Middle East Research and Information Project: Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971
Egypt’s armed forces number well over 300,000 men, the largest in the Arab world or in Africa. Some two thirds are in the army, and most of the rest in the air force. Since 1952, the top political leadership has been drawn from the armed forces. Since 1968, there has been a “demilitarization” of the top political structures. A recent study calculates that the proportion of cabinet posts held by military officers declined from 35 percent under Nasser to 15 percent under Sadat.
Egypt’s external debt—the sums owed to other governments, private multinational banks and multilateral agencies like the World Bank—increased on an average of 28 percent per year under Anwar al-Sadat, compared to 13 percent over the previous ten years. Sadat’s decade also witnessed important shifts in the origin and structure of this debt, in a manner that paralleled—and to a large extent financed—Egypt’s political reorientation.
We now know that the execution-style death of Anwar al-Sadat on the anniversary of the October war crossing was the prelude to neither a coup d’etat nor a popular uprising. Government institutions continued to function within the established legal framework and internal stability reigned. The trial of Khalid al-Islambuli and his accomplices also made clear that the assassination was not the work of an isolated or demented individual. It was carried out by a group with clear religious motivation; they sought to eliminate the leader but not to overthrow the regime itself.
Israel invaded Lebanon on June 6, 1982, the fifteenth anniversary of the June war of 1967. Then, Egypt was the main Arab combatant state in a war that redrew the geopolitical map of the Middle East. Today, Israel is again redrawing the map, with Palestinian and Lebanese blood. This time Egypt has filed a formal diplomatic protest through its ambassador in Tel Aviv—the first such protest since the peace treaty of March 1979.
Events since early June, and specifically the Reagan administration’s complete support for and identification with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, accentuates the long-standing need to mobilize popular opposition to US policy in the Middle East. The possibilities for such efforts now exist to a greater degree than ever before. Polls show a majority of Americans oppose the invasion. Public attitudes at this moment are far ahead of the politicians and the media.
To the editors: This letter is in regard to your most recent issue on Iran, “Khomeini and the Opposition” (MERIP Reports 104). It includes interviews with representatives of the right opposition (Bakhtiar) as well as the left opposition. The latter, we learn, includes the Islamic left (Mojahedin’s Rajavi), independent socialists (Hezarkani) and liberals (Bani-Sadr and Nobari) — all of whom, we know, are affiliated with the National Council of Resistance. Are MERIP readers to assume that Khomeini’s left-wing opposition consists solely of the above? Or is MERIP suggesting that the above comprise the only “significant” opposition?
Bereket Habte Selassie, Conflict and Intervention in the Horn of Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980).
Fred Halliday and Maxine Molyneux, The Ethiopian Revolution (London: Verso, 1982).
Most Western commentators sharply criticize the current Ethiopian regime and the process that brought it to power. They argue that there has been no genuine revolution in Ethiopia, but rather a military coup followed by terror against civilian opponents, repression of the workers’ movement and refusal of self-determination to the national minorities. For critics on the right, such developments prove the turpitude of “Soviet surrogates.” For critics on the left, they show yet another military clique subverting a progressive mass movement.
February 27, 1982
On February 16 the Ethiopian armed forces launched Operation Red Star, a military offensive aimed at isolating the Eritrean opposition and rebuilding the war-torn territory. Ethiopian troops in Eritrea number 120,000, and they are backed by MiG 23 jet fighters, MI-24 helicopter gunships, T-54 tanks and heavy artillery supplied by the USSR. The government in Addis Ababa has made few comments on the war since the original announcement of the campaign on January 25. Mohammed Siad Barre, the spokesman hereof the Eritrean Peoples’ Liberation Front (EPLF), asserts that the Ethiopians have suffered almost 11,000 killed or wounded in the three-week old war.
In April 1976, more than 18 months after taking power, Ethiopia’s ruling Provisional Military Administrative Council (PMAC) finally provided an elaborated ideological basis for the Ethiopian revolution. The National Democratic Revolution Program, published that month, included many of the changes demanded by the radical civilian left: widespread nationalizations; rural and urban land reform; establishment of peasant and urban (kebele) neighborhood associations; a mass army; reorganized trade unions and other mass organizations. [1] The document also allowed for considerable devolution of authority and responsibility to the elected leadership of these new organizations.
