveler's eye bear witness: whether he finds himself in the great markets of Mogadisho or Harer or Addis Ababa or Asmara, he encounters the same people, the same smells, the same gestures, the same faces that are unlike any others in the world...
...The parliamentary regime established by the Italians at the time of Somalian independence, in 1960, had risked a military confrontation in the Ogaden in 1964...
...but they are less important to the evolution of the country than what is happening in the countryside...
...From that moment, in private the WSLF leaders did not conceal their anxiety, either: they knew that any political or even just a military settlement would be made once again to their detriment...
...Recent movements that have crystallized the resentment of inhabitants of the segregated ghettoes—the Black Consciousness Movement, the Black People's Convention, the South African Students' Association—have been based on the assumption that nothing was to be hoped for from any form of coexistence with whites...
...If the repressive forces that now exist are employed in line with the principles that underlay their reinforcement—i.e., preparing for the final confrontation—there is the risk that, sector by sector, a creeping paralysis will take over an economy that is less primitive, having been developed over the intervening two decades...
...The South African CP has always experienced severe theoretical difficulties in its analysis of the local situation, especially since the white workers at Rand rose up, in 1922, to defend racial barriers in employment...
...The situation is far from stable...
...Russia in 1917...
...Zeila and Djibouti in the French Territory of the Afars and Issas—where they soon constituted a majority...
...It took Pretoria a while to understand that in the matter of policy the Americans had merely brave words to offer...
...Despite the siren songs that have issued from various business quarters, no one in the government has wanted to attempt an easy military adventure...
...These wars are grievously fratricidal...
...In Maputo, the capital of the country, there are now fewer cars...
...It was probably inevitable that the role of the state should be reconfirmed, sometimes by violence but also by a rapid change in political or administrative incumbents...
...The last such riot took place in Sharpeville, in 1960...
...These peasant committees are structured in relation to local problems, and do not all have the same composition...
...The Mozambicans, for their part, have developed a policy of abstention...
...This expansion was concomitant with the appearance of the European maritime powers, which—after quarreling over the coastal ports—set about gaining a foothold in the hinterland...
...Socialist" Somalia heaps opprobium on the Soviets and Cubans...
...They are in touch with the central government—the Dergue (Military Committee)—and with its administration through the intermediary representatives in their respective provinces...
...Nonetheless, it survived the debacle, resorting to purges in the army, administration, and university...
...It would seem that they are trying to signal the fact that they exist, but now it is up to the authorities in Addis Ababa to resolve the economic and political problems of the lowlands...
...This group dispatched a few contingents to join in the assault that the great conqueror Ahmad Gran was launching against the high plateaus in Ethiopia...
...the cost of living has risen steeply (in 1973-75, at a rate of 20 percent per year...
...As in their relations with other African countries, everything must be tacit...
...It is not that goods are in short supply but that the shops are irregularly stocked, for the distribution system is fairly chaotic...
...In other words, the question of power was reopened in a dual sense—with respect to the central government and also to the management of local affairs...
...That is scarcely a metaphor, for despite all the progress the party had made, it was very far from being rooted everywhere in the country...
...But the Committee is anything but homogeneous, and it is hard to understand why the international press was so prompt to criticize Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu, who is rather to be classed among the moderate elements...
...Some preliminary discussions did take place in East Berlin...
...For some time, the civil war between the two fronts has been in abeyance, but it could resume...
...Except for the rich valley of the Zambezi, where in the 18th century they established a kind of feudal system, the Portuguese did not occupy the bulk, the interior, of the territory until the late 19th century...
...Constantly on the move, the Somali tribes jostled one another and fought over springs and pasturage...
...they assume all governmental powers—all local administrative, judicial, and police functions—as well as the management of the local economy...
...But the division of the Eritreans in two organizations—one revolutionary, the other more conservative and pro-Arabraises the ante...
...For the rest, the country was a realm of the slave trade, then of the head tax and forced labor...
...China in the 20s...
...The rivalry between the regular and "parallel" Ethiopian armies is deep, which makes combined operations quite problematical...
...Some bold theoretical detours also were necessary to justify the strangeness of the situation...
...This country, where 85 percent of the population are peasants, was obliged recently to import meat from Peru...
...Lack of rain forced the nomads to approach the rivers and to impose their herds on cultivated fields...
...Somalia thereupon asked the Soviets for military aid, and sent its young officers to be trained in Eastern Europe...
...For reasons that are far from having been clarified, the Somali tribes evidenced a remarkable dynamism, which led to an unbounded expansionism...
...A rosy future lies ahead for foreign aid...
...and it has taken concrete form in the two wars over the Ogaden...
Vol. 26 • April 1979 • No. 2
