https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/castro-was-a-false-liberator/2016/11/30/ebf9be1c-b718-11e6-b8df-600bd9d38a02_story.html?utm_term=.0a9fa38a8a19
Opinions
Castro was a false liberator
By Charles Lane Opinion writer 1 December 2016
Say what you want about Fidel Castro, in Africa he was a liberator. His aid to the South African anti-apartheid struggle will forever be remembered as a grand stroke of moral leadership, in great contrast to American policy.
That’s the theme of various sympathetic postmortems for the Cuban dictator, who died at 90 on Nov. 25.
Castro’s detractors express an “American-centric” view, the New York Times’ Pentagon correspondent, Helene Cooper, noted Sunday on “Meet the Press”: “The Castro that I grew up knowing as a child growing up in Liberia was a Castro who fought the South African apartheid regime that the United States was propping up.”
To be sure, it would be hard to exercise unchallenged rule over a country for nearly half a century without doing anything admirable. So stipulate that Castro’s Cold War-era backing of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, and his army’s war against South African troops in nearby Angola, belong on the plus side of history’s ledger.
Whether that mitigates Castro’s apologia for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, his alliance with, and expressed admiration for, the East German builders of the Berlin Wall, or his support for Moammar Gaddafi in Libya and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela — not to mention the disastrous results of communism in Cuba itself — is a thornier question, however.
Answering it would require broader examination of Castro’s Cold War record in Africa, to include the eastern regions of the continent, where Cuba intervened militarily on behalf of the Ethiopian dictator, Lt. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam, in the 1970s.
Mengistu participated in a successful military coup against the U.S.-backed Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, eventually seizing power on Feb. 3, 1977, by massacring his rivals in the officer corps.
Castro admired this bloody deed as a preemptive strike against “rightists” that showed “wisdom” and cleared the way for Cuba to support Mengistu “without any constraints,” as he explained to East German dictator Erich Honecker in an April 1977 meeting whose minutes became public after the fall of European communism.
Castro hatched a plan to steer Ethiopia into the Soviet camp in alliance with two Soviet-backed neighbors, southern Yemen and Somalia. However, Somalia’s dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre, balked. He saw the upheaval in Addis Ababa differently: as an opportunity to seize Ethiopian territory long inhabited by ethnic Somalis.
Somalia invaded this arid region, known as the Ogaden, in July 1977. Castro responded by sending 17,000 soldiers (armed and transported by Moscow) to save Mengistu and punish what was — as Castro correctly pointed out — a clear violation of international law by Siad Barre. Never mind that, to Somalis, Ethiopia’s borders were those of Haile Selassie’s defunct empire, which had split their ancestral land and enjoyed international recognition only due to Western imperial machinations.
At the time, President Jimmy Carter was pursuing better relations with Havana and even considering an end to the U.S. embargo. Cuban military intervention in Africa, predictably, made it impossible for Carter to pursue the opening. Castro didn’t mind that, either.
By March 1978, the Cubans had ousted the Somalis — and then stayed to deter Somalia (now armed by Washington) from trying again. With the Cuban forces watching his back, Mengistu wrapped up his bloody campaign of domestic repression, known as “the Red Terror,” and sent his own Soviet-equipped, Cuban-trained troops to crush a rebellion in Eritrea.
The last Cuban troops did not leave Ethiopia until September 1989; they were still on hand as hundreds of thousands died during the 1983-1985 famine exacerbated by Mengistu’s collectivization of agriculture.
Abandoned by Havana (and Moscow), and facing a rebellion, Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe in 1991; dictator Robert Mugabe, another close friend of Cuba, granted him asylum.
Today, of course, the Horn of Africa remains tumultuous. Somalia is a failed state, which not even 25,000 U.S. troops could stabilize in the early 1990s. In Ethiopia, Mengistu’s successors cooperate with the United States against terrorism, and the United States, in return, mostly tolerates their human rights abuses.
Looking back, it’s hard to see what lasting benefit, if any, Castro’s intervention achieved, though the sacrifice of Cuban blood and treasure 8,000 miles from home was certainly permanent.
What’s impressive, rather, is the senselessness of it all. Cuba brought no more order out of chaos in the Horn than the other, larger foreign powers — from the British Empire to Mussolini’s Italy to Barack Obama’s America — that have intervened over the centuries.
Perhaps Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa, the soldier who actually led Cuba’s troops in the Ogaden (and, later, Angola), could find a moral to the story.
Alas, this hero of Cuba’s African wars died in 1989. Fearing that the popular general could become a political rival, Castro ordered him arrested and tried on trumped-up treason and drug charges — then shot at dawn.
*Charles Lane is a Post editorial writer specializing in economic and fiscal policy, a weekly columnist, and a contributor to the PostPartisan blog.
