Much of the land is desert, and rainfall is uncertain,
so that surviving even at subsistence level is
difficult. Famine has stalked the region and
claimed more than a million lives. Five million
remained in danger in the early 1990s. Only
Libya has reaped untold riches from below this
desert, in the form of oil, but it fell under the
maverick rule of Colonel Gaddafi, who properly
used a part of these riches to benefit the Libyans
but also fanned conflict among his neighbours
and elsewhere in the world. Gaddafi remained
unpredictable. Libya’s wealth did not help the
whole region; indeed, its neighbours Chad and
Somalia are among the poorest in Africa.
Authoritarian regimes in Ethiopia and Somalia,
characterised by corruption and economic mismanagement,
added to the misery. But it was,
above all, the tribal and civil wars of the region
that were responsible for the sufferings of millions
of helpless people. Precious resources and aid
were used to pay for weapons to fight these wars.
The West and East, when their priorities were dictated
by the Cold War, supplied them. Yet these
were the countries ‘liberated’ by the United
Nations from European colonial rule, their independence
intended to signal a new era for the
suppressed peoples of the world. What went so
dreadfully wrong?
The first African nation rescued from colonial
dependency was Ethiopia (then called Abyssinia),
thanks to the internecine Second World War
between the European colonial powers. In 1941
it was liberated from Italian occupation, which
had begun in 1936, and Haile Selassie was
restored as feudal emperor. Ethiopia alone had
successfully resisted by force of arms European
colonial partition in the nineteenth century as the
Italian army, advancing inland from the colony of
Eritrea on the Red Sea, was defeated in 1896.
When Haile Selassie returned in 1941 he benefited
from the modernisation and centralisation of
the Italian occupation and launched an Ethiopian
drive to try to bring his backward kingdom into
the twentieth century. Progress was impressive in
education, and a small start was made in setting
up some factories and in industrialising. With the
assistance of the US a properly equipped and
trained army was created. These developments,
however, undermined the old structures of the
monarchial state. By the early 1970s new shocks
resulted in government and society falling apart.
The year 1973 proved disastrous. The rise in
oil prices hit the poorest countries especially
hard. This coincided with a calamitous drought.
There was famine in the Tigray province and the
royal army was defeated by Eritrean freedom
fighters. The rising, which turned into revolution,
began in the spring of 1974. Behind it was a
group of officers, army mutineers, who were
joined by students and teachers in the capital,
Addis Ababa. Gradually the revolution became
more radical. The 83-year-old emperor was
deposed in September 1974 and imprisoned; later
he and his family were murdered. Strife within the
military and among the radical groups followed
until in February 1977 Colonel Haile Mengistu
eventually emerged as the victor and unleashed
a reign of terror; opponents were rounded up
and summarily executed. Assuming the red star
and the trappings of a Marxist people’s republic,
he wielded absolute power over the political and
economic life of the country and crushed his
opponents as enemies of the revolution.
The Soviet Union saw here an opportunity to
advance its influence in a region of Africa bordering
on the Red Sea, which was of obvious
strategic significance. Moscow cynically hailed
Mengistu’s seizure of power as a truly ‘Bolshevik’
revolution and provided arms and aid. Meanwhile
the internal divisions in the country and
Mengistu’s dictatorship had one other result: the
resumption of fierce fighting between the central
Politburo in Addis Ababa and outlying Eritrea, a
province attached to Ethiopia after the Second
World War. Faced with Eritreans in the north
and with Somalis in the south-east, Mengistu
depended on Soviet weapons and military training.
The demands of the military, the devastation
of the endless warfare over a disputed frontier
with Somalia, and the Eritrean war of liberation
condemned the Ethiopian people to one of the
lowest standards of living in Africa. Periodic
famines killed hundreds of thousands and threatened
the lives of millions more. Television cameras
revealed the terrible scenes of hunger to the horrified
West in 1984 and 1985. But spectacular
public responses, such as Band Aid organised by
a pop singer, to provide cash for the starving could
not attack the roots of the problem – the corruption
and mismanagement of Mengistu’s dictatorial
regime added to the continuous warfare
in the Tigray and with Eritrea and Somalia.
