HORN OF AFRICA: Ethiopia Goes on the Attack

With a little help from a strange assortment of friends

What has suddenly become the world's hottest war is raging in he Horn of Africa between the Ethiopian army and Somali guerrillas who are backed by their ethnic cousins in the Somali Democratic Republic, and the tide of battle changed dramatically last week. Five months ago, the Somali guerrillas had all but driven Addis Ababa's forces out of the Ogaden desert (see map), an Ethiopian region inhabited largely by Somali nomads. Now Ethiopia has launched a spirited counterattack to regain the Ogaden—and perhaps drastically upset a complex balance of forces throughout the entire region.

What has transformed the Ethiopians from losers into almost certain winners has been the arrival since mid-December of the most imposing arsenal of military equipment that the Soviet Union has assembled anywhere outside the Communist world: $900 million worth of tanks, field guns, rockets, radar, artillery, mortars and missiles. To help with the hardware, and otherwise shore up the sagging Marxist military regime of Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, Moscow has also provided Addis Ababa with a polyglot army of soldiers and technicians. According to Western intelligence reports, the roll includes 1,000 Russians, 3,000 Cubans (of whom 2,000 are believed to have been involved in last week's fighting), 1,000 or so troops from the radical Arab state of South Yemen and perhaps 2,000 East Germans, Czechoslovaks, Hungarians, Poles and Bulgarians (see box). In addition, the Ethiopians are still assisted by about 40 Israeli technicians, who help to service military planes and install and operate electronic communication and surveillance equipment.

It is the massive Communist aid that has made the difference in the fortunes of war. For weeks, some 25 Soviet naval vessels have been standing by in the Red Sea off Eritrea province, where the Ethiopians are fighting a civil war against three liberation fronts. The Russian flotilla is presumably there to protect a Soviet sea lift to the Ethiopian-held port of Assab. Meanwhile, the Ethiopian air force, probably assisted by Cuban pilots, has been conducting bombing raids on the Somali city of Hargeisa and the port of Berbera, where the Soviets had a missile and naval base until the Somalis ousted them last year. The offensive began last week when Ethiopian armored columns, spearheaded by Soviet T-54 tanks, poured from the strongholds of Harar and Dire Dawa. Air cover was provided by MiG-21s and American-made F-5s left over from the days when the U.S. was Ethiopia's chief arms supplier.

By week's end the Ethiopians were reported to have swept 20 miles to Babile and taken positions to the south and east of Jijiga, from which they had been driven last August. The Somalis admitted that their forces in the Ogaden were in a "tactical retreat," and on Thursday the Mogadishu government called for general mobilization "in the face of a threatened Ethiopian invasion."