June 1947 - End of 1947

Chaos in the Horn

For East Africa, 1947 has been a year of rapid change. Following short-lived (and some might say illegal) attempts by the United Kingdom to grant independence to the occupied territories of Eritrea and create a united Somali state, states all around the globe funneled tons of materiel into the hands of the Ethiopian government. The Ethiopian Army quickly swelled to double its size, while the British quickly drilled local brigades of their own. As both sides rattled their sabers and Ethiopia deployed its entire army to its borders, it seemed almost certain that East Africa would soon be host to yet another colonial conflict.

In the end, Britain blinked. Saddled with crippling debt from the Second World War, a costly colonial war in East Africa was an uncomfortable proposition--especially when Washington started making rumblings about cutting Britain out of its upcoming aid packages. By July of 1947--no later than four months after the announcement of their intended fait accompli--the British had withdrawn entirely from what was once Italian East Africa. However, they left chaos in their wake. Shortly before their withdrawal was completed--after Ethiopian forces had taken on parts of the security duties in the region--a series of explosions struck the Djibouti - Addis Ababa railway in the middle of the night, destroying four critical rail bridges and viaducts on the stretch of rail north of Shinile. The Ethiopian investigation turned up no evidence (though it seemed likely it had been done by a group of Somalis), but the effect was the same: from July 1947 on, Ethiopia’s only railway was out of commission.

Though war was narrowly averted, the impact of those few months of tensions looms large throughout the Horn of Africa…

Ethiopia

World War II Rifles… For Everyone!

The British withdrawal was hasty and (deliberately) sloppy. In their rapid retreat from Ogaden, the Haud, Italian Somaliland, and Eritrea, the British left behind tons of equipment, ranging from captured Swedish Mausers to Lee Enfields to Italian Carcanos to, in the most extreme cases, Italian heavy equipment like anti-tank guns, anti-aircraft guns, and artillery pieces. Most of this equipment was quickly scooped up by British-trained forces in the area (the heavy equipment in particular was all captured by the Somali Youth League), but the materiel abandoned was so plentiful that thousands of rifles found their way into the hands of Eritrean and Somali civilians as well.

At the same time that the British were drawing down their military presence in the region, the Ethiopians were building their presence up. Buoyed by international support against the British fait accompli in Ogaden, the Ethiopians had no shortage of friends abroad, and those friends had no shortage of military surplus of their own. By May, Djibouti City was inundated with foreign weapons from the Soviet Union, the United States, and elsewhere. All told, somewhere north of 200,000 small arms passed through Djibouti City--to say nothing of the ammunition, the hundreds of trucks, the mortars, the grenades, and twenty or so pre-War tanks--and almost all of it chugged along from Djibouti City to Addis Ababa via the country’s only operational railway.

The amount of weapons given to Ethiopia was staggering. With only an army numbering only 28,000 at the beginning of the year (set to increase to 60,000 by the year’s end), the Ethiopian Armed Forces quickly found themselves with enough guns to equip every man three times over. On paper, Ethiopia was now the most equipped army in Africa--indeed, likely in all of the Global South.

In better circumstances, Ethiopia might have been more capable of handling this unprecedented influx of weapons. However, with all twenty-eight of the Army’s battalions deployed to the borders with Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, the task of offloading and securing these weapons--whose quantity vastly outstretched the logistical capabilities of the army to store and the bureaucratic capabilities of the army to keep track of--was left almost entirely in the hands of poorly trained, poorly disciplined, entirely green recruits that made up the other half of the newly-enlarged Armed Forces. Matters were not helped by the sudden withdrawal of the British nationals seconded to Ethiopian civil service,

A few entrepreneurially-inclined officers, keenly aware of the military’s single-minded focus on the borders, eagerly took advantage of the situation. It started off slowly at first. A recruit takes a half dozen rifles and deserts, selling them for several years’ wages on the black market. A few dozen rifles and a crate of ammunition carried out from the armory in the middle of the night to be stored at an officer’s family farm. A box of medicine pilfered from the back of the truck and given to their village. It grew in brazenness from there. Trucks of materiel that left stockpiles with no record of their visit. Matters only got worse when the Djibouti - Addis Ababa railways was knocked out of commission in July--it was far easier to lose trucks of guns than trains of them.

