Several years ago, high in the medieval fortress city of Gondar, once the capital of Ethiopian emperors, I found myself in a poker game with an unusual assortment of Americans — three Peace Corps volunteers and a pair of U.S. Army Green Berets. Somehow, the game, with its clashing Americans, has always symbolized for me the double, contradictory role of American influence and involvement in the Ethiopia of Emperor Haile Selassie.

On one hand, the United States supports the traditional, authoritarian regime of the Emperor. American money helps him suppress a regional rebellion in Eritrea without his worrying about the grievances that cause it; and American money allows him to procrastinate as much as he likes in implementing the reforms that might modernize Ethiopia. At the same time, the United States, largely through its influence in education, has catalyzed revolutionary forces that threaten the authoritarianism of the Emperor, and may someday transform Ethiopia. This second role is largely accidental, and many American officials do not recognize it. Ironically, one immediate sign of it is a periodic outpouring of anti-Americanism from young Ethiopians.

The American connection

Ethiopia is a mountainous though fertile land of 24 million people on what is known as the Horn of Africa. It has always been unique in Africa, a Coptic Christian enclave rimmed by Islam; an independent empire untouched, except for the brief Italian occupation before World War II, by colonialism; a proud, Hamitic nation. In some ways, Ethiopia has been hurt by history. Its escape from colonialism has meant an escape from the schools, roads, and other services that came with colonialism. Its long independence has hardened traditional, feudal ways and made modernization more difficult than in those African societies that collapsed in the face of imperialism. On any measure of development, Ethiopia ranks near the bottom.

Ethiopia is a logical choice for American aid-givers trying to help and influence the Third World. Unlike most other countries in Africa, it does not have colonial ties to Britain or France to make it eligible for the cream of their aid programs. For this reason, it was an early favorite of President Truman’s Point Four program. Since 1952, the United States has spent $300 million on economic assistance and more than $170 million on military assistance to Ethiopia. No other outsider gives Ethiopia more. With Liberia and Zaire, Ethiopia makes up a sort of American sphere of influence in Africa.

So far, the drastic cuts in foreign aid by Congress have not changed the AID program in Ethiopia. In time reduced appropriations may mean a reduced program in Ethiopia. But as long as American policy toward Ethiopia remains unchanged, Ethiopia is sure to remain a favored recipient of American aid in Africa. Other, less favored African countries will absorb more of the cuts than Ethiopia.

Some observers in Addis Ababa, in fact, believe that any future change in Ethiopia’s dependence on American aid will stem less from Congress than from an attempt by Ethiopia to look elsewhere. The new year began with foreigners bemused by imperial, feudalistic Ethiopia’s sudden friendship with China. After Emperor Haile Selassie visited Peking in October, 1971, China promised Ethiopia a long-term loan of $85 million. But Ethiopia has not drawn on it so far.

Ethiopia allows the United States to maintain its one remaining army base in Africa. As an American Embassy official said privately once, “The United States has paid rent for the base in the form of military assistance.”

The U.S. Army base is the Kagnew communications station in Asmara in northern Ethiopia. Built on a 7500-foot plateau a thousand miles north of the Equator, the station exploits atmospheric conditions that allow it to communicate with ease to the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Africa, and the Indian Ocean. Officially, its job is to relay messages to American diplomatic and military posts and ships at sea. In addition, it probably eavesdrops on foreign communications in the Middle East and the Russian-rimmed Black Sea. Army officers attach much value to Kagnew’s services and insist that these cannot be duplicated elsewhere.

The United States established the station during World War II, when Asmara was in former Italian Eritrea. The first formal agreement with Ethiopia, giving the United States a twenty-five-year lease, was signed in 1953. A more important and secret agreement followed in 1960. Under this agreement, revealed for the first time at hearings of a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee in 1970, the United States promised increased economic and military assistance for the right to enlarge the base.

“If we could get rid of Kagnew,” Senator J. William Fulbright asked at the hearing, “it would just be normal relations there the same as with most countries?” David D. Newsom, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, replied, “I think that is correct. Yes, sir.”

