April 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Dangers of a Widening War: An Eastern African Perspective

Dan Connell is the author of Against All Odds: A Chronicle of the Eritrean Revolution (Red Sea Press, 1997) and Rethinking Revolution: New Strategies for Democracy & Social Justice, The Experiences of Eritrea, South Africa, Palestine & Nicaragua (Red Sea Press, 2002). This article is based on a talk given at AFSC in Cambridge, MA, on March 20, 2002.

The fighting in Afghanistan is not over, but the Bush administration is already moving rapidly to establish new fronts in the "war on terrorism." I am here to talk about one of these fronts--in Somalia--very likely the next one to involve US forces in the kind of active combat that we have been seeing in Afghanistan, though not on that scale, and to look at the situation in the surrounding region, known as the African Horn, that sets the context for this intervention.

The Horn of Africa is made up of the countries of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Djibouti, and Somalia. These states together with Kenya are also joined in a regional organization called IGAD, the Intergovernmental Authority for Development. And these same states minus Somalia were characterized as the "front line nations" in the build-up for US intervention in Somalia by US General Tommy Franks when he was in the region in March.

Conflict Already Underway in the Region

I want now to take you on a quick political tour of the main problems and conflicts already underway in this volatile but strategically important region--conflicts into which our nation's new war policy and the military operations that go with it will be inserted. I will look at what the US is doing now and is likely to do in the near future, and I will raise questions about our posture and about what underpins US policy more broadly.

To begin with, it is clear, as administration spokespeople have repeatedly said, that this "war on terrorism" will be a long, complicated campaign, defining this era much as the Cold War did for decades. It will do so not only in terms of active military engagement but also in terms of political and economic alliances and policies--covering the full panoply of international relations.

One aspect of this, as in the Cold War, is that structural problems and weaknesses within cooperating partners and allies in Africa and elsewhere are likely to be ignored in pursuit of common short-term objectives--not only human rights and democracy issues affecting segments of subject populations but deeper flaws and fault lines in the makeup and governance of the states themselves. Such an approach to international relations inevitably enhances long term risks.

Think about the many recent examples we have of individuals, movements and regimes of questionable character whom we have supported to achieve short-term results only to pay the price later for what they have gone on to do on their own: Manuel Noriega in Panama, Saddam Hussein during the Iraq/Iran war, Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, to name but a few. The list is spans every continent in which the US was engaged during the Cold War. Of course the most notorious of these former protégés is none other than Osama bin Laden himself, along with the so-called Arab Afghans whose broad movement we and our Saudi allies supported during the anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan. And there is no shortage of such characters (and regimes) in the Horn of Africa today.

Recent US Involvement

About the best you can say about US policy in the African Horn prior to September 11 is that there was none--or at least none that was clearly and consistently built around defined, long-range objectives. On the contrary, US policy in the Horn has over the past quarter-century been characterized by a series of disconnected and contradictory actions and alliances that together set the stage for what is about to happen next.

Most Americans associate Somalia with the "humanitarian intervention" in 1992-93 that climaxed with the death of the US Army Rangers during an abortive attempt to arrest Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed. This was the defining experience for US involvement in Africa at start of Bill Clinton's first term in office (though it is worth recalling that it was initiated by the first Bush administration). The impact of this disaster on American public opinion had a great deal to do with Clinton's abject failure to act in Rwanda to prevent the genocide there, and it created an obsessive fear of US casualties in all military engagements that followed, up to but ending with the one now underway in Afghanistan.

Sudan is remembered by Americans for the missile attack on the Shiffa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum in August 1998 after the destruction of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania by groups linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. Sudan was bin Laden's home base through the early 1990s. It has also been the site of one of Africa's most brutal and prolonged civil wars, with nearly 2 million dead since it resumed in 1983, after a decade of uneasy peace. Maybe you've read stories of what are called the "lost boys" from southern Sudan in The Boston Globe. You may also have heard charges that slavery has resurfaced there and that evangelical Christian groups are sponsoring highly questionable "buy-back" schemes to secure the release of individual captives. If you have followed these overlapping crises recently, you will know that US policy there, too, has been wildly inconsistent and for the most part ineffective.

