Airlift Culminates 17 Years of Secret Israeli Links to Mengistu Government

By Richard H. Curtiss

The May 21 flight from Ethiopia's capital of Addis Ababa by its strongman President Mengistu Haile Mariam briefly raised the curtain on his government's shadowy 17-year-old relationship with Israel. Among some 14,000 Ethiopian " Falasha" Jews airlifted to Israel during a 30-hour period the following week were several hundred Israeli military advisers, technicians and weapons specialists.

Many had held key advisory positions with the defeated Ethiopian defense forces. Based upon the familiar formula of trading arms for Jews, Israel's Ethiopian connection had eerie parallels with Israel's continuing secret relationship with Iran.

Both Ethiopia and Iran have had Jewish minority populations for more than 2,000 years. Iran's Jews trace their origins to the Persian conquest that freed Jews from their Babylonian exile in the sixth century BC. Ethiopian Jews claim even earlier descent from a reputed son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, King Menelik I, and the courtiers who traveled with him from Jerusalem to Ethiopia. An equally likely tale is that they are descendants of craftsmen sent by King Solomon to help construct for the Queen of Sheba a palace like his own. Some religious Jews identify the Ethiopian Jews with Dan, one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel. Others say they were Israelite followers of Moses who were stranded on the Egyptian side of the Red Sea. Anthropologists suggest a migration of Jewish tribes from Egypt or Yemen.

Another parallel between Ethiopia and Iran is that both countries went from close monarchical alliances with the US to extreme hostility, Ethiopia in 1974 and Iran in 1979. Although Ethiopia's Marxist revolutionary government and Iran's Islamic revolutionary government both severed all diplomatic ties with Israel, clandestine military connections were promptly resumed in both cases.

This was in accordance with a basic doctrine advanced by Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, of cultivating close Israeli ties with major non-Arab regional powers. It resulted in two periods of secret Israeli collaboration with Iran in inciting and arming Kurdish insurgencies against neighboring Iraq. It also included Israeli collaboration with Ethiopia in inciting and arming Christian and animist tribes in southern Sudan against the central government in Khartoum.

Ultimately, Israel became a principal supplier of military equipment and expertise to both Ethiopia and Iran, for use against US supported opponents, Somalia and Iraq. Self-perceived benefits for Israel included keeping potential Arab opponents preoccupied both in Africa and in the Arabian peninsula. Israel also profited financially as the middleman in large arms transactions, and the relationship facilitated the immigration into Israel of thousands of Iranian and Ethiopian Jews.

Behind Israel's public rejoicing over the sudden deliverance of the remainder of Ethiopia's Jewish population, however, there undoubtedly are mixed feelings. Israel may lose a foothold in the horn of Africa that was a matter of deep concern to Arab states in the area. Even Egypt, although it is at peace with Israel, feared that the Israelis were plotting with Mengistu to break up Sudan and eventually divert some Nile waters away from Egypt.

As for the Falashas, they could not have arrived at a worse time for Israel. Some members of the first wave of arrivals in 1984 and 1985 are still in relocation centers. Others complain that they live in substandard housing in remote "development towns" or West Bank settlements that they would not have chosen for themselves.

Immigrants Loved But Not Liked

"The problem with this country is that it loves immigrants but doesn't like them very much, " explains Rahamin Elazar, director of Radio Israel's Amharic language service and one of the first Ethiopian Jews to arrive. " They call people to come here and are happy when we come, but they have no facilities for us. So we fall into the hands of a very complicated bureaucracy that doesn't do its work properly."

Now, swamped by waves of Soviet Jewish immigrants for whom they seem unable to find either housing or jobs, Israeli authorities have little to offer newcomers. By contrast, before the current cycle of Ethiopian drought and civil war-induced famine, most of the Ethiopian Jews lived productively as blacksmiths, potters, weavers and small farmers in towns and villages in Gondar province in Ethiopia's northwestern interior.

Most would still be there if Israeli and American Jewish organizers had not induced them to leave their homes and assemble in Addis Ababa to await transport to Israel. After months of waiting, while Mengistu allowed, at most, a few hundred a month to depart, and now an arrival en masse in a country utterly unprepared to receive them, many may soon wish they had never encountered their coreligionists from abroad.

