I Didn't Do It for You

by Michela Wrong

  It is hard to credit that strategic self-interest counted for quite so little in Moscow’s volte-face. With a population 10 times larger than Somalia’s, conveniently-positioned Eritrean ports–closer to the Middle East than Somalia’s harbours–its role as OAU headquarters and its history as a symbol of the anti-colonial struggle, Ethiopia was always going to be partner of choice for a superpower seeking leverage in the Horn. And the timing for a bold Soviet grab at greater world influence felt right. Defeat in Vietnam had left Washington on the back foot, nervous about intervention abroad, unsure of its place in the world. The sudden collapse of Portugal’s African empire had given birth to an independent Angola and Mozambique, led by Marxist governments that looked to the Soviet Union for philosophical guidance and financial help. From Tanzania to Madagascar, Benin to Congo-Brazzaville, Ghana to Algeria, radical African presidents were nationalizing industries and declaring single-party rule. The continent was on the turn, ‘progressive’ forces appeared to be triumphing. For a superpower pushing against what felt like limp US resistance, in search of berths for its submarines and landing strips for its aircraft, Ethiopia was a prize to be coveted.

  In justifying its U-turn to itself, Moscow could also dwell upon the emotional thread that had linked it to Ethiopia through the centuries. This was the one African country with which Russia could boast a long-standing historical connection. As far back as Peter the Great, the Tsars had fantasized about an alliance with Africa’s Christian kingdom, land of Prester John. In 1888, a foolhardy Cossack adventurer had actually set up a short-lived colony baptized ‘New Moscow’ on the Red Sea. During the 19th-century colonial scramble for Africa, Russian emissaries to the Abyssinian royal court had vied with Italian, British and French delegations for Emperor Menelik II’s attention. It is even said that Russian military tactics–urged on Menelik by an enterprising Russian captain–played a role in the victory at Adua. Surveying Ethiopia, with its peasant population mired in feudal poverty, its powerful Orthodox church, its decadent aristocracy and restless students, Moscow felt it was looking at a black version of its younger self. This was an African Russia, before Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin had got to work, screaming out for change. It was true that Moscow’s new friendship was being forged just as the settling of scores in Addis Ababa reached its bloodiest. ‘You would meet an acting governor or a major one day and the next day you would be told “they are no more”,’ remembers Shubin, who toured Ethiopia in October 1977. ‘They were dying one by one.’ But the grim reality of the Red Terror merely seemed to confirm the correctness of the parallels being drawn by Soviet analysts. During their revolutions, Russia and France had both experienced such purges, an inevitable part of history’s working, it was felt. However unappetizing events in the capital seemed, they had no doubt that Ethiopia was embarking on a fundamental process of structural change. ‘These were scuffles at the top. Whatever was going on in Addis, a real revolution was taking place in the countryside, where the land was being nationalized. You could feel it,’ insists Shubin.

  In the eyes of such men, Moscow was under an active obligation to intervene. Marx had taught his acolytes certain things were destined to pass. Lo and behold, in Ethiopia, his predictions about the rise of the proletariat appeared to be coming true. How could Moscow, keeper of Marx’s sacred flame, turn a deaf ear when a socialist new-born asked for help?

  ‘It’s difficult to understand now, but at the time many Soviets really believed that the battle between capitalism and socialism was inevitable, unavoidable and, in the final instance, destined to be won by socialism. Going against it would have been like trying to go against the tide of history,’ says Anatoly Adamishin, deputy foreign minister under Mikhail Gorbachev. ‘Do you know the joke about the husband who decides to murder his wife by screwing her to death? After weeks of constant love-making, she is looking very sprightly, while he is in a wheelchair, utterly exhausted. “Poor thing,” he whispers to a friend. “She doesn’t realize she has only days to live.” We were like that when it came to capitalism. “Poor thing,” we kept telling ourselves. “It doesn’t realize it’s doomed.”’ He gives a rueful laugh. ‘We entered Ethiopia step by step, in stupidity, but we had this conception we were fulfilling an international duty to help people struggling against oppression.’7

  It was clear that socialism’s eventual success, in a country as accustomed to one-man rule as Ethiopia, rested on the shoulders of one individual: the man baptized ‘the Red Negus’ by the media. Soviet diplomats who met Mengistu when he was still a major jostling for position in the Derg–a period during which he claimed to have survived nine assassination attempts–were favoured with what, in tribute to the Soviet Union’s most famous astronaut, was known as a ‘Gagarin smile’: the beaming welcome of a man who appeared to have a limpid conscience and nothing to hide. They noted the charisma, but were not fooled by the impression of sunny openness. ‘Mengistu was a very broad smile, with a very hard man behind,’ remembers Sinitsyn, who first met him at a 1974 rally. ‘He struck me as a man who had grasped his purpose in life, who knew exactly where he stood. He was very resolute, capable of taking difficult decisions. A man who, as the Americans say, would draw first.’

