Word: ethiopia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ETHIOPIA-SOMALIA conflict this past winter received more press coverage than any other clash in Africa. The Horn of Africa is undoubtedly a hot spot--not solely because Cuban mercenaries bolstered the Ethiopian regime's fight against the Somalis and Eritreans as the cover of Newsweek last week would suggest. But because the area is politically and militarily strategic for a multitude of countries--not least of all Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran. For many Americans the Horn has become yet another conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union staged on third world terrain. This impression alone...
...perennial Somali-Ethiopian tension has a lengthy history, but had yet to culminate until this year. As early as the 1960s, the Somalis professed their wish to unite all the Moslem Somali peoples, despite the fact that these expansionist aims would engulf not only the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, but also Eritrea, Djibouti (once French Somaliland, and otherwise known as Afars and Issas), and Northeastern Kenya. For this reason the United States then rejected the Somalis' request for military support and is not now extending large military support to President Said Barre's regime...
...Somali threat also prompted Haile Selassie's Ethiopian government to tighten its control over the self-proclaimed separatists in Eritrea--the half-Moslem, half-Christian province that is Ethiopia's only outlet to the Red Sea. With the U.S. refusal to supply arms to them in 1963, the Somalis accepted Soviet MIG's, artillery weapons and armed personnel carriers in exchange for Soviet rights to the port of Berbera. This led Kenya and Ethiopia--already friendly to the U.S.--to ask for a step up of arms shipments to them. The U.S. subsequently supplied both with obsolete Pentagon reject weapons...
While the U.S. found Ethiopia strategic because its port of Massawa bordered on the Red Sea, providing U.S. nuclear submarines with a friendly port, so did the Israelis--for different reasons. Seeing Nasser commit 70,000 men into what is now the Democratic anti-monarchists, fearing the further spread of Arab influence and ever aware of the importance of maintaining an open seaway from the Indian Ocean through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean, the Israelis sent police-military advisers to Ethiopia to combat the Moslem independence group in Eritrea. At the same time the rebel Eritreans received support from...
While Carter ignored the Horn, the Soviets moved to support Ethiopia economically as well as militarily: they poured $850 million into the country. The Somalis, fearing Soviet support of Ethiopia and seeing the possibility of expansion in the future checked, expelled the Soviets, forcing them to withdraw from Berbera. But the Soviets, anticipating the Somali move, had already established themselves at Aden, the port at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula of South Yemen, long considered by the British as the most strategic point on the Red Sea. The base is close to the Red Sea island of Yanbu, where...