Anachronism

Kagnew’s importance accounts in great part for the patience with which the U.S. government accepts the inertia of the Emperor. Haile Selassie is a small, seventy-nine-year-old man with a limp handshake, an almost inaudible voice, and a walk so stiff that his knees seem worked by a puppeteer’s string. In the long reception room of his palace, the Emperor, with curled gray beard and crinkled brow, seems bewildered and lonely, receiving guests while his pet Chihuahua dogs scamper across the carpet. Yet a ruthless, shrewd, powerful personality must be hidden by his timid appearance, for he has ruled the Ethiopian Empire as Regent and Emperor for fifty-five years, a reign rivaled in history only by those of monarchs like Queen Victoria and Louis XIV.

Many American officials like to describe Haile Selassie as a great modernizer, but this characterization must be seen in perspective. In his long reign, the Emperor has broken the power of the nobility, changed the status of his people from serfs of feudal lords to subjects of the state, forged the beginnings of a centralized nation-state, and introduced Ethiopia to Western education. But critics maintain that he has been most zealous about reforms that strengthened his own power.

His style is an anachronism. A European on close personal terms with him said recently, “I dearly love and respect His Majesty, but when I see him stop by the hospital and hand out dollar bills to all those people outside, I tell myself it is time he went.”

Rebellion

The limit on the Emperor’s commitment to change shows in his lukewarm support of land reform, which has become the symbol of modernization to many young Ethiopians. He has allowed Parliament to sit on a moderate land-reform bill even though he has the authority to pressure Parliament into enacting anything he wants. “If this government can’t enact this kind of bill,” says a young, educated Ethiopian, “then what is the use of thinking of more radical reforms?”

The land-reform bill, in fact, has embarrassed the United States. Most other donors of aid believe that their agricultural development programs are endangered by Ethiopia’s traditional, almost feudal sharecropping system, which turns over a sizable share of the profits to absentee landlords. The impoverished tenant has little incentive to improve his farming. Because of this, the Swedish government has informed the Ethiopian government that unless Parliament enacts a land-reform bill by July, 1972, the Swedes will end their economic assistance program. The United States has made no such threat, and in fact, is going ahead with a new agricultural development program. In private, American officials concede that they would never follow the course of the Swedish government even if they agreed that the land-reform bill was vital for the success of their agricultural project. Although they will not admit it, the reason is Kagnew. If the United States wants to keep the army base, it cannot threaten the Emperor with a loss of economic assistance.

The rebellion in Eritrea is another illustration of the failure of American aid. The rebellion is rooted in colonial history. Unlike the rest of Ethiopia, the northern province of Eritrea was colonized by the Italians in 1890, who named it after the Roman name for the Red Sea, Mare Erythraeum. The colonial experience made Eritreans better educated, more efficient, and better skilled than other Ethiopians. Eritrea has the best roads and largest industries in Ethiopia. All this makes the Eritreans chafe under the domination of the less sophisticated Amhara peoples in Addis Ababa.

After World War II, there was much debate about what to do with Eritrea. The British administered it after the war. In 1952 the United Nations turned it over to Ethiopia as “an autonomous unit federated with Ethiopia.” But Emperor Haile Selassie dismantled the autonomy step by step. His government suppressed Eritrea’s political parties and arrested political leaders and journalists. In 1962, a cowed Eritrean assembly voted for full union with Ethiopia. Eritrea became a province subservient to the rule of the Emperor and his Amhara administrators.

In 1961, dissident Eritreans formed a secret organization, the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF). The ELF has followed the usual pattern of guerrilla tactics in Africa. The rebels mine and blow up trains, railroad tracks, bridges, roads, gas trucks, and oil depots. They also hold up buses and trains in the countryside, levy taxes in the villages, intimidate progovernment Eritreans, ambush police patrols, and try to hijack planes.

Sometimes the United States is the target of the ELF. In January, 1971, the rebels killed an American soldier carrying mail from Masawa to Kagnew. In the last two years, they have kidnapped, held, and then released the American Consul General in Asmara, an American Peace Corps volunteer, and a team of photographers from National Geographic.

The ELF has grown bolder in the last few years, partly because of increased support from the Arab countries, which have armed and trained the 2000 to 5000 guerrillas. This support, however, has cost a heavy price. In exchange, the ELF has turned more Muslim in its thinking and propaganda, sometimes calling for an independent “Arab ” Eritrea instead of an autonomous Eritrea. In the long run this could hurt the ELF, for Eritrea’s two million people are divided—half Christian, half Muslim.