  Mengistu’s ruthlessness was built on profound insecurity. In contrast with Haile Selassie, an Amhara aristocrat whose self-belief was reinforced every time he looked in the mirror and registered his own aquiline profile and pale complexion, evidence of that prized Solomonic heritage, Mengistu had grown up nursing a clutch of inferiority complexes, grievances too deep ever to be assuaged. While he towered over the tiny Emperor–not a difficult feat–he was nonetheless acutely aware of his own lack of stature. Soviet advisers chuckled amongst themselves at his built-up shoes, his insistence on being photographed in splendid isolation. (‘If you look at the official photos, you’ll see Mengistu never allowed himself to be photographed standing next to anyone. He didn’t like the comparison,’ one former military adviser told me.) They laughed at the way in which an Ethiopian master of ceremonies always arranged for official handshakes to be staged above a table bearing a huge flower bowl, ensuring the resulting photo showed the visitor bowed and at full stretch. ‘He was a very small man, small physically and small morally,’ sniffs Adamishin.

  Mengistu was as conscious of his ethnic origins as he was of his height. He claimed to be half-Oromo and half-Amhara, a perfectly respectable pedigree in race-conscious Addis. But the ruling elite the Derg had removed from power never swallowed the explanation. Curling its collective lip, it noted his dark skin and negro features. Rumours circulated that he came from a backward ethnic group in south-west Ethiopia, that his father had been a slave, that he had had to abduct his beautiful Amhara wife to persuade her to marry him. ‘His lips are thick, his bones are African,’ ousted royal courtiers would mutter. In public, they referred to him respectfully as ‘the Chairman’, in private they called him bariaw (‘the slave’). ‘What is the slave up to today?’ they would inquire scornfully. Mengistu knew what was said. He had heard it all before, battling his way up through army echelons. But he never stopped minding. ‘Why do they hate you so?’ the ebony-skinned Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda is said to have asked him, on a visit to Addis. ‘Because I look like you,’ was Mengistu’s sour reply.

  A psychologist would have had no difficulty interpreting the bloodletting that accompanied his ascension, the appropriation of land and property and the toppling of a royal dynasty, as a bitter man’s revenge on a class that had consistently snubbed him. Humble roots and a massive chip on the shoulder were characteristics Mengistu shared with another socialist leader, a fact Soviet officials registered without following the thought through to its conclusion. ‘We often used to comment amongst ourselves on the similarities between Mengistu and Stalin, who as a Georgian also came from a minority and felt an outsider,’ says Sinitsyn. With time, the ominous parallel was to prove more accurate than any had foreseen.

  Was the early Mengistu really a Marxist? Or was
he merely an ardent nationalist who adopted the slogans required to win massive arms deliveries from his new friends? Looking back, one is struck by the extent to which both superpowers made the same mistake in their dealings with Ethiopia: seeing only what they wanted to see. In Washington, policymakers decided that Haile Selassie, a leader who believed himself descended from Solomon, had signed up to Western democratic values. Their Soviet counterparts eyed up Mengistu, a military man of sudden violence–capable of taking a pistol in his hand and personally executing a potential rival–and saw a leader who, however clumsy his grasp of the principles of dialectical materialism, could give shape to Africa’s first truly social revolution.