What became of all of these lost guns? The most common outcome was that someone bought them. It was well-known that the richest buyers were abroad. However, with few international contacts to sell to, and with no ports to call their own, making sales abroad was out of reach for most. Some amount of material made its way to Port Sudan and (in no shortage of irony) Djibouti City, where interested parties quickly scooped it up and shipped it off to parts unknown, but it was far from a majority, and the risk of getting caught by local authorities was large enough that most preferred not to risk it.

The second best markets were Ethiopia’s neighbors. Though flush with guns themselves due to the British withdrawal, the brewing violence in Italian Somaliland and Eritrea meant that everyone wanted guns. A good amount of weapons moved from Ethiopian stockpiles into the hands of interested buyers in both these territories, but was inhibited by the heavy military presence along the border. A cut of the profits was enough to convince some field officers to turn a blind eye to the gunrunning, but shipments were intercepted nevertheless. Worse, even though there was plenty of demand for guns in these places, money was often in short supply.

With international buyers out of reach, and with neighboring markets saturated, the best remaining option was to sell on the domestic market. Fortunately for the Ethiopian government, there wasn’t too much demand for illegal weapons in Ethiopia. For the moment, most of the country’s anger was directed outwards at the British rather than inwards at Haile Selassie, who was riding high off of his humbling of the British Empire. All he had to do was keep things calm at home by not pissing anyone off, and everything would be fine.

Haile Selassie Pisses People Off

Emboldened by his victory against the British, Haile Selassie embarked on a slate of programs intended to reform the tax base of Ethiopia and distribute land to the landless. In July, the central government redoubled efforts to collect taxes from the peasantry and the nobility. On its face, collecting taxes is not a radical concept. On paper, all landowners in Ethiopia were already taxed. What was radical was actually collecting those taxes from the nobility. Through a mix of political connections, social conventions, and plain old administrative incompetence, much of Ethiopia’s nobility either avoided the existing land tax or paid effective rates significantly below the legal minimum. Even when they did pay taxes, the costs of those taxes were often passed through to the tenant farmers beneath them. The fact that the Ethiopian government was now insisting on collecting those taxes was nothing short of anathema to the nobility.

A few months later, the central government added more fuel to the fire by announcing a new government policy to transfer 50 acres of land to any family who wanted it. Intended to alleviate rural poverty, the plan allowed any Ethiopian family to apply for a government grant of either 50 acres of ranchland in the Ogaden or government-owned agricultural land throughout the rest of Ethiopia (which would come with the added benefit of two oxen and seed).

There were a few problems. Leaving aside the logistical difficulties of this plan (fifty acres is a truly massive amount of land for a single family to work without mechanization--even two oxen can only plough about thirty acres of land in a ploughing season, and Ethiopian oxen are hardly the heartiest of beasts), some major social ramifications emerged.

First, applicants to the program were overwhelmingly northern and Christian--certainly the favored class in Ethiopia. The average applicant was an Amhara or Tigrayan who worked only a small part of communally-owned land in the country’s northern provinces. Second, as the program functioned by transferring land under government ownership rather than by appropriating and redistributing privately-owned land, the land grants were necessarily in places where the government owned land. Due to the historical land use patterns in Ethiopia, that happened to the south, which was not Christian. It should come as no surprise that these Christian settlers were not at all welcomed by the local population--especially considering that their arrival often displaced locals who had been squatting on the land themselves.