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>From WP archives-March 12, 1977
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/03/12/castro-qaddafi-seen-planning-to-help-ethiopia-crush-rebels/2f3654f1-12a5-4642-96e9-c2f9a2238d2e/?utm_term=.18cbf17696e2
Castro, Qaddafi Seen Planning To Help Ethiopia Crush Rebels
By Thomas W. Lippman March 12, 1977
There is growing evidence, mostly circumstantial but still persuasive, that Cuba and Libya plan to help the leftist military government of Ethiopia in its struggle to put down secessionist rebels in its vital Red Sea province of Eritrea.
If they do, it will bring them into conflict with the Arab States of Egypt, Sudan, Syria and Saudia Arabia, all of which support the Eritrean liberation movement.
Cuban Primi Minister Fidel Castro just completed a 10 day visit of Libya as the guest of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, who has been developing close ties with the Soviet Union.
[Castro and Qaddafi, in a joint comunique, denounced "imperialist maneuvers" against the Ethiopian rulers, according to Granma, the official Cuban Communist Party daily, Reuter reported from Havana.]
In bits and pieces, a picture is beginning to emerge of growing Cuban interest, still apparently limited, in northern and eastern Africa.
Immediately after leaving Libya, Castro went to two countries in the vicinity of Ethiopia. Yesterday he conferred with leaders of militantly leftist South Yemen. Today, in a puzzling move, he reportedly went to Somalia, which has been involved in long-standing territorial disputes with neighboring Ethiopia.
Little information about the purpose of Castro's visit to Libya has been made available and diplomatic analysts here and in Tripoli have had little to add to the official accounts. According to these accounts, Castro spent his time visiting factories and model farms, seeing the "new Libya."
He rode in parades, toured the country and attended a session of the Libyan General Popular Congress at the desert town of Sebha where, according to diplomats who watched the spectacle, he appeared bored.
During Castro's visit, the rest of the Arab and African world was preoccupied with the first Afro-Arab summit conference and apparently paid little attention to Castro. The anti-Qaddafi Egyptian media, normally encouraged to report at length on signs of Soviet or other Communist influence in Libya, ignored Castro.
Yesterday President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, an old foe of Qaddafi, gave an interview to the official Sudan news agency in which he strongly criticized "the increasing Soviet intervention, through Libya, to support the Ethiopian regime which is savagely repressing the Eritrean revolution." He said nothing about Cuba.
The current trip by Castro however, reflects Cuba's interest in the area. So does a statement by President Felix Malloum of Chad, which has lost thousands of square miles of mineral-rich territory to a Libya land grab. Malloum said he was not disturbed by the amity between Cuba and Libya because his own country has excellent relations with Havana.
It has been reported recently that there are some Cuban military advisers in Uganda, though President Idi Amin has denied it.
There are also, according to reliable intelligence reports, Cuban advisers working in South Yemen, only 50 miles across the mouth of the Red Sea from Ethiopia's naval base of Assab, on the Eritrean coast.
Monday, while Castro was in Libya, a leader of the Eritrean rebellion said publicly that the Addis Ababa government was planning to call for Cuban help to suppress the movement.
In an interview with the Associated Press in Beirut, Osman Saleh Sabbi of the Eritrean Liberation Front said his group has "solid information" that the Ethiopian regime has asked Cuba for help. He said an advance contingent of Cubans was already in Addis Ababa to help the government in its efforts to supprjess the secessionist rebellion that has been going on for years in the province and that has reportedly made substantial gains recently against demoralized Ethiopian forces.
Calling for American help to prevent Cuban intervention, the Eritrean raised the specter of Angola and suggested that the Arab oil states would be unhappy to see Cuban military forces at the Red Sea. Anxiety about the security of the Red Sea shipping lanes, vital to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Sudan, has been in the forefront of Arab concerns recently.
The ostensible source of this concern has been reports of Israeli military activity off the Eritrean coast, but diplomatic analysts here believe the real target was Ethiopia itself.
At a summit conference in Khartoum last week, the presidents of Egypt, Syria and Sudan, now united in a joint political command that is hostile to Libya, stressed this point, calling the Red Sea on "Arab sea."
The rebels in Eritrea are considered Arabs, while the Ethiopians, whi annexed Eritrea in 1962, are not.
Ethiopia's delegate to the Afro-Arab summit, Ato Berlami, denounced this attitude on the part of the three Arab partners.
"There is a dream of making the Red Sean an Arab lake," he said. "The only part of the coast of that sea that is not Arab is in Eritrea, and the Arab countries want to put an end to that situation."
While he named no specific countries, he said that some Arab states that did not share this view of the Eritrean situation, apparently a reference to Libya. Ethiopia and Libya had already been linked by circumstance if not by design in their common hostility to Sudan.
The increasingly pro-Western Sudan is actively supporting the Eritrean rebels, and has been a bitter enemy of Libya since Sudanese President Jaafar Nimeri accused Qaddafi of engineering a coup attempt against him last July.
Officials of the Cuban embassy here were not able to comment on their prime minister's visit to Libya.
Received on Thu Dec 01 2016 - 12:15:44 EST