This is a Solidarietà Internazionale publication Oct 2000 (original article in italian)

Dangerous Games

by Alberto D'Angelo


It is a common and consolidated opinion, among the public as well as among observers, that the whole of the African continent is being subjected to devastating upheavals. Likewise, the saying that this is the "post cold war" crisis is widely spread. A grain of truth might exist in this saying, as often happens with platitudes, however it would be a wise advice to get away from general remarks and try to understand the tragedy of a certain country, of a certain area, of a certain geo-economic or geo-strategic axis as belonging to a unitary pattern, built on a critical and unifying basis, and not simply on an observational one. This is not a simple task, since it requires time, good will and ability to expose oneself.
The West African tragedy can be read from a geo-economic perspective – preciousness of resources and inter-capitalistic struggle for their control, with direct repercussions on ruling classes and factions. Furthermore the areas of Sahel, the sub-Saharan Africa and the inner austral area are victims not so much and not only of the International Monetary Fund's and the World Bank’s remedies, but also of a specific strategy aimed at re-building total dependence through the dismantling of the state, the distortion of the economic territorial vocations and their destination to be peripheral residues of the new international division of labour, inert reserves of produce to order, allowing the fall in prices to open growing spaces for the five world monopolies. However, certain geographical districts suffer from a geo-political peculiarity, a strategic prerogative handing them over to their historical destiny of death.

Not everybody knows, and those who know it hide the fact that the last Ethiopian emperor Hailè Selassiè for decades was the recipient of fifty percent of the money spent by the United States of America for the whole of Africa. Andrea Semplici recalls in "Nigrizia" – issue of July-August 2000 – how the International Monetary Fund interrupted its relations with Ethiopia in October 1997, giving that "embargo" as final. Things, however, are not like the Combonian journal says, because the IMF not only restored those relations the following year, immediately after the planned Ethiopian aggression on Eritrea – which along with Libya and Cuba, ill-treats and refuses strong powers – but did it, once again, letting Ethiopia be the major recipient of the large international community’s interventions in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, if it is true that strategy is a "science" and not the product of chance, it has once again made Ethiopia the pivot of a strategic axis which has its barycentre in the Horn of Africa extending over the Great Lakes and ending at the Gulf of Guinea. One day someone will tell the whole truth.

On the other hand if Sudan, which has been submerged with money and attention by the United States until 1989, the year in which a regime "giving comfort to terrorism" rose to the throne of Khartoum, is the object of renewed strategic interest on the part of Washington which ordered it to be bombarded, the application of a conventional style plan - USA or NATO aggression - requires sound reasons in order to be carried out. This could even lead one to believe that a Milosevic or a Saddam Hussein, far from being enemies of Washington, seen from the slant of a secret alliance, actually gave them their best possible services, by creating the conditions for direct military intervention – invading sovereign states or carrying out ethnic cleansing - by proxy or by the Atlantic alliance in areas of primary strategic interest such as the Persian Gulf and the lower part - the Adriatic Balkans - of the enormous energy pipelines that start in the Caspian, which so happens also to be on fire.

The Horn of Africa is the area of the most, overwhelming strategic interest in the whole World, in the classic sense of the statement, where strategic means drawn up for a scheme of military hegemony and power, justified by the plan to exploit areas of the planet that have high potential for raw materials, markets and global space.

The Horn of Africa extends along the Red Sea, dominating the commercial routes between the Mediterranean, the Middle East and the Arab world, where there are decisive reserves of world energy assets for many decades to come. Furthermore, the Horn of Africa is strategically situated, a few minutes by plane, in the "operative" area of the Persian Gulf. It extends on the eastern side of the Red Sea, the "Arab lake". It is bound by the origins of an Islam that has difficult internal dialogue, between the Arabian peninsula, the fertile semicircle, the Middle East and Persia. It continues along the Somali coast which looks onto the Indian Ocean.

In a world where even the most intimate recess can be controlled, in which satellite systems carry out completely faithful minute audio-video recordings, where control systems have divided up the planet - Echelon signal repeaters are situated in Italy - no-one is allowed to believe that something conspicuous can happen without the conspirer having a clear license or orders to do it.

In an apodictic case in the history of international law which is still taken up and studied as a negative topic, the United States stopped Eritrea from becoming independent after the World War, according to what was foreseen by the UN procedures on the subject of de-colonization. John Forster Dulles from the Department of State declared that "From the point of view of justice" the opinions of the Eritrean people must receive consideration, but "strategic reasons" imposed that the precious geopolitical Eritrean lot should be federated to Ethiopia, handing Eritrea over to a renewed dominion. Since then, it was at the beginning of the 1950s, Ethiopia started to be inundated with torrents of money, the reason behind this basically being the control of strategic Eritrean space, where the main operative unit that the US had outside their own territory, the Kagnew base, thrived. While the biggest military base was in the Mediterranean, Wheelus Field, in Libya and was eliminated by colonel Muammar Kadafi, the father of the Jamahiriyya, the state of the broad masses. To think of the truth of an inexistent border question - colonial and American maps confirm the Eritrean paternity of the "contested" territories - as the cause of the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea means giving into the narcotic element which the most classical "by order" operations has spread on the event.

The Arab world is in revolt and as a precaution the USA had to decamp its own military presence from Saudi Arabia in 1997, the Egyptian leader Mubarak did not allow a stable military presence on Egyptian territory on top of the consolidated manoeuvres in the desert. Therefore, the United States thought well to go back and occupy that delightfully strategic enclave of Eritrea which was once a special outpost of theirs. Yet, having just emerged from the longest African liberation war of the century, Eritrea did not intend to crown the suffering of thirty years of war by becoming the Puerto Rico of the Horn of Africa and refused the United States the possibility of setting up military bases – making us think of D’Alema’s government in Italy.