Outsiders who know Ethiopia well say that the rebellion can be quieted only if the government puts more of the administration of the province in the hands of Eritreans, provides an economic development program to make up for the economic consequences of the loss of Italian and British colonial capital, and eases the repressive measures of the army.

But Ethiopia disdains these kinds of reforms. “Talking to Ethiopians about the social causes of the Eritrean rebellion is like talking to General Custer about the social causes of the Indian wars,” says a Western diplomat. For this, the United States bears part of the blame. By helping to create a large military establishment, the United States has helped lull Ethiopia into blinding itself to the grievances of Eritrea. Ethiopia employs much of the American arms and advice, including Green Berets who trained Ethiopians in counterinsurgency a few years ago, to meet the rebellion.

Nothing personal

American assistance has had a far different impact in the field of education. Ethiopia would hardly have a school system without the United States. The first 281 Peace Corps volunteers who arrived in 1962 doubled the number of degree-holding secondary school teachers in Ethiopia. Since then, 1500 Peace Corps volunteers have taught there. In the first five years, they outnumbered Ethiopian teachers in the secondary schools and made up from a third to a quarter of the faculties. For years, the Ministry of Education was laden with AID personnel. Haile Selassie I University, the only university in Addis Ababa, is practically an American enterprise, staffed heavily by Americans, most paid by either AID or the Ford Foundation.

The Americans do not teach rebellion, but students exposed to Americans absorb ideas that are revolutionary in a country like Ethiopia. Americans teach Ethiopian youngsters to think, to question, to examine, to create. They are admonished never to memorize by rote all that is put before them. They are taught to be skeptical.

It is no accident that the students are the only organized group in Ethiopia now openly questioning whether the Emperor and his old autocratic ways are holding up the development of Ethiopia. For three years, the school system has been disrupted by striking and demonstrating students who want a new regime.

The turmoil has been ironic for the United States. Although many Peace Corps volunteers sympathize with the sentiments of young Ethiopians, the students have often made the Peace Corps a prime target of their fury. In a mimeographed tract, for example, the university students insisted that “the teaching of English by the Peace Corps teachers is designed to effectively control the minds and attitudes of the youth in Ethiopia.” Until the Peace Corps started to cut the number of its volunteers in Ethiopia a year ago, there were nu¬merous instances of students roughing up and throwing rocks at their Peace Corps teachers. To the students, the volunteers were simply the most visible symbol of American support of the Emperor. Many students believed that the Emperor’s regime would collapse without the economic and military assistance of the United States. After pelting volunteers with rocks, some students insisted that they meant nothing personal.

The Ethiopian response to student turmoil has been as heavy-handed as its response to the rebels in Eritrea. On December 29, 1969, the Emperor’s Imperial Bodyguard stormed the campus of Haile Selassie University and shot and bayoneted students who had gathered to protest the murder of their student union president. University sources put the death toll at twenty. In May, 1971, police rounded up thousands of demonstrating students and kept them in detention camps for weeks.

In early 1970, Dr. Joseph Murphy, now president of Queens College, resigned as Peace Corps Director in Ethiopia, saying it made little sense “to continue in a country which cannot establish a social order with better answers to its problems than shooting and beating young people.” Many volunteers also resigned, and the Peace Corps was forced to scale down its program. But other American representatives in Ethiopia looked on the Peace Corps resignations and cuts as a peculiar Peace Corps problem unrelated to American policy in Ethiopia. They do not seem to feel that the American commitment to Ethiopia needs serious reexamination.

Such re-examination cannot come about as long as American assistance hinges on the Kagnew base. There is a good deal of disagreement about the necessity for Kagnew. Some State Department officials say that satellites or a new base in the Indian Ocean could take over the job of Kagnew. The Army disputes this. In a recent interview. Colonel Russell B. Jones, Jr., commander of Kagnew, said, “In the foreseeable future, I doubt that the job of Kagnew can be duplicated in the Indian Ocean, elsewhere in East Africa, or by Communications Satellite.” But until the United States abandons Kagnew, its relationship with Ethiopia will remain abnormal.