It was already too late when on 5 March 1990
Mengistu declared that the state would abandon
Marxism–Leninism. In May of the following year,
the game was up: the rebel forces were closing in.
The coalition led by the People’s Revolutionary
Democratic Front captured Addis Ababa. By that
time Mengistu had fled to safety in Zimbabwe.
The guerrillas had overcome a 350,000-strong,
seemingly modern army and air force equipped
with weapons supplied formerly by the Soviet
Union. The old ally had deserted Mengistu and
the army was demoralised. After seventeen years
Mengistu had lost all credibility.
Threatened by the turmoil were a group of
black Ethiopians professing as their religion a
form of ancient Judaism. The Ethiopians called
them ‘strangers’, Falashas. Some 140,000 – that
is, most of those who had remained after the first
airlift in 1984 – were now rescued, plucked out
of Africa and brought to Israel. The Israelis
had once more demonstrated to the world that
they would protect their own, regardless of all
other considerations – economic, international,
political and social. Black Jews would be integrated
into Israel like Jews from all other continents,
races and ethnic groups. Service in the
army and education of a new generation would
do their work.
The new leaders in Ethiopia faced a daunting
task in their attempts to revive a devastated country.
At least they were no longer at war with
Eritrea, whose independence was in sight. As if its
own problems were not enough to cope with,
Ethiopia was also attempting to feed hundreds of
thousands of refugees fleeing from southern
Sudan.
In the early 1990s, Eritrea had a population of
3.5 million. The country had been forcibly
colonised by Abyssinians, by Turks and finally in
1889 by the Italians. Italian colonies were run
mainly for the benefit of Italy, so local nationalist
feelings were suppressed. ‘Liberated’ by the
British in 1941, Eritrea was not granted independence,
despite wartime promises. In fact,
there were long wrangles after the war between
the victors about what to do with the former
Italian colonies. The British and the French could
not simply take them over as new colonies, as
spoils of war. The climate prevailing at the United
Nations would not have permitted such blatant
colonialism. There was only one thing on which
the Western victors were agreed and that was to
keep the Soviet Union out. Eventually, in 1951,
the former Italian colony of Libya was granted
independence.
The Eritreans fared the worst. By a UN resolution,
they were to be assured respect for ‘their
institutions, traditions, religions, and languages,
as well as the widest possible measure of selfgovernment’.
Instead, they were federated with
Ethiopia, so that Ethiopia might have access
to the sea. The dominant West at the United
Nations believed it had a secure ally in Haile
Selassie, and the Red Sea was too important
strategically to allow a small Eritrean state independence,
and so, decisive influence. The Eritrean
Liberation Movement was soon formed, only
to be brutally suppressed, and in 1962 Haile
Selassie annexed Eritrea. With the assistance of
Arab neighbours, the newly founded Eritrean
Liberation Front took up the armed struggle
against Ethiopia in the 1960s and, despite splits
and intrigues, fought the longest war in Africa
until Mengistu’s overthrow in 1991. South of
Eritrea lies northern Ethiopia, inhabited by the
Tigray peoples, some 5 million strong. They too
waged a liberation struggle against Mengistu’s
rule. Droughts and fighting devastated subsistence
agriculture, so that famines decimated the
Tigreans. At the same time, the Ethiopians were
fighting the Republic of Somalia over the territory
known as the Ogaden. The new rulers of
Ethiopia brought peace to the country. The
regions enjoyed some autonomy; when a referendum
was held, Eritrea overwhelmingly chose
independence in 1993. All this gave a chance for
famine relief to reach starving peoples. Two of the
poorest countries in Africa, Ethiopia and Eritrea,
wasted their scarce resources fighting each other.