Eritrea is Africa's newest nation, a former Italian colony that Ethiopia swallowed in the 1950s (with strong US backing) in a bid to give the landlocked empire access to the Red Sea. Eritrea won its independence in 1991, after one of the longest and most complicated revolutionary wars in modern African history. If you missed this remarkable story, you may have heard of the country during the horrific famine in the region in the 1980s or during recent coverage of its renewed war with Ethiopia in 1998-2000.

By way of contrast, our images of Ethiopia tend to be constructed out of the stuff of myth and legend--a phenomenon that unfortunately obscures as it much it reveals about the modern state by that name, whose current boundaries were only established at the end of the 19th century during the period known as the "Scramble for Africa." In fact, Ethiopia participated in that Scramble, conquering whole peoples by playing off competing European powers and expanding to almost four times its former size. But few of us think of Ethiopia as an "imperial" power, with all the baggage such a legacy carries.

Ethiopia burst into global consciousness most recently in November 1984 when televised images of mass starvation were beamed into our homes. Today, it is Africa's second most populous state after Nigeria, but also one of the poorest, and it now has over a quarter million soldiers sitting in trenches along its contested border with its former colony, Eritrea, awaiting the verdict of an international border commission.

The Post-Cold-War Power Vacuum

In its final years, the USSR steadily cut back its involvement in Africa before it collapsed and withdrew altogether. Once this happened, the US also scaled back its involvement (and its support for former proxies), leaving a sudden and substantial power vacuum. The result in Africa was similar to that in the Balkans, where fragile states and regimes long held up by outside powers could not stand on their own once the props were removed. Centrifugal social forces kept in check until then began to intensify, as demagogues moved to exploit them for their own ends. We know the results.

Consider the Horn of Africa, where the record is as mixed as anywhere on the continent. In 1991, after a 30-year fight against successive US- and Soviet-backed Ethiopian regimes, Eritrean nationalists, eschewing external backing, nonetheless won their independence. Once in power, the liberation movement quickly constructed a stable new centralized state, in which Muslims and Christians from nine distinct ethnic groups live together today in relative harmony. There are some problems there in terms of the stifling of dissent and limitations recently placed on the press and on the formation of new political parties, but these do not track along the fault lines I have been describing and do not carry the seeds for internal fragmentation or civil conflict.

In Ethiopia, an opposition coalition allied with the Eritrean nationalists ousted the Mengistu dictatorship in 1991 and set out to redefine the former empire along more ethnically egalitarian lines. But the results of this experiment are problematic. The new government, dominated by one armed movement from the Tigray minority in the north, has restructured Ethiopia along the lines of what it terms "ethnic federalism," giving Tigrayans pride of place in the new configuration and setting the stage for future challenges from rival ethnic constituencies. In this respect, they have taken two steps forward and one back, putting in place a structure that carries huge risks for the future. Thus, Ethiopia, which has experienced low level conflict throughout the 1990s, resembles an African Yugoslavia--structurally unstable, with the prospect of a violent break up in the event that weakness at the center combines with the rise of significant challengers on the periphery.

For its part, Somalia virtually disintegrated as a functioning state in 1991. Interestingly, this is the only state in Africa that is ethnically and religiously homogenous. But this did not prove sufficient to hold it together once the superpowers pulled back and the Siad Barre regime collapsed.

Today, there are two mini-states (Somaliland and Puntland) in the northern portion of Somalia that was British Somaliland during the colonial era. Most of the east and south, once Italian Somaliland, is ungoverned by any central authority.

Meanwhile, a promising nation-building effort is underway now under a group calling itself the Transitional National Government (TNG). It includes Somali elders, businessmen, military officers, representatives of civil society, and some warlords, and was set up at a conference in Djibouti in 2000 with the support of all IGAD states but one, Ethiopia, which shelters an assortment of rival warlords.

For its part, Sudan spent most of the past decade mired in an ongoing civil war that accelerated after an Islamist military coup in 1989. The war, which has raged off and on since independence in the 1950s, left an estimated two million dead and millions more displaced after resuming in 1983 and then intensifying under the new Islamist regime in the 1990s. The National Islamic Front, which gave bin Laden and his "Arab Afghans" sanctuary in the 1990s, campaigned to enforce policies of Arabization and Islamization throughout the ethnically and religiously diverse society, suppressing all independent organizations (trade unions, parties, civil society organizations), imposing severe restrictions on women, setting up ghost-house torture centers, and arming local militias, some of which were responsible for the reappearance of slave-raiding, in an all-out effort to secure a victory in the civil war. However, it was unable to do so, even with the added resources that new oil reserves brought once they were tapped for export toward the end of the decade.

Sudan is complicated; so is the opposition. The rebels are committed to a radical restructuring of the nation along secular democratic lines, not to the resolution of a handful of grievances. Yet the Bush administration's approach to this conflict, strongly influenced by both Ethiopia and Egypt, which have their own interests in a rapprochement with the Khartoum regime, seems designed to secure a temporary truce that does not address the underlying causes of the war or the character of the regime itself, while adding another tactical ally to the "war on terrorism."

The US has been busily shopping for allies and pursuing a quick fix to the crisis in Sudan, much like the current effort to attain a "cease-fire" in the Israel/Palestine conflict, without becoming entangled in the details of a comprehensive resolution of the war.

Farther to the south is Kenya, our main ally in east and central Africa. Kenya has been sinking ever deeper into the mire of corruption and tribal conflict since the end of the Cold War, and there is little prospect for improvement, despite the fact that the aging autocratic president, Daniel arap Moi, himself a shining example of self-aggrandizement in office, appears to be stepping down before the next elections.

There Are No Quick Fixes

I doubt many will remember the details of all the conflicts and contradictions I've outlined here--and I have barely scratched the surface--but that is precisely my point. This region is intensely complicated. Actions in one place impact nearly all the others. The present is shaped by the past. Nothing is simple, and nothing we may do can take place without having consequences.

This may be stating the obvious, but to be effective in any sustained campaign to rid this region of Islamist or other "terrorism" and to usher in a period of political and social stability, we need a deep grasp of the cultures, histories, current players, options and opportunities that lie ahead and behind us there. Above all, we need patience, which has never been this country's (or this administration's) strong suit.

US Policy in the Horn Today

The main thrust of US policy since September 11 has been to strengthen relations with Ethiopia, stepping up military cooperation there despite the fact that the conflict with neighboring Eritrea remains unresolved, while at the same time exploring the possibility of a thaw in relations with Sudan and assessing entry points for a direct intervention in Somalia.

US policy in sub-Saharan Africa is built around the concept of "anchor states," which are the main focus of our aid and diplomacy and which serve as hubs through which we seek to act on or otherwise influence events and actors in surrounding sub-regions. Three countries carry this designation today: South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya. Ethiopia long occupied a similar place in the pantheon of US allies and clients in Africa, but for the Soviet period, and it is now apparently slouching back into that position, though not yet officially tagged an "anchor." This has considerable implications for how we engage with the various conflicts and contradictions I have outlined.

The main problem with this approach is that Ethiopia is fundamentally unstable and subject to major fractures. It is thus an approach fraught with risks, the more so if future breakaway states or mini-states hold us responsible for the behavior and the staying power of the present ethnically-dominated regime in Addis Ababa.

Washington is trying with Ethiopia's encouragement to cool out the conflict in Sudan in an initiative that will not and cannot solve the problems that drive this war. I will predict to you now that this war will intensify in the coming eight to ten months, focusing mainly on the oil fields, which both the rebels and the government see as the key to victory--the former to shut them down, the latter to expand production, secure more arms for a final military push and wave the carrot of direct investment opportunity in front of US and European oil companies.

New Fronts, Old Questions

As to Somalia, US ships are now patrolling the Red Sea, and our aircraft are routinely in the air space over that country. Ground reconnaissance teams have also traveled in and out of Somalia in recent weeks. They are gathering intelligence for Washington planners to assess the situation and determine entry points for future military and political action. It appears almost certain that we are going back in. The questions are: when, under whose auspices, at what level, for how long, and with what specific objectives?

The bigger questions may revolve around what sort of follow-up we commit to and what we leave behind after we do whatever it is that we do both in Somalia and elsewhere in the region, and how all that kicks back at us in the future. Looking at how this is unfolding today, I, for one, dread to think what that may turn out to be. And so should you.

Previous Article    Next Article