Retaining Western Influence in Africa: The Ogaden War

Abstract

While FPD officials were still finishing their report on Switzerland’s Southern Africa policy that had been mandated after the Angolan War, tensions between the two socialist neighbours in the Horn of Africa were about to escalate. In an attempt to unite all ethnic Somalis in one state, the Somali army invaded the Ethiopian Ogaden region in July 1977, starting the only conventional war between two African states during the Cold War. The peasant liberation movements Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF) and Somali-Abo Liberation Front (SALF), trained, armed, and commanded by the Somali state, had been fighting for more than a year in this desert area. By the time they were joined by regular Somali troops, the liberation movements were in control of most of the Ogaden region, except for the bigger towns. In July 1977, the Somali army quickly conquered the rest of the Ogaden lowlands before starting to attack the towns on the Harar plateau in mid-August. Fierce Ethiopian resistance soon brought the Somali offensive to a halt and stalemate began.1 The Good Offices Committee of the OAU, chaired by the Nigerian head of state, reaffirmed its central tenet of the inviolability of colonial borders and called for the respect of territorial sovereignty, thereby diplomatically backing Ethiopia’s side in the conflict. Over the course of the following months, the OAU’s repeated attempts to mediate a negotiated settlement failed.2 This conflict, between two of Africa’s poorest states, would probably have raised little international interest, had it not been accompanied by a reversal of superpower alliances. In December 1976, the USSR and the Ethiopian PMAC had signed a military cooperation agreement. During a shootout in February 1977, Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam eliminated his political rivals within the Ethiopian regime and was elected chairman of the Derg. Exasperated by the Somali invasion and its government’s refusal to abandon its nationalist quest, the Soviet leadership increased military deliveries to Ethiopia in September 1977 and stopped providing Somalia with arms. In a desperate bid for Western support, the Somali head of state, Mohammad Siad Barre, abrogated the 1974 friendship treaty with the USSR on 13 November 1977, expelled