The 41-year-old Elazar, who makes fundraising trips to the United States for the National Association of Ethiopian Jews, believes the first modern encounter between European and Ethiopian Jews took place in 1862. That year, he says, a French professor from the Sorbonne named Joseph Halevi visited Ethiopia. There he met an Ethiopian who, upon hearing Halevi was Jewish, told him, "You can't be a Jew. There are no white Jews. "

From this contact, Elazar says, European and Ethiopian Jewry first learned of each other. A century later, Elazar repeated the experience personally when, as a young man in Ethiopia, he heard three tourists speaking in a foreign tongue that he recognized. He approached them and said, "Shalom."

Surprised that an Ethiopian recognized spoken Hebrew, the three Israelis asked, "Who are you?"

"I'm a Jew," Elazar told them.

"That's impossible," the Israelis replied.

"There are no black Jews."

The matter still perplexes many Jews in Israel, where some development towns have refused to accept more than their "quota" of the Ethiopians, and where residents in many apartment houses are said to conspire to keep out Ethiopians, or to find other housing for themselves when the Falashas arrive. The word Falasha is used pejoratively in Ethiopia, and means "strangers. " The Ethiopians, therefore, refer to themselves as "Beta Yisrael" (House of Israel).

Between October 1984 and March 1985, some 8,000 Ethiopian Jews were airlifted secretly from refugee camps in Sudan to Israel. Dubbed "Operation Moses," the airlift was funded by American Jewish organizations and facilitated by US officials in Sudan, with the silent concurrence of some Sudanese governmental authorities. It was halted by an embarrassed Sudanese government, however, when one of the American Jews involved wrote about it to raise funds in the US.

In the aftermath, Sudanese-US relations cooled permanently, and the sudden arrival of such a large number of Jews from Africa created problems within Israel. Claiming that the Falashas were not really Jewish, some of the orthodox rabbinical authorities in Israel demanded that they undergo religious instruction and "conversion" in order to qualify for Israeli nationality and in order to marry. (There is no civil marriage in Israel.)

Like most such problems in Israel, it has never been fully resolved. The Sephardi chief rabbi accepted the Falashas as Jews in 1973. The Ashkenazi chief rabbi does not accept them to this day. At the beginning, the "rescue" of the Falashas seemed more popular with American Jews than with some of the Israelis themselves. The latter have been heard to speculate that their American coreligionists seized upon the project so enthusiastically to offset the racist image created by Israel's military and economic dealings with the apartheid regime in South Africa, and thereby to lessen Black-Jewish tensions in the United States.

Surprisingly, "Operation Moses" engendered few problems in Ethiopia itself. Almost nothing about it was reported in the press, under tight control since 1974. That was the year when a junta of leftist army officers called the "Dergue" seized control of the government and placed the aging and virtually senile Emperor Haile Selassie under house arrest until he died.

In 1977 one of the officers, Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, emerged as Ethiopia's strongman. He had already engineered the execution of 60 members of the former emperor's household and government. Now, during a palace meeting, he personally killed five of his colleagues and political rivals on the ruling council with a revolver.

Mengistu imposed his own Workers Party of Ethiopia and a Marxist-Leninist structure on all levels of Ethiopia's feudal society, bringing both manufacturing and the country's agriculture to a near halt. After a visit to Moscow, the dictator also switched foreign patrons.

The Soviet Union had been supporting Somalia in a war against Ethiopia over the Ogaden province. In return, Somalia permitted Soviet navy vessels to use Somali port facilities on the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. The Soviets concluded, however, that Ethiopia, which presently has a population estimated at 55 million, was more valuable than sparsely populated Somalia, a member of the Arab League.

The Soviets began an arms supply to Ethiopia which, between 1977 and 1990 when their mutual assistance treaty expired, totaled some $12 billion in military assistance. Meanwhile, as the war claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, the US switched its support to Somalia—in return for the use of port facilities by US naval vessels.

In 1979, Colonel Mengistu initiated the red terror" in which, according to Amnesty International, 10,000 professionals, intellectuals, and other potential opponents of Mengistu-decreed socialism were killed. Bodies of some of the victims were exhibited on television. In the capital, young men of families suspected of opposition or living in neighborhoods considered disloyal were seized, tortured and killed, and their bodies dumped in main streets and squares.

In 1984 and 1985, drought further reduced crop yields, already weakened by the collectivist displacements and a secessionist rebellion that had continued since 1960 in the northern province of Eritrea. As famine swept through Ethiopia's interior, claiming more than a million lives, refugees poured into southern Sudan. That is when the Israeli airlift of the Ethiopian Jews among the refugees began.

Later, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the withdrawal of Soviet forces back into an economically and politically disintegrating Soviet Union, the Soviets ceased to supply arms or petroleum on credit to Ethiopia. Mengistu's tottering Marxist government turned for help to Israel. Many Israeli military and civilian technicians had remained in Ethiopia after its break with the US, and had been working side by side with Soviet military experts, even while US advisers were working with opposing Somali forces.