Nowhere was the arrival of these Christian settlers less welcome than in the Ogaden. The region had always been somewhat separate from the rest of Ethiopia. Tax collection was limited to a few agricultural settlements that acted as a network of garrison towns, but most Somalis were pastoralists, and only visited these towns infrequently for trade. The absence of the Ethiopian state had been particularly pronounced over the last ten years: hardly any vestige of the Ethiopian state had set foot in the province since the Italians invaded in 1935. The juxtaposition of that decade with the current state of affairs--Ethiopian tax collectors scurrying about collecting years of back-taxes and army regiments traipsing around the border--was hard to bear, but in time it would pass. The arrival of the Christian settler? That would not. Something had to be done to force them out and protect the ancestral lands of the Somali clans--and it had to be done fast.

The Powder Keg Explodes

Suffice to say, government policy in Ethiopia left a lot of people pissed off and eager to do something about it. Nobles wanted to protect their wealth from the clutches of newly-emboldened government taxes collectors. Southern tribes and Somali clans wanted to protect their ancestral lands from the new Christian settlers that were trying to take them away. Christian settlers wanted to defend themselves against those very same angry locals.

In better times, under better circumstances, these groups might have had no choice but to stew in their anger. Unfortunately for the central government, these were not better times. Guns were cheap and plentiful, and the army was far away, preoccupied with problems of its own.

In the latter half of 1947, arms rapidly proliferated throughout Ethiopian society. Tax collectors sent to collect from nobles found themselves politely, but firmly, prevented from doing their job by armed gangs on the nobleman’s payroll--a modern feudal retinue of sorts. At the same time, tenant farmers--sick of decades of oppression by their landlords--organized into militias of their own, launching sustained revolts against noble landlords throughout much of the country.

The violence took on not just a class-based dimension, but an ethnic one as well. Amhara and Tigrayan settlers arriving in southern Ethiopia had their farms raided, their oxen slaughtered or stolen, and their families murdered. Armed settler militias would then retaliate with reprisal raids of their own, targeting villages of Hadiya, Sidama, Kaaficho, and other southern ethnicities that were believed to be targeting them.

The most organized violence took place in the Ogaden. Flush with weapons from the British withdrawal and outraged at the return of the Ethiopian yoke, many Somalis have taken up arms against the Ethiopian state. The wildly unpopular settlement policies of the central government made fast friends of the settled, agriculturalist Somalis (who made up the bulk of SYL supporters during the short-lived British occupation) and the nomadic, pastoralist Somalis (who had been largely ambivalent towards the Greater Somalia project).

The political union of these two groups has greatly emboldened the Somali separatist movement in the Ogaden. While their activities started off small--killing Amhara settlers and stealing their cattle--their success made them bolder. Increasingly, armed nomads ambush the overstretched supply lines of the Ethiopian Army units stationed on the border with Somalia. Towards the end of the year, a few military garrisons came under quick hit-and-run attacks by Somali guerillas, who vanished back into the night almost as suddenly as they arrived.

The threat posed to the authority of the central government by the proliferation of these armed groups is clear. How to go about solving the crisis, less so. To make matters worse, the government finds itself in a precarious financial situation following massive expansions to the budget (such as increasing the education budget sevenfold and doubling the size of the army--a situation that is only likely to get worse should the government go through with its plan to occupy Eritrea at the end of the year. Haile Selassie and his government will have to tread carefully to handle these competing priorities.

Eritrea

Differing Visions

Indigenous Eritrean society may be broadly divided into two different groups. The larger of these two groups are the Christians, who have historically resided in the region’s highlands along the border with Ethiopia proper. The largest of the Christian ethnic groups is the Tigrinya, who are the majority population of the region’s largest city, Asmara. The smaller of these two groups are the Muslims, who reside in the northernmost sections of the Eritrean highlands near the Sudanese border, as well as along the coastal plain. The largest Muslim ethnic groups are the Tigre (who reside in the highlands around Akordat, Nakfa, and Afabet), the Saho (who are concentrated around Mersa Fatma), the Rashaida (a transboundary ethnic group, divided between Sudan and Eritrea, who live along the coast north of Massawa), and the Afar (a transboundary nomadic group divided between Ethiopia and Eritrea, who live along the coast south of Ti’o).

In addition to these two broad groups of native inhabitants, there remains a substantial class of Italian settlers. Numbering some 80,000 strong at the beginning of the Second World War, the size of this settler class has dwindled since then. Still, the roughly 40,000 Italians living in makes up somewhere between four and five percent of the region’s population, and is overwhelmingly concentrated in the areas of Asmara (which is about one-third Italian) and Massawa. Eritrean politics in 1947 are largely, but not completely, divided along these ethno-religious lines. The indigenous Christian population represents the vast majority of the pro-Union political movement, advocating the political integration of Eritrea into the Ethiopian Empire (though they are supported by a small minority of Muslim landlords, who believe joining Ethiopia would protect their current status). Conversely, the pro-Independence movement is broadly supported by the Muslim community (particularly the Tigre and Rashaida), a minority of Christians, and the Italian settlers. In total, it is estimated that the anti-Union movement enjoys the support of a thin majority of Eritrea’s population.

Britain’s Contributions

For the few short months between the announcement of Britain’s policy to support an independent Eritrea and the termination of that same policy, Britain made serious attempts to ensure that the soon-to-be-independent Eritrean state would be able to stand on its own two feet against an expected Ethiopian invasion. Chief among these efforts was the training to two indigenous infantry brigades, the Eritrean Rifles, who remained even after the British withdrawal was finalized in July 1947.

A combination of factors led to the Eritrean Rifles adopting a composition that differed from broader Eritrean society. The first driver was British policy. Driven by a combination of political savvy (the British were well-aware of the fact that Eritrea’s Christians supported a union with Ethiopia) and good old-fashioned racism (the martial race theory, still popular in British colonial and military administration, viewed Eritrean Muslims as better soldiers than Eritrean Christians), the British were heavily inclined to recruit Muslims over Christians. The second driver was self-selection. Given that it was readily apparent that this new British-trained military was meant to resist Ethiopian efforts to annex Eritrea, those who preferred union with Ethiopia (who were largely Christian) simply chose not to apply. The end result was that the British-trained Eritrean forces were majority Muslim (though with a sizable Christian minority) and staunchly pro-Independence, both among the recruits and among the former Italian Askari who were recruited to serve as NCOs.

The Italian Gambit

Ethiopia was not the only country eagerly awaiting the departure of the British. Although Italy had surrendered all claims to its colonies in the Paris Peace Treaty, the government still maintained interests in those colonies--ranging from a desire to protect Italians living abroad to naked imperial ambition.

With violence almost a certainty after the British withdrawal was completed, the Italian settlers took to organizing themselves with great gusto. Not even a week had passed between the announcement of the British withdrawal and the formation of the first Italian militia in Asmara. The first militia in Massawa would come another week later. While these groups were well-organized--many Italian settlers had military or police backgrounds--they were poorly equipped, using whatever weapons the individual settlers had in their possession.

Fortunately for the settlers, the Italian government, eager to flex its muscles after the humiliations of the last years, undertook a slew of efforts meant to empower the Italian community in Eritrea. An Italian blockade runner, filled to the gills with guns, mortars, and other military equipment, attempted to land at Massawa in the days before the British withdrawal. Unfortunately, the runner was forced away by the still-present British Navy, meaning that the Italian militias were, by and large, worse equipped than the Eritrean Rifles as the British departed.

Britain Departs, Guns Flow Free

On the eve of the British withdrawal, the British-trained Eritrean Rifles enjoyed the status of being the largest organized armed group within Eritrea. Numbering roughly 8,000 strong, the British-trained army, despite its hasty training, was easily the strongest group in the country. Under the leadership of a group of former Italian Askari led by the newly-minted Colonel Hamid Idris Awate, the group had an experienced (if largely uneducated) core of NCOs and officers to draw from, and remained confident in their ability to ensure the territorial integrity of Eritrea, and to force the Four Powers and the United Nations to recognize the dream of a free and independent nation.

