By Sam Wilkins, The Strategy Bridge

The Horn of Africa dominates today’s headlines. From ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia’s Tigray region to the ongoing war against al Shabaab, the region is beset by overlapping crises. Understanding today’s tumult in the Horn requires grappling with the complex legacy of the Cold War’s final chapter in the region. The Cold War accelerated and intensified the Horn of Africa’s zero-sum brand of ethnic politics from 1977-1985, and the thaw and subsequent end of the Cold War in Africa ended critical lifelines for the notorious regimes in Addis Ababa and Mogadishu, precipitating their collapse in 1991.

This essay outlines how the Cold War’s conclusion laid the groundwork for the Horn’s bloody 21st century in four sections. First, it reviews how the intensification of the rivalry between Moscow and Washington from 1977-1978 re-aligned the superpower dynamics in the region.  The second section illustrates how superpower intervention in the region led ruling regimes to eschew diplomatic solutions to the various ethnic rebellions against their rule and precipitated a famine in Ethiopia.

The third section explains how the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev’s “New Thinking” and the end of the Cold War in Africa ushered in the unraveling and ultimate downfall of the regimes in Mogadishu and Addis Ababa. The essay’s conclusion outlines how understanding the international dynamics and missed opportunities in this final chapter of Africa’s Cold War helps deepen our understanding of the Horn’s current tumult. This is the story of the last gasps—and enduring impact—of the Cold War in the Horn of Africa.

BACKGROUND: THE COLD WAR ARRIVES IN FORCE (1977-1978)

It is impossible to understand the conclusion of the Cold War in the Horn without first grasping the tumultuous outcome of the Ogaden War between Ethiopia and Somalia. At the beginning of the 1970s, Siad Barre’s Somalia sat firmly in the Soviet sphere. It hosted a Soviet base in Berbera and fielded a Soviet-supplied army. Ethiopia, meanwhile, represented a reliable American partner under Emperor Haile Selaisse.  Selassie’s overthrow in 1974 by a cabal of young leftist officers known as the Derg unraveled this alignment. As Ethiopia’s political center convulsed in disorder, outlying ethnic groups erupted in rebellion. The Derg, under the leadership of a young Major named Mengistu Haile Meriam, began brutal efforts to suppress these revolts.

Siad Barre eagerly viewed these developments as an opportunity to achieve his irredentist aims of uniting all ethnic Ogadenis under his rule.  Barre misinterpreted a series of communications with American diplomats as an American endorsement of his territorial goals and readiness to replace the Soviet Union as Somalia’s military sponsor. Despite Soviet objections, Barre launched his Soviet-equipped military in an invasion of the Ogaden in July 1977. Exasperated, the Soviet Union denounced the Somali invasion, leading Barre to expel all Soviet advisors from Mogadishu. These Soviet advisors flew directly to Ethiopia, where they formed the core of a rapidly growing Soviet and Cuban intervention. This internationalized force repulsed Barre’s legions from Ethiopia by February 1978

THE CREATION OF MONSTERS (1978-1985)

Defeat in the Ogaden, in retrospect, spelled the beginning of the end for Barre’s regime. Somalia’s postwar outlook appeared truly grim. While the war itself was popular, Barre’s defeat was humiliating—and politically disastrous.

The Somali National Army, which had grown quickly to meet the demands of the war, faced plummeting morale. While the Somali National Army  had once been a source of national pride for Somalia’s fractious clans, discharged soldiers brought home tales of its incompetence in defeat. In Mogadishu, officers from the Majeerten clan launched a coup in April 1978. While Barre’s forces crushed the revolt, his regime was clearly in dangerous territory.

Barre gambled that the U.S. would quickly replace the Soviets as his sponsor. While the U.S eventually provided approximately $90 million per year in military assistance, this support proved slow to materialize. To fund his security state, Barre levied taxes against his clan enemies, further fueling resentment.

Ethiopia’s triumph in the Ogaden War proved a bitter harvest. Flush with confidence and Soviet assistance, Mengistu accelerated his attempts to transform Ethiopian society and crush the ethnic rebellions against his rule. However, despite receiving over $2.3 billion dollars of Soviet military assistance by 1983, Mengistu’s military proved unable to defeat stubborn rebellions in Tigray and Eritrea throughout the first half of the 1980s. 

The Derg concurrently undertook an ambitious program of collectivization and land reform designed to increase short-term outputs. However, the introduction of these intensive farming methods by Eastern Bloc advisors, combined with the deforestation of newly nationalized forest areas by firewood-hungry peasants, devastated Ethiopia’s delicate ecological system. When a drought struck from 1983-1985, Ethiopia’s already decimated agricultural system shattered.

Biblical levels of famine followed. By 1984, over 1 million Ethiopians had died of starvation.  Mengistu’s repressive political system proved slow to comprehend the immensity of the crisis that gripped the countryside.  Cold War dynamics accelerated this suffering. East German Stasi advisors to Mengistu reported that his Government Commission for Relief and Rehabilitation was infiltrated with “counterrevolutionary enemy forces,” who collaborated with foreign embassies and relief organizations. These fears of foreign infiltration exacerbated the agony of hard-hit areas by simultaneously casting doubt on the reports of famine within the Ethiopian government and delaying the required permission and support to international relief efforts.

THAW AND COLLAPSE (1985-1991)

For the Soviets, the famine unleashed cynicism about their erstwhile partners in Ethiopia and stimulated a reexamination of the prospects for socialism in Africa.

Newly installed, Gorbachev increasingly viewed Mengistu’s regime as an albatross on Marxism-Leninism and a drain on the creaky finances of the Soviet Empire.  As Gorbachev’s government wound down its support for the Derg, the raison d’etre for American support to Barre’s increasingly repressive regime evaporated. As American support dried up, so did Barre’s odds of survival against increasingly resilient clan rebellions.

Gorbachev’s Re-Appraisal and the Downfall of Mengistu

Under the protective framework of Glasnost, or “new thinking,” frustrations with Mengistu’s regime blossomed. Officials of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union recognized the famine had been caused by Ethiopian mismanagement and ultimately “threatened 5-6 million people” with starvation.

Bloody ethnic rebellions by Tigrayans and Eritreans also deeply unnerved Soviet regional experts. These deep ethnic conflicts, some scholars reasoned, rendered class-based socialist development models inappropriate for Ethiopia. One prominent Soviet Africanist admitted in 1988 that “there are no socialist states in sub-Saharan Africa, only socialist-oriented states.” Party officials, once zealots for intervention and socialism in Ethiopia, denounced the country in official documents as “perverting the principles of socialism” and fomenting a “negative image that was actively used by reactionary forces in Africa and beyond.”

Escalating costs represented an additional concern. Mengistu’s government, in the words of one Communist Party official, demanded “a lot, quickly, and freely.” Gorbachev emerged determined to end what he called the “uneconomic” support for the Derg. These changes represented a massive about face—and by extension, a condemnation of the entire Soviet Third World project.

Read more: To the last Bullet: The cold war’s last gasps and enduring impact in the Horn of Africa

Source: The Strategy