  All the initial signs seemed encouraging. It was an article of faith in Moscow that if a country was to undergo permanent revolutionary change, it needed a ruling Marxist-Leninist vanguard party. Mengistu dutifully set the process in motion, announcing the creation of a Commission for Organizing the Party of the Working People of Ethiopia. Addis Ababa became the first African capital to raise a statue to Lenin. Fidel Castro paid a visit. ‘I believe in such a thing as African socialism,’ Mengistu would tell visitors, a picture of Karl Marx prominently displayed behind his desk. He was received by Leonid Brezhnev at the Kremlin–there were to be over a dozen such get-togethers–and the two men hit it off. ‘My country is disposed to give you anything except the atomic bomb,’ the Soviet leader said. In return, the impressionable younger man offered loyalty and undying gratitude. ‘Every time, before I told him anything else, I would say: “Comrade Leonid, I am your son, I owe you everything,”’ Mengistu later told an interviewer. ‘And I truly felt that Brezhnev was like a father to me.’8

  While weaponry was always to dominate the relationship, cooperation extended into every sphere, just as it had with America under Haile Selassie. The two countries signed scores of economic agreements. Thousands of Ethiopians won places at Soviet universities, while hundreds of Soviet doctors, teachers, engineers and agronomists were dispatched to Ethiopia, filling the vacuum left by US Peace Corps volunteers. Moscow was granted the Red Sea access it required, mooring its warships off the Dahlak Islands; its military advisers took up positions inside Ethiopia’s forces. When sensitive topics came up for international debate–a UN call for Soviet troops to withdraw from Afghanistan, for example, or a decision to boycott the Los Angeles Olympics–Ethiopia voted loyally with the Communist bloc.

  But, as the years went by, Moscow began experiencing niggling doubts. It seemed to take an age–10 long years in fact–for the promised Workers’ Party to see the light of day. Officially, power then shifted from the Derg’s military committee to the new civilian body. In practice, the party’s leadership was made up of prominent Derg members and, just as in imperial days, all real decisions were made by one man: if the names had changed, the song remained the same. By then Mengistu, whose habit of driving past the hovels of Addis in an open-topped red Cadillac was commented on disapprovingly by the Communist Party paper Izvestiya, had already cultivated an oppressive personality cult. The traditional foibles of dictatorship–personal riches, easy women–seemed to leave Mengistu unmoved. Power was his aphrodisiac. Before official ceremonies, one of Haile Selassie’s gold-brocaded red velvet thrones would be sent ahead to allow Mengistu to survey his subjects in monarchical splendour. An aide would then recite into the microphone: ‘There is one man who matters in Ethiopia and that man is Mengistu. Forward with Socialism under Mengistu!’, not once, but 10, 20, 30 times. The dutiful applause just kept coming, for no one dared be the first to stop clapping. Aides who in the early days of the Derg had denounced the Queen of Sheba as a whore now floated the notion of Mengistu’s Solomonic ancestry: the attending implication of religious predestination needed no spelling out. A rumour spread that he was the illegitimate son of Haile Selassie’s brother–royal after all. ‘When I met him in the Kremlin for the last time he had changed a lot,’ says Sinitsyn, who was then working for the foreign ministry. ‘It was clear he had come to regard himself as above everyone else. He was behaving a bit like Haile Selassie, very nonchalant while his entourage bowed and scraped. And already, at that stage, he was beginning to be disillusioned with us.’

  Just as Haile Selassie’s insatiable demands eventually poisoned his dealings with Washington, Mengistu quickly developed military appetites so vast even the most extravagant superpower could never hope to meet them. Soviet and Cuban support had proved supremely effective against Somalia, forced to withdraw in March 1978. But Mengistu found the problems in the north, where the EPLF and TPLF were now coordinating their attacks on the Ethiopian army, exasperatingly difficult to eradicate. He demanded more weapons to finish the job. In 1982 Ethiopia imported $575m in arms, in 1983 $975m and in 1984, $1.2 billion.9 It was never enough. Aware that the unresolved war in Eritrea risked sabotaging Ethiopia’s revolution, Moscow had started pressing for a political settlement, even going so far as to arrange secret meetings between the Eritrean rebels and the Derg in 1978 and 1980. But the steady stream of Soviet supplies sent Mengistu a very different message. Why bother striking shabby deals when, with hardware such as this, he could simply obliterate the enemy? Resigned to the notion that the Eritrean war might ‘continue for generations’,10 he allowed negotiations to peter out. Moscow had fallen into a trap of its own making. Just as its extraordinary generosity once convinced Siad Barre he could seize the Ogaden, it now nurtured the belief in Addis that compromises would never be necessary, the war in Eritrea could be settled by purely military methods. The definition Oscar Wilde once coined for British rule in Ireland–‘stupidity aggravated by good intentions’–aptly described Soviet policy.

  Irritated by Mengistu’s constant requests, the Soviet Union was also aggrieved by his record on agricultural reform. To Moscow, the case for revolution had always seemed at its most morally unanswerable in Ethiopia’s countryside. But land nationalization, which forced peasants to sell at prices fixed by the state, had failed to sate Ethiopia’s age-old hunger. In 1984 and 1985, drought hit the country once again, and with it a famine more devastating than the one that preceded Haile Selassie’s overthrow. It left 1 million dead, presenting Moscow with a multi-layered embarrassment. Not only did the famine raise a question-mark over the suitability of collective agriculture to the developing world, it threw bleak light on Mengistu’s priorities, from the hefty slice of the budget lavished each year on the military to the $55m wasted celebrating the 10th anniversary of Ethiopia’s revolution. Humiliatingly, it was Western aid–both governmental and of the kind whipped up by pop star Bob Geldof–that prevented more Ethiopians from dying, not aid from Moscow.

  By the time Live Aid was blasting out ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’ on Western radios, the Soviet Union was no longer the unquestioning, eager partner Mengistu had first dealt with in 1977. In 1982, his beloved Brezhnev had died, taking with him the certainties of yesteryear. Brezhnev’s short-lived successor, Yuri Andropov, implicitly acknowledged that Moscow’s mission of exporting socialism to the Third World had produced decidedly mixed results. ‘It is one thing to proclaim socialism as one’s goal, and it is quite another to build it,’ he ruminated.11 Then, in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power.

  Extraordinary as it may seem today, the accession of the man who would eventually preside over the dismantling of the Soviet Union was hailed by Kremlin-watchers at the time as a sign of ‘business as usual’. Indeed, Gorbachev initially paid lip-service to tradition, hailing Mengistu as the Soviet Union’s most important friend in Africa. But the tone soon changed. At home, the comparatively youthful new Soviet leader spoke of the need for restructuring and openness. When it came to foreign policy, he challenged the very principles on which intervention in the Horn had been based. ‘It is immoral to throw hundreds of millions of dollars into the development of homicide when millions starve and are devoid of everyday necessities,’ he declared.12

  Mengistu was cast in a new and uncomfortable role. The high priest was moving on, leav
ing his protégé as sole defender of a faith now questioned by its founder. Baffled by talk of perestroika and glasnost, Mengistu called the Kremlin to arrange an appointment. ‘I needed to know what was going on. I went to Moscow to ask him what those two slogans meant. They were slogans that I didn’t understand–and if you ask me, the Soviet people didn’t understand them either.’ The new general secretary could not have been more reassuring. ‘I shall not shift one millimetre from Marxism-Leninism,’ Gorbachev promised the Ethiopian leader. ‘I am proud of our socialist achievements, and I always will be.’ Fine words–but Mengistu sensed, correctly, that his heart was not in them.13

  What bothered Gorbachev was not that the Soviet Union had consistently backed the wrong horses in Africa, propping up the continent’s most disastrous regimes. The brutal truth was that Moscow could no longer afford its self-appointed role as patron of the developing world’s Marxist experiments. To revert to Adamishin’s analogy, while rosy-cheeked capitalism bounced from strength to strength, the Soviet Union was strapped to its wheelchair, on a glucose drip, grey-faced and drawn. The Soviet economy was stagnating. While Moscow played the part of benefactor, sending Ethiopia hundreds of thousands of tonnes in grain, it was not producing enough to meet its own population’s needs. ‘Once, when I was on holiday in Havana, I decided to work out how much Cuba cost the Soviet Union,’ remembers Adamishin. ‘I calculated that for two months of every year, every Cuban could afford to live without spending a single kopeck, thanks to Soviet aid.’ He tried raising the issue with Andrei Gromyko, then his boss, but was brushed away. ‘I spoke to one of his colleagues. I said, “We have to stop this or we will be desanguinated.” He just said, “Don’t go there.” We were pushing others down the Socialist path while our own country was degenerating with every passing year.’ Watching Moscow’s deepening predicament, Washington hugged itself in delight. ‘There was an attitude of: “It’s their Vietnam, let them get bogged down in it,”’ a former State Department expert on Africa told me. ‘They’re stuck on the tar baby, good luck to them.’