Word: ethiopian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...tables again turned. In 1972 Egypt expelled the Soviet Union. In 1974, the Ethiopian emperor was overthrown by a Marxist-Leninist military group known as the Dergue. Saudi Arabia supported both Egypt and the Sudan with huge cash flows, helping both countries to break with the Kremlin. And in 1976 Carter became president. Shocked by Carter's "hands off" policy in Africa--specifically Angola, and now the Horn--and determined to keep the Soviets out of their backyard, the Saudis and Iranians pushed Sadat to seek direct negotiations with Begin, rather than concede to the American effort of bringing...
Militarily, the speedy windup of the fighting was a Soviet tactical triumph. For centuries, Jijiga has been protected against attacks from the west by the Ahmar Mountains and the Karamarda Pass. Instead of trying to fight through the pass, a combined combat force, estimated at 68,000 Ethiopians and 7,000 Cubans, simply went over the mountains. Light armor -tanks or armored personnel carriers -was airlifted behind the lines of the surprised Somalis by Soviet heavy Mi-6 or Mi-8 helicopters based at Dire Dawa. The Somalis had been pinned down by repeated...