Russians, Go Home!

The Somalis cut loose from Moscow

It was hardly a dignified leavetaking. A gaggle of Russians, the first of many such groups to run the same gauntlet last week, gathered in the hot, squalid main hall of Mogadishu airport to await an Aeroflot flight to Aden. Somali customs officials, who normally give departing passengers a bored wave-through, set upon the sweating travelers with malicious grins, demanding that they open every suitcase for an item-by-item inspection. At the airport bar, quarrels broke out as the bartender doubled the price of Cokes. A Western TV cameraman recording the pandemonium took an elbow in the ribs from an incensed Russian.

Thus planeload by sweltering planeload did the remaining 1,500 Soviet personnel and some 45 Cuban comrades depart Somalia, one of the Kremlin's oldest foreign-aid footholds in black Africa. As one group was preparing to leave, an American Air Force 707 landed, bearing a U.S. congressional delegation on its way to lunch with Somali President Mohamed Siad Barre. The delegation's long-scheduled arrival was sheer coincidence, to be sure, but the symbolism was unmistakable.

As had been predicted, the Somalis were throwing the Russians out. They denounced their three-year-old friendship treaty with the Soviet Union, and they asked the Russians to vacate the Soviet-built naval base at the Somali port of Berbera on the Gulf of Aden. Soviet military and civilian advisers were ordered to get out of the country on a week's notice, leaving just seven U.S.S.R. embassy employees in Mogadishu--the exact size of the Somali embassy staff in Moscow. Simultaneously, the Somalis broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba.

The break was all but inevitable in view of the massive support that Moscow and Havana have been sending to Ethiopia, the Somalis' enemy. The Somalis had known for at least three years that the Kremlin, for all its protestations of good intentions toward Somalia, was forging new ties with Addis Ababa. Then war broke out in Ethiopia's Ogaden desert last July between Ethiopian forces and the ethnic Somalis who live there; the insurgents are backed and armed by Mogadishu. After that, the Somalis quickly realized that, as one official puts it, "our brothers were being killed by bullets supplied by the people who said they were our friends."

The Soviets had been aiding Somalia ever since the early 1960s, helping to make it one of the best-armed nations in Africa, with a 22,000-man army, three MiG-equipped fighter squadrons and six tank battalions. Until the mid-1970s Ethiopia, under the late Emperor Haile Selassie, received substantial aid and arms from the U.S. But after the Emperor's overthrow in 1974 by a leftist junta, Addis Ababa's relations with the U.S. cooled. Despite their ties to Somalia, the Russians saw a chance to establish a presence in Ethiopia, which is almost ten times as populous as Somalia and whose ancient feudal society might prove more receptive to Soviet socialism over the long run than Muslim Somalia had been. Many observers think Moscow diplomats genuinely believed they could continue to have it two ways: maintaining close ties with both Mogadishu and Addis Ababa while tilting toward Ethiopia in the current war.

If so, they underestimated the fiercely independent Somalis. In late August, Barre made his final trip to Moscow, where he was snubbed by Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev and was refused the heavy weapons he sought. Barre then visited Saudi Arabia, whose leaders had been trying to woo him away from Moscow for at least three years as part of their anti-Communist strategy to reinforce moderate regimes along the Red Sea and on the Horn of Africa. Barre came away from Jeddah with a reported promise of $300 million; in return, he presumably promised the Saudis that he would get rid of the Russians in his own good time.

The result so far is something of a geo-political standoff. The Soviets have lost their primary Indian Ocean naval facility, but can probably find some kind of alternative--possibly on Ethiopia's Red Sea coastline. They have exchanged the friendship of Somalia for that of a far bigger country. But Ethiopia is an extremely fragile ally that is fighting wars in its northern province of Eritrea as well as the Ogaden, and is led by an unstable junta. Only last week the junta executed its second in command, Lieut. Colonel Atnafu Abate.

The West, for its part, expects to form closer but hardly client-style ties to Somalia. The U.S. is ready to resume economic assistance, after a hiatus of six years, at the level of about $10 million a year. West Germany, grateful for Somalia's help in its Mogadishu skyjacking rescue operation last month, will provide $17 million over the next 14 months. But neither the U.S. nor any other Western country is anxious to lavish much military aid on Somalia while it is still at odds with Ethiopia.

For the moment, the Ogaden war remains a stalemate, with Somali forces holding most of the disputed territory and maintaining pressure on the strategic Ethiopian-held towns of Harar and Dire Dawa. Most diplomatic sources in Mogadishu believe, however, that when new shipments of heavy Soviet military equipment already in Ethiopia begin to show up in the field, the tide of battle could well turn against the Somalis.

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