War between them seemed least likely at the
outset after the overthrow of the Marxist regime
in Ethiopia in 1991. The Eritrean president
Issajas Afwerki and the Ethiopian new prime
minister of Ethiopia Meles Zenawi had been rebel
comrades in arms when they ousted the dictator
Mengistu. The separation of the two countries in
1993 allowing Eritrea independence had been
peaceful. The delimitation of the new frontier,
neither country willing to lose authority by compromise
over a small area of land, spluttered into
war in 1998. War forced hundreds of thousands
of the poorest farmers to flee from the fighting
zones and face starvation. UN intervention, the
despatch of peacekeepers, mediation leading to an
agreement to submit the border dispute to an
international commission ended fighting in 2000,
but when in March 2003 the commission
awarded the disputed village and the inhospitable
land surrounding it to Eritrea, Meles Zenawi
refused to accept the finding. War threatened
once more. Pride, nationalism and sheer folly
condemned tens of thousands to die. Without
substantial food aid another mass famine in
Ethiopia and Eritrea threatens thousands of lives.
The Republic of Somalia was created in 1960 from
the Italian and British colonies of Somaliland.
Somalians share language, culture and Islam, and
nationalism is a strong force, able to survive the
colonial partitions by Italy, Britain and France.
The Ogaden had been conquered by the
Abyssinians in the 1890s, and after the Second
World War it was once more handed back to
Ethiopia. Conflict between the two countries
arose soon after the establishment of Somali independence.
In 1969 there was a military revolution
in Somalia, which received Soviet support, but
when Somalia and Ethiopia went to war again
in 1977 the Soviet Union – forced to choose
between two of its clients – eventually backed the
stronger Mengistu. The Somali army was defeated
in the Ogaden in 1978. The US meanwhile
replaced the USSR in Somalia.
Thus internal strife in the strategically important
Horn of Africa led to a Cold War game of
musical chairs. Nothing illustrates better the hollowness
of the pretensions of these African military
regimes when they claim they are following
‘democratic free world’ principles of government
or modelling themselves on the Marxist people’s
republics. The politics of Africa reflect African
realities: the first requirement of leadership is to
stay in power and to maintain the cohesion of the
new nation. The Somali Democratic Republic was
ruled by a Supreme Revolutionary Council under
its president, General Mohammed Barre, until
his downfall in 1991. Warfare and internal strife
had reduced this poorest of African countries,
dependent on subsistence agriculture, to near
starvation. In 1990 the country descended into
chaos, with Barre trying ruthlessly to hold it
together by using his elite guards.
In January 1991 Barre was driven from power.
Even worse was in store for the people of Somalia
than Barre’s brutal rule. Although the 6 million
Somalis are almost unique in Africa in forming
one nation, all speaking one language and following
the same religion, a Sunni branch of
Islam, clans had fought each other for centuries
over ownership of pastures, and Barre’s rule – far
from eradicating the clan rivalries – had only suppressed
them. Now, like a release of steam from
a pressure cooker, clans, local warlords and gangs
erupted in an orgy of civil conflict. The country
was awash in weapons.
The rest of the world was horrified by the television
reports sent from the capital, Mogadishu,
a ruined city in which over a million were seeking
some sort of shelter. The UN and relief agencies
sent in food aid to the starving population, but a
few hundred ‘blue berets’ – UN troops – were
totally inadequate to guard the supplies and to see
that emergency supplies reached the people. For
hundreds of thousands who had starved to death,
it was already too late.
Somalia presents a most pitiable face of contemporary
Africa. Independence led to dictatorial
rule, corruption and the lavishing of scarce
resources on armaments. The end of dictatorship
was followed not by a transition to democracy but
by chaos, anarchy and ruin. A more determined
international effort, which got under way in the
autumn of 1992, endeavoured to save some 2
million Somalis from starvation. After the illplanned
US intervention in October 1993 to
impose peace on the warring factions had failed
so humiliatingly, Somalia was left to its warlords.
If they cannot reach a peace between them, no
other nation was willing to risk its soldiers to
pacify the Somalian cauldron. The UN, the body
of last resort provided some aid. Despite all its
efforts Somalia has remained a fractured, broken
country.
