Ethiopia Goes on the Attack

With a little help from a strange assortment of friends

What has suddenly become the world's hottest war is raging in he Horn of Africa between the Ethiopian army and Somali guerrillas who are backed by their ethnic cousins in the Somali Democratic Republic, and the tide of battle changed dramatically last week. Five months ago, the Somali guerrillas had all but driven Addis Ababa's forces out of the Ogaden desert (see map), an Ethiopian region inhabited largely by Somali nomads. Now Ethiopia has launched a spirited counterattack to regain the Ogaden--and perhaps drastically upset a complex balance of forces throughout the entire region.

What has transformed the Ethiopians from losers into almost certain winners has been the arrival since mid-December of the most imposing arsenal of military equipment that the Soviet Union has assembled anywhere outside the Communist world: $900 million worth of tanks, field guns, rockets, radar, artillery, mortars and missiles. To help with the hardware, and otherwise shore up the sagging Marxist military regime of Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, Moscow has also provided Addis Ababa with a polyglot army of soldiers and technicians. According to Western intelligence reports, the roll includes 1,000 Russians, 3,000 Cubans (of whom 2,000 are believed to have been involved in last week's fighting), 1,000 or so troops from the radical Arab state of South Yemen and perhaps 2,000 East Germans, Czechoslovaks, Hungarians, Poles and Bulgarians (see box). In addition, the Ethiopians are still assisted by about 40 Israeli technicians, who help to service military planes and install and operate electronic communication and surveillance equipment.

It is the massive Communist aid that has made the difference in the fortunes of war. For weeks, some 25 Soviet naval vessels have been standing by in the Red Sea off Eritrea province, where the Ethiopians are fighting a civil war against three liberation fronts. The Russian flotilla is presumably there to protect a Soviet sea lift to the Ethiopian-held port of Assab. Meanwhile, the Ethiopian air force, probably assisted by Cuban pilots, has been conducting bombing raids on the Somali city of Hargeisa and the port of Berbera, where the Soviets had a missile and naval base until the Somalis ousted them last year. The offensive began last week when Ethiopian armored columns, spearheaded by Soviet T-54 tanks, poured from the strongholds of Harar and Dire Dawa. Air cover was provided by MiG-21s and American-made F-5s left over from the days when the U.S. was Ethiopia's chief arms supplier.

By week's end the Ethiopians were reported to have swept 20 miles to Babile and taken positions to the south and east of Jijiga, from which they had been driven last August. The Somalis admitted that their forces in the Ogaden were in a "tactical retreat," and on Thursday the Mogadishu government called for general mobilization "in the face of a threatened Ethiopian invasion."

"The first pivotal point," reported TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief David Wood from Addis Ababa, "will come if the Ethiopian thrust breaks through the barren Karamarda Mountains, which lie across the line of advance some six miles west of Jijiga. For thousands of years, armies on both sides have stood off invasions here. And it is here that the Ethiopians fled in the face of the Somali advance."

From Jijiga, the Ethiopians could easily sweep another 95 miles to the Somali border. The big question is: What will they do when they reach that frontier? One member of the Ethiopian junta told Wood: "I can assure you that Ethiopia is not going to invade Somalia." Nonetheless, the Somalis are fearful that the Ethiopians if they reconquer the Ogaden will not be able to resist the impulse to slice through northern Somalia to the sea.

Thus the Ogaden, a wasteland traditionally forsaken by all but a few thousand nomads, has become the center of an international crisis. The Soviet Union, having lost out in Egypt and Somalia in recent years, is making a high-stakes play for Ethiopia. With its Communist help, the Addis Ababa junta (known as the "Dergue") has a strong chance not only of defeating the Somalis in the Ogaden, but also of strengthening its position against the Eritrean secessionists, whose guerrilla forces control most of that province. The Soviet press has attacked Somalia as a bastion of reactionary forces, even though the country was until lately one of Moscow's most cherished Third World allies. Recent visitors to Moscow have included Cuban Defense Minister Raul Castro and Premier Ali Nasser Mohamed of South Yemen, which has become a refueling and staging point for the Soviet airlift to Ethiopia.

By the greatest of ironies, one of Moscow's associates in the Ethiopian adventure is Israel, whose friendship with Addis Ababa dates from the 1950s (if not, as some Israelis note, from the days of King Solomon's celebrated dalliance with the Queen of Sheba). The friendship is maintained today because predominantly Christian Ethiopia remains the only non-Arab power in the area, and the Israelis are hoping to retain a foothold there.

Saudi Arabia and Iran, on the other hand, are determined that the Soviets should not expand their power center in the Horn of Africa and are prepared to help defend Somalia against any invasion. Last month King Khalid and the Shah of Iran met in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and agreed on joint action in the Horn, including the sending of French-made tanks to the Somalis.

Through all this, the U.S. has been caught in something of a dilemma. It is anxious to show its friendship to the Somalis, but is also reluctant to provide aid while they are involved in their Ogaden adventure, which is, strictly speaking, an invasion of a neighbor's territory. In Washington last week, U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance said: "We have received assurances [from the Soviet Union] that the Ethiopians would not cross the border. I hope and expect that [these assurances] would be carried out." He added that the U.S. would reconsider its policy of not supplying arms to either side if Somalia was invaded.

Moscow's gamble is that Ethiopia, with its 29 million people, will prove to be a more valuable base than little Somalia (pop. 3 million).

That may well be true, but Ethiopia remains dangerously unstable; without the Soviet and Cuban iron grip, the Mengistu regime could fall at any time. In Addis Ababa, as many as 1,000 people have been killed since November in an officially sanctioned campaign of violence that government officials describe as "justifiable terror." Every night members of a counterrevolutionary group of so-called white terrorists are slain in the streets. One day last week a young man lay dead on a sidewalk near the city's busy marketplace; to his chest was pinned a note warning citizens of the dangers of dissent. I

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