I traveled into Ogaden with the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF) for five days in August 1980. We drove about 230 miles across open savanna in broad daylight, crossing the main road between the Ethiopian garrisons in Degabur and Gebredarre. On the third day we reached a town of over 10,000, a trading center bombed by the Ethiopians a year earlier. The merchants who catered to the nomadic population had set up shops under bushes and trees. A village committee, instigated by the WSLF, consisted of merchants, elders and WSLF militants. The committee, I was told, regulated prices and adjudicated local disputes. The WSLF Youth League had set up a school for boys and girls.
Fred Halliday conducted this interview in London in May 1982.
One of the more positive political themes that the exiled students brought back from their studies was a special emphasis on the need for the emancipation of women. A Women’s Committee operated within POMOA. As late as 1977, official state documents were stressing the double oppression of women, as workers and women. This was in contrast to the more orthodox theory of the Eastern European countries that became official policy in 1978. In the countryside, moreover, the establishment of peasant associations went together with the setting up of local women’s associations. Nearly all women had been integrated into these structures by 1980, and women appear to have participated quite widely in the peasant associations.
By the end of 1979, Mengistu Haile-Mariam, “the Chairman,” was being projected through the official media in a strong authoritarian light. He derived from his earlier years an exceptional acquaintance with the regional diversity of Ethiopia. Born in an Oromo area between 1940 and 1942, of mixed Amhara and shankala (a caste of blacks who were traditionally slaves) origin, he traveled as a child to different areas while his father was soldiering and then serving as a houseguard. Mengistu gained access to the Holeta military academy, where he was trained as an ordnance officer. He twice visited the United States for training purposes. There is no public evidence of his radicalism prior to the constitution of the Derg in 1974.
With hindsight it is possible to see in the course of the Ethiopian revolution a process of radicalization and post-revolutionary consolidation through which the Provisional Military Administration Committee (PMAC, or the Derg) established a stable new order on the ruins of the old. The direction of political and social change was by no means this clear during the first years after 1974. The pattern of revolutionary transformation involved a deep paradox, namely the conflict between the military leadership at the top and the various radical civilian forces below. At each stage of the revolution, the PMAC, aware of its own political weaknesses, sought to establish alliances with these civilian forces. Indeed it put into practice much of what the civilians were themselves demanding.
Political developments in Africa have lately slipped out of the headlines, but the confrontations brewing there could dwarf earlier conflicts in both military fury and political complexity. The US-backed regimes in Somalia and Sudan each face the possibility of sudden coups d’etat or civil wars. The Soviet-supported Ethiopian government is losing another in a long sequence of campaigns to stamp out nationalist guerrillas in the former Italian colony of Eritrea. Addis Ababa also faces ongoing revolts by three minority nationalities who are increasingly linking up with one another to topple the military authorities.
It is nearly three years since we devoted an issue to the Horn of Africa. As Dan Connell notes in his introductory overview, the dizzying geopolitical realignments of the regimes there only make more dangerous the internal, structural crises of national unity, political repression and overwhelming mass poverty. The recent publication of The Ethiopian Revolution by Fred Halliday and Maxine Molyneux provides an excellent opportunity to scrutinize some of these developments. We present, in condensed form, their account of events inside Ethiopia since 1974. This article, along with Patrick Gilkes’ contribution, provide some sympathetic comprehension of the revolutionary turbulence that has beset that country. Our interview with I. M.
Professor Menachem Milson, the Israeli “Arabist” who heads the West Bank occupation forces, compares the intensity and seriousness of the recent unrest there with the war of 1948. The Begin government, determined to root out all assertions of Palestinian nationalism, is trying to destroy those institutions that articulate the Palestinian national identity under occupation. These are the elected municipal councils and mayors, and institutions of higher learning such as Birzeit University. The mayors, representing major social and political forces, embody the support of the vast majority of the population for the Palestine Liberation Organization.
To the Editors: I would like to give a correct version of the interview I had with Fred Halliday in March 1980, published in MERIP Reports 98 (July-August 1981). Our conversation was not recorded. Halliday occasionally took notes, and errors and inaccuracies have therefore crept into the interview as published.
I conducted this interview with Manuchehr Hezarkani after his departure from Iran in October 1981. He is a medical doctor trained in France, and has been among the founders of three important Iranian political forces: the Confederation of Iranian Students, which led the opposition in Europe to the Shah in the 1960s and 1970s, the Writers’ Association of Iran, and the National Democratic Front, an independent socialist coalition established immediately after the revolution and driven underground in August 1979 after organizing protests against the imposition of censorship. Since this interview was given, the NDF has officially associated itself with the National Council of Resistance set up by Bani-Sadr and the Mojahedin.
—Fred Halliday