Bordering the Red Sea to the north-west of
Ethiopia lies the Sudan, where starving peoples
from the Tigray and Eritrea found refuge. In one
of the most extraordinary migrations thousands of
Ethiopian Jews, the Falashas, also crossed into the
Sudan (1983–4) on their secret journey to Israel.
The Sudan provides the main route through
which aid can be channelled to Eritrea and
Tigray, but it is not itself a stable country politically
or ethnically. The south is African and vehemently
opposes the spread of the Muslim religion
and law, which the Arab north of the country
seeks to impose. When the Sudan gained independence
from Britain in January 1956, paramount
British consideration had been to prevent
Nasser’s Egypt from dominating it, but it was
left to the Sudanese to decide the issue. A rebellion
in the south in the summer of 1955, motivated
by the fear that all power would in practice
be transferred to the north, was repressed and did
not delay independence. Britain was in a hurry
and failed to insist on safeguards for the south.
British Middle Eastern policy required strong,
unified nations, not weak political divisions that
might be exploited by the Soviet Union.
After a short period of multi-party government
in the Sudan, the military seized power in 1958
and ruled for the next six years. General Abboud’s
regime followed a harsh policy of Arabisation,
established Koranic schools in the south and
expelled Christian missionaries. In 1962 a civil
war began that was to cause destruction and great
loss of life among the southern people. After a
second brief civilian interlude, another military
coup in 1969 brought Colonel Jaafar al-Nimeiri
to power. His more conciliatory approach enabled
the fighting in the south to be brought to
an end in 1972. But a renewed attempt in 1983
to force Muslim law and custom on the south
led to a fresh outbreak of fighting. The endemic
north–south conflict in the Sudan and its
unstable political conditions have added to the
immense problems of a country whose vagaries
of climate hinder agricultural production, while a
rapidly expanding population requires more not
less food. Devastating floods in August 1988
made 2 million homeless.
In June 1989, after months of turmoil, a
military coup overturned the government and
General Omar Hasan Ahmed al-Bashir became
head of state and commander-in-chief at the head
of a Revolutionary Council of National Salvation.
Political parties were dissolved and many politicians
and professional people were detained. The
regime was ruthless in dealing with its opponents
and potential enemies. Attempted coups in 1990
and 1991 led to the execution of the army officers
involved, but protests continued. Behind the
army stood the National Islamic Front of fundamentalist
Muslims led by Hasgan Turabi. Islamic
criminal law, the sharia, was applied again.
Khartoum became filled with some 1.8 million
refugees, possessing practically nothing, and half
a million more were forcibly settled outside the
city. The civil war between north and south continued.
The non-Muslim south, African, Christian
and Animist (a religion which holds that both
living and inanimate objects have souls) was in a
desperate condition with widespread famine
added to the civil war and preventing relief agencies
from reaching the starving. The Sudan was
seen as a hotbed of terrorism. Osama bin Laden
organised from there the devastating simultaneous
car bombing of the US embassies in 1998.
The frontiers have remained porous for terrorists.
But the expulsion of Osama bin Laden who then
went to Afghanistan was an early indication of
change. As the Sudan entered the new millennium
Islamist extremism softened. Turabi fell
from grace and was placed under house arrest.
The Bashir regime was trying to lose its pariah
status. The regime after a decade and a half felt
more secure. Oil was discovered and exported and
provided badly needed funds for new technology.
The European Union now increasingly ‘engaged’
the Sudanese regime but US sanctions imposed
in 1997 still remained in place too. The key to
better relations is to bring to an end the war in
the south with its human-rights violations and
loss of life from fighting and starvation. More
than a million people have perished. The Sudan
has known only eleven years of peace in the five
decades that have passed since independence. In
the south the main rebel group, the Sudan
People’s Liberation Army, is faced with the stark
choice of famine and depopulation or an accommodation
with the north. Foreign pressure and
mediation secured a ceasefire in February 2003
with hopes for a more durable peace later that
year only for a new conflict to break out in the
Darfur region of western Sudan.
Libya is the richest country in Africa. In 1951 it
became the first African state to exchange colonial
status for independence. This was not because it
was advanced in any way. During the Second
World War, the Italian colonial territories of
Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were conquered by the
British Eighth Army. Britain’s main concern was to
ensure that the Russians would not secure a
foothold by claiming a share in the trusteeship of
the Italian colonies. So the provinces were combined
on independence with French-administered
Fezzan to form Libya, and the head of the most
powerful Cyrenaican family, Emir Mohammed
Idris, whose conservatism could be trusted, was
elevated to become King Idris. It was not an ideal
solution from a Western point of view. Britain and
Italy would have preferred a long period of trusteeship,
but at the UN the Arabs and their allies were
able to push independence through. Idris fulfilled
Western expectations and permitted the construction
of a huge NATO airbase on the outskirts of
Tripoli. No one dreamt of the wealth the discovery
of oil would bring to the desert kingdom or the
trouble it would later cause the West.
Libya began exporting oil in 1961. By then
Nasser had changed the politics of the Middle
East and, after Suez, British and French imperialism
was on the retreat. These transformations
affected the students and junior officers of Libya,
who were drawn to socialist ideas and to a revival
of Muslim values, at the same time as they felt
increasing antipathy towards Western, especially
American, military and commercial domination.
In September 1969, a 29-year-old officer, Major
Muammar Gaddafi, overthrew the regime of King
Idris. He had long planned the coup as a necessary
step to freeing Libya from foreign exploitation
and raising the Arab peoples to live their lives
according to the teachings of the Koran. All the
peoples of Libya, those of the oases as well as
those of the towns, should share in Libya’s prosperity.
Gaddafi expounded his ideology in his
Green Book. His ‘Third Universal Theory’
rejected the Western ideologies of capitalism and
communism, as well as the concept of the ‘state’.
The masses should rule through local people’s
committees, and life should be conducted according
to Muslim law. In practice Gaddafi was the
supreme ruler, though fellow officers in the
General People’s Committee may from time to
time have exerted some influence on policy.
In developing Libya economically, Gaddafi was
shrewd. In 1971 he led the oil-rich states in a policy
of forcing the Western consumers to pay vastly
more for the oil they had hitherto obtained so
cheaply. The riches this bestowed on Libya were
used for agricultural development and industrial
diversification. They also enabled Gaddafi to create
an Arab welfare state. Thus the oil income
brought considerable benefit to the people.
Gaddafi’s relations with the rest of the world
were warped by an uncompromising revolutionary
zeal. Foreign bases were closed down and the
Western military presence expelled. In the 1970s
and 1980s Gaddafi intervened in the ethnic civil
war in Chad, backing the northerners against the
southerners and occupying part of northern Chad.
The government in the south was saved only by
French intervention. But Gaddafi’s notoriety
in the West mainly derived from his support for
terrorist groups, ranging from factions of the
Palestine Liberation Organisation to the IRA. A
terrorist attack on a Berlin nightclub which left
American servicemen dead was followed in April
1986 by an American attempt to silence Gaddafi
for good by bombing his living quarters and military
targets. They missed Gaddafi but caused civilian
casualties. The intended ‘surgical’ air strikes,
using British bases, were widely condemned, but
Gaddafi’s support for terrorism became less overt.
Since the 1990s Gaddafi has moderated his
radical rhetoric. After many years he delivered to
international justice the perpetrators of the downing
over Scotland of Pan Am flight 103. Gaddafi is
well aware the way the wind is blowing; the
enmity of the US and the West can do great harm
to the country dependent on exporting oil. In
2003 Gaddafi accepted responsibility for the
downing of flight 103 and was ready to pay compensation.
Negotiations to lift international sanctions
were now initiated by the US and Britain.
Supporting terror did not pay. Gaddafi in the new
millennium has turned more to Africa, posturing
as Africa’s elder statesman, a champion of African
unity. The revolutionary fervour subdued, the
megalomania of earlier years was replaced by a
more realistic appraisal of the world. Gaddafi gave
up attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction
in 2004 and sanctions were lifted. The West
is now reviving her oil industry.
World History