While the Eritrean Rifles were by far the largest force, they were not the only force--especially as the countryside was swiftly flooded by guns left behind by the British and brought over the border by entrepreneurial Ethiopians. The Italian militias in Asmara and Massawa grew rapidly--first from seized British stockpiles, and thereafter from the blockade runners that finally arrived in Massawa.

The other big winners of the British withdrawal were, ironically, the pro-Union forces. With the Eritrean Rifles focused on protecting the border with Ethiopia, the pro-Union forces were able to secure more of the weapons than the pro-Independence forces were. These weapons were quickly concentrated into pro-Union militias.

War Erupts

The first shots of the War in Eritrea were fired on 5 August 1947, when a newly-formed pro-Union militia ambushed a company of Eritrean Rifles on the outskirts of Adi Ugri in southern Eritrea. Though this ambush was handily defeated by the Eritrean Rifles on account of their superior training, it was only the first of many such conflicts.

In the opening stages of the conflict, the Eritrean Rifles were convinced that their superior training and organization would allow them to crush what pro-Union sentiment existed in the country. The true threat, by their reckoning, was not whatever militias the pro-Union political movement might scrape together, but rather the Ethiopian Army itself. To this end, the pro-Independence forces positioned themselves along the border near Badme, Gheza Abada, and Affesi, trusting a comparatively small amount of their forces to control the pro-Union hinterlands to their year. This quickly proved a costly mistake: with the pro-Union militias growing faster than the Eritrean Rifles could have anticipated, their supply lines were under constant assault, rendering their position untenable.

By early September, Colonel Awate had given the order to retreat, taking as much war materiel as they could with them, and reform a defensive perimeter around the capital of Asmara. As they withdrew, though, they found themselves with a new problem. The Italian militias, newly emboldened by weapons delivered through the port of Massawa, had more or less assumed control of Asmara and its environs, sandwiching the Eritrean Rifles between Italians to the north and rapidly closing militias to the south.

While fighting back probing offensives from the pro-Union forces to the south, the leadership of the Eritrean Rifles engages in a series of tense negotiations with their Italian counterparts. Both sides were well aware that they could defeat each other. However, whichever force won the day would be left at the mercy of the pro-Union forces to their south, who were, though poorly-organized, more than capable of mopping up the battered remnants of either faction. Survival required them to cooperate.

And so the Italians and the Eritrean Rifles made a deal to join forces against the pro-Union forces. In some ways, this deal was unsurprising. Both the Eritrean Rifles and the Italian settlers had, prior to the start of this conflict, been staunch supporters of Eritrean independence. For the pro-Independence faction, tolerating an Italian minority within a free country was easier to stomach than Ethiopian domination. For the Italians, their influence would be infinitely greater in an independent Eritrea than it would be in an Ethiopian Eritrea.

With an uneasy truce declared between them, the Italians and the Eritrean Rifles turned their attention back south. September and October saw heavy fighting in and around Asmara as pro-Union forces attempted to seize control of the region’s largest city and shatter the supply lines of their opposition. Ultimately, they were forced to pull back at the end of October to regroup and reorganize, leaving room for the pro-Independence forces to regain some breathing room.

At the Year’s End

As the year draws to a close, the “front lines,” as they were, have not moved much. Heavy fighting over Asmara has resulted in the pro-Independence forces, allied with the Italian settler militias, maintaining control of the city. After the end of the Asmara Offensive, both sides preferred to marshal their strength in anticipation of a larger war next year, using their current weapons stockpiles, as well as what weapons they could purchase or gather, to bolster their militias. In the south, the Saho and Aussa nomads remain more or less uninvolved in the fighting.

Now that the Four Powers have finally stirred from inaction to officially award Eritrea to Ethiopia in the closing hours of 1947, it seems almost certain that the Ethiopian forces will cross the border in support of the pro-Union forces. The pro-Independence forces, for their part, seem unfazed by the declaration, believing that force of arms will prevail where the Four Powers have failed them.

Eritrea on 31 December 1947--front lines are less solid than they may appear!

Italian Somaliland

Anarchy Interrupted

Much like in Eritrea, the British took great pains to train an independent army (the Somali Rifles) prior to their departure from Italian Somaliland--four brigades, numbering some 16,000 strong in total. While these forces lack the same experienced leadership as the Eritrean Rifles, given that there had been far fewer Somali Askari in Italian service, they are well-equipped and decently trained.

Much unlike in Eritrea, the Somali Rifles and the Somali Youth League leadership enjoy complete dominance in Somalia’s military and political spheres. Where in Eritrea, the flood of weapons had resulted in burgeoning militias and a collapse into civil war, there was no comparable threat of social collapse in Somaliland. The British presence was mostly in the major urban centers, which were hotbeds of SYL support, meaning that most weapons were immediately funneled into SYL stockpiles. Since the SYL was the only organized political party in the region, and enjoyed the support of most everyone educated enough to meaningfully participate in the governance, they were easily able to take control of the levers of power in the cities, too. Some weapons made it into the hands of the nomadic Somali clans, sure, but none of them were particularly interested in trying to make a government of their own. Guns were a valuable commodity for inter-clan disputes (and for trading to Ogaden Somalis fighting the Ethiopians). Why waste them?

The Way Forward

The transition in Somaliland was brisk and organized. Outside of the major cities, one could be forgiven for not noticing the British had even left. The big question was: what comes next? Somalia was, for all intents and purposes, de facto independent at this point, with the President of the Somali Youth League, Abdulkadir Shaikh Sakhawudeen, serving as its de facto leader (supported by the party’s Central Committee). However, it was one of the poorest countries in the world, with a young and inexperienced political leadership. To make matters worse, though the country was de facto independent with the British withdrawal, its international status was still de jure undecided. With an agreement between the Four Powers unlikely to happen before the February 1948 deadline set out in the Treaty of Paris, it is likely that the fate of Somaliland will be passed on to the General Assembly to determine. It remains to be seen how the Somali Youth League will seek to navigate this predicament.

Summary

Massive arms imports into Ethiopia and a deliberate British policy of abandoning military equipment during their withdrawal from East Africa have resulted in the dissemination of hundreds of thousands of small arms throughout the region. In Ethiopia, this abundance of arms, combined with backlash against recent government policies, have resulted in the formation of armed feudal retinues, peasant militias, settler and anti-settler militias, and Somali separatists. Budgetary woes and the deployment of the entire military to the border regions has exacerbated the crisis. Furthermore, the Djibouti - Addis Ababa railway--which handles most of the country's export traffic--was taken out of commission by saboteurs of unknown origin in July.

In Eritrea, the sudden British withdrawal left a power vacuum that resulted in a civil war (if you can call it that) between pro-Union forces (who are mostly Christian) and pro-Independence forces (who are mostly Muslim). During the chaos, Italian settlers in Asmara and its environs formed armed militias of their own (with secret support from the Italian government). Seeking more to ensure their own survival than anything else, their interests are broadly-aligned with the pro-Independence faction, with whom they enjoy an uneasy peace.

In Italian Somaliland, the presence of a British-trained, Somali Youth League-controlled army and the lack of clear political alternatives results in the formation of a de facto independent Somali state, which calls for the unification of all Somalis in the Horn of Africa (including those in French Somaliland, British Somaliland, Ethiopia, and Kenya). While the region is for all intents and purposes independent, de jure it remains to be seen what the Four Powers and/or the United Nations will decide to do with this territory.