Following years of provocation by the inhabitants of Tigray on the Eritrea border, during which uncountable deportations and seizures took place and Eritrean administrators who had settled in their own territory were violently replaced, in early May 1998 an Eritrean military patrol commanded by high-ranking Eritrean officers was slaughtered cold bloodedly by troops from Tigray. A few days later the Ethiopian parliament, without exception, declared a state of war.

The third phase of war, in May 2000, threw off the mask of excuses for fools and revealed its real self. Thirty per cent of the Eritrean territory was invaded while famine and drought raged, there were over a million refugees out of a total population of three and a half million. This all happened after Eritrea had accepted the "peace plan" in February 1999, of the OAU presided over at that time by a chairman who was a notorious murderer, like the burkinabé Compaorè. All this while the Eritrean representative was thrown out of the OAU premises, whose constitutive reasons - Cairo 1964 - of intangibility of the borders inherited from colonialism Ethiopia has never underwritten. The OAU office is however...in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, a country which for decades has received fifty per cent of the money paid out by the USA to the whole of Africa. A country which has been made the main beneficiary of IMF intervention in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa even while it attacked Eritrea.

Indications from Arab and Middle East networks reveal the use of USA satellite recordings that guide the Ethiopian army, involved in a "large-scale conventional military ground attack" on the unprotected flanks of Eritrea.

Lots and lots of money arrives from Washington and Tel Aviv. More money reaches Ethiopia from the International Monetary Fund, since it is still special domain and diligent applier of the "structural adjustment" programs. From the Italian government of D’Alema, the most in favour of the Atlantic pact (Kosovo) of the post-war period, 240 million US dollars arrived for "development contributions" while in February 1999 Ethiopia was completing a large-scale offensive on the Badme front, a "contested" village that the CIA maps consider to be thirty kilometres within the Eritrean border. In arrival from Washington, Tel Aviv and Moscow - this time Havana and Tripoli are not involved - there are consultants, experts and protectors of the movements of the band of international criminals from Tigray - files are already being sent to the High Court of the Hague - , into the hands of whom Ethiopia of the "Great Tradition" has fallen. The USA sent war ships around the port of Massawa in the second phase of Eritrea Storm in 1999 and asked the Arab countries to enforce a total petrol embargo on Eritrea. The Libyan colonel Muammar Kadafi, of the Jamahiryya, the state of the masses, opposed this.

Eritrea that everyone had given up for dead, evacuated the lowlands and fought off the Ethiopian attack on the banks that no-one is able to take by land. The talks were not to be held at the OUA presidency in office, presided over by Bouteflika, the Algerian president, but in Washington at the State Department. Ethiopia remained within the occupied territory, which a phantom international community did not impose them to leave; there was not a word from the UN during last May’s invasion.

The media counterpoint that accompanies this "senseless" war throughout the world and in Italy cannot be ignored, instead it is a war full of clear and precise sense: it is of a coercive, geo-strategic nature.

The Somali situation is the classic cold war scenario, where the counterweights of the United States and the Soviet Union alternated disastrously until the latter disappeared at the end of the 1980s. The Soviet influence in Siad Barre’s country had already toned down at the beginning of the 1980s when there was a "complete switch over" of alliances which pushed the Soviet Union from Somalia to Ethiopia and the United states from Ethiopia to Somalia. Only the same objective remained in this quadrille game: Eritrea, the country lying along the final strip of the Red Sea, finding itself each time faced with all of the puppets of this farce, beating them incredibly alone, one by one.

Since the 1980s the US support in Somalia, the bridgehead on the Indian route and on the internal continental axis, has become stronger. Here too the domino principle of intervention must be recognized. The first item of expenses, among the figures on the balance-sheet is that of the army, for which Siad Barre’s putrid government receives 200 million dollars destined to the industrial-military machine. Then further large-scale intervention follow in terms of "aid", while the end of Siad Barre draws near despite the unconditional American support which will never be withdrawn, until the last day. When Somalia fell into the hands of the warlords the United States chose to renew its intervention by using the driving force of the United Nations. The UN started off quite well in Somalia ordering the Algerian Mohamed Saknoun to put the country together again. They must have started to try to do so, trying in some way to reactivate the vital nuclei of the economy, decentralizing food production and distribution and making an attempt at national reconciliation. The United States imposed the deprival of the authority from the generous Algerian commissioner reviving the classic method of military interference. Using the UN as a shield, the marines landed in Somalia with precise orders: not to reconciliate the factions and rebuild the country giving voice to the best components of civilian Somalia society, but to liquidate militarily Aidid, one of the opponents who made them pay dearly for it by ordering the bodies of the marines killed in gun fire to be dragged through the streets. The UN also paid, being identified closely with the USA who, however, acted independently. The game became really dirty and in 1994 the American army abandoned Mogadishu and Somalia after killing all hopes. The USA now sells arms to both factions, delegating its influence - a soft method - to the action of the OAU and some non-government organisations.

It now remains to be seen whether the recent election of a new Somali president will confirm the success of a traditional policy of American lieutenancy or whether something, as perhaps with Eritrea that is not defeated, may be slipping out of the hands of Malthus’ heirs.

…If something unpublished is to appear, on the tormented yet splendid lands of the Horn of Africa.