Word: ethiopia
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...slim lieutenant colonel with a sharklike grin named Mengistu Haile Mariam. An avowed Marxist, he was one of a coterie of officers who finally deposed Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie in September 1974. Today, at 39, he has emerged as the top man in Ethiopia's 60-member junta, largely by pressing a campaign of arrests and killings that rivals even Ugandan Field Marshal Idi Amin's considerable efforts in this area. Mostly, Mengistu's efforts have been aimed at half a dozen rebel organizations, including a full-fledged guerrilla force fighting for independence in Eritrea...
President Carter's emphasis on human rights clearly played a role in the Americans' expulsion. Only last February, after reviewing a State Department report excoriating the Mengistu regime for widespread abuses, the White House withdrew $6 million in military assistance to Ethiopia. Making the gesture a pretext for conclusively switching Ethiopia's allegiance from Washington to Moscow, Mengistu did not appear at all perturbed when the U.S. suspended shipment late last week of another $100 million in arms already pledged to his government...
...campus, in the Soviets' latest enterprise, is the Horn of Africa, the stretch of real estate that is strategically placed along the Red Sea routes vital to Arab oil trade (see map). There the Soviets are simultaneously cultivating a new interest-Ethiopia-while trying to remain on good terms with an old friend -Somalia. Since the two African countries dislike one another intensely, the Soviet effort is delicate work...
...aggressively, although the long-range benefits of this effort are not yet clear. With client regimes in power in Angola and Mozambique, the Russians have buckled a kind of Red belt of influence across the middle of the continent. Now if they can hold on to Somalia and bring Ethiopia into their orbit, they will have hooked a suspender onto the belt. Meanwhile the other gallus is shaping up along the Atlantic coast of Africa, involving Zaire, the Congo, Benin and Guinea-Bissau...
These twin projections of Soviet influence reaching northward alarm the Arab states situated above black Africa. "Angola yesterday, Zaire today, Sudan tomorrow," worries the prestigious Cairo daily al Ahram. What troubles the Arabs particularly is that if the Soviets can pull both Ethiopia and Somalia firmly into their orbit, they may successfully create an axis of influence along the African Horn that in time of crisis could give them control of the Bab el Mandeb Strait linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden...