It is in all probability a sheer coincidence that Mr. L.I. Mendelevich, the top Soviet negotiator with the USA on the question of the demilitarization of the Indian Ocean, should have come to Delhi in the wake of a shift in Ethiopia’s favour in its war with Somalia. But coincidence or not, this fact underlines an important point which policy makers in New Delhi must note even if there is little they can do about it. Ethiopia, as everyone interested in such things knows, is being backed to the hilt by the Soviet Union which attaches so much importance to influence in Addis Ababa that for its sake it has deliberately sacrificed its long-standings ties with Somalia, including the use of key Berbera base. And if the Ethiopians succeed in not only regaining control of the Ogaden region which the Somalis had earlier managed to seize, but also push ahead to capture Somalia’s coastline on the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, the Soviet Union will indirectly be in a position to dominate the southern gate of the Red Sea and the coast of Saudi Arabia. Surely this is a possibility which cannot be ruled out if US intelligence reports – that the Soviet Union has put 1,000 troops and Cuba 2,000 troops in Ethiopia – are reasonably accurate. That, too, is not all. For, it has been alleged that the Soviet Union is building an operations base at Aden on the southern entrance of the Red Sea as a substitute for Berbera from which they have driven out.
All this is not to suggest that the Soviet Union is being particularly interventionist and perfidious. The United States is not behind it in this regard. After all it has expanded the facilities at Diego Garcia and its two allies, Iran and Saudi Arabia, have extended substantial assistance to Somalia. Moreover, how is one to describe the sale in enormous quantities of the most sophisticated equipment by it to oil-rich countries of the region and the presence of thousands of American personnel – 20,000 in Iran alone – except as a most serious form of intervention? The point that is sought to be made is that neither the talk of demilitarization nor the likely agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union to freeze at the present level their respective naval presence in the Indian Ocean touches the heart of the problem, which is that the super-powers are not sparing any effort to acquire dominant influence in the Persian Gulf area on the one hand and around the Horn of Africa on the other. In plain terms, if the independence of the countries in the region is the objective behind the call to convert the Indian Ocean into a zone of peace, the present forms of intervention are far more dangerous than the expansion of their naval fleets by the two super-powers.
The Soviet Union has certainly suffered a series of reverses in West Asia beginning with the expulsion of its military personnel from Egypt in the summer of 1972. The denial of facilities at Berbera in Somalia, too, is a blow for it. But if anyone in New Delhi had been rash enough to conclude that it had finally lost the struggle, he would do well to wait for the outcome of the Somalia-Ethiopia war and President Sadat’s efforts to negotiate with Israel a settlement which he can manage to sell to Syria and Jordan in course of time. Ethiopia’s victory and President Sadat’s failure can transform the scene dramatically to the Soviet Union’s advantage and America’s discomfiture.