A Mengistu half-brother, Kassa Kabede, who had been educated at an Israeli university and spoke Hebrew, was put in charge of increasing military and political contacts with Israel. Diplomatic relations were restored in 1989, and Israel sent both arms and military advisers to help Ethiopia repress the Eritrean rebellion.

Ethiopia's population is about 40 percent Christian and 40 percent Muslim, but the leadership has been largely Christian. Eritrea's population of more than 2.5 million people also is evenly divided between Christians and Muslims, and much of the leadership of the Eritrean Popular Liberation Front also is Christian. Israel apparently justified its aid in fighting the Eritrean secessionists on the basis that they maintained offices in Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Damascus and Tripoli, and also drew financial support from Saudi Arabia. Therefore, after winning independence, they could be expected to be a pro-Arab state.

Although Israel sought to keep its burgeoning relationship with Marxist Ethiopia hidden, former US President Jimmy Carter revealed one facet of it in December 1989. Returning from an attempt to mediate peace in the Horn of Africa, Carter charged at a news conference that Israel had violated US law by selling cluster bombs to the Ethiopian government for use against the Eritrean rebels.

The cluster bombs could have been American-made and delivered to Israel before 1982, when the US banned further export of the deadly weapons to Israel on grounds it had used them for offensive purposes in Lebanon. Since then, Israel has begun to make its own cluster bombs, but export of these, too, is illegal if they are based upon US technology.

Carter refused to elaborate on his charges, obviously based upon briefings by Western diplomats, but US officials in Washington speculated privately that Israel had delivered the cluster bombs to Ethiopia through a Chilean manufacturer.

Israel, without denying that it had sent such weapons to Ethiopia, said there would be no more shipments. Meanwhile, the Mengistu government allowed a gradual emigration of some 3,300 additional Ethiopian Jews to Israel, bringing the total before the current airlift to more than 20,000.

As his troops suffered increasing losses on the battlefield, Mengistu began seizing tens of thousands of peasant boys under 16 to fill the dwindling ranks of his army, and stepped up his savage treatment of political opponents. After a group of military officers sought to seize power while the dictator was on a visit to East Germany, Mengistu returned and executed 12 high-ranking officers and an undetermined number of their followers.

That action shattered whatever fighting spirit remained in his conscript army. Its soldiers began surrendering in such numbers that the Eritreans and other rebels couldn't feed them. They simply disarmed their prisoners and sent them back to their villages.

Israel, nevertheless, mounted an intensive lobbying campaign through its supporters in Washington to convince the US to do another turnaround. Although the Reagan administration had once authorized a covert operation to undermine Mengistu after the kidnapping and torture of a CIA agent posted in Addis Ababa, Israel's establishment in the US capital began advocating that the US reconsider and accept Mengistu as an ally instead of an enemy.

The Rebels Unite and Close In

Meanwhile, the secessionist Eritrean Popular Liberation Front had entered into a loose alliance called the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front with other opposition armies. They are the Tigray People's Liberation Front, which has been in rebellion since 1974, and the Oromo Liberation Front. Neither seeks secession, but only the fall of the Mengistu government. On April 26 and 27, as rebel armies closed in from the west, north and east, a US delegation visited the Ethiopian capital.

The Americans, led by former Minnesota Republican Senator Rudy Boschwitz, designated as a special emissary from President Bush, and a deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs, offered to convene a May 28 peace conference in London to negotiate a settlement. Boschwitz also carried a letter from Bush asking Mengistu to permit a massive airlift to remove the Ethiopian Jews assembled in the capital. The US government believed they might be singled out during a fight for the capital by other Ethiopians resentful of the food and special treatment they had been receiving from the Israeli Embassy.

When Mengistu fled Ethiopia on May 21, he was replaced by the recently appointed vice president, General Tesfaye Gebre-Kidan, described by US officials as a respected officer with a good human rights record. Actually running the government, as newly appointed prime minister, was former Foreign Minister Tesfaye Dinka. Not related to the general of the same name, he is an economist with close ties to Western diplomats and to the Bush administration.

Bush sent a cable to the new government on May 22, again inviting all parties to the London peace conference and asking them not to begin a fight for the capital until after Israel had evacuated the Jewish population. All parties promptly agreed and, reportedly after Israel paid $35 million and granted asylum to Kassa Kabede and another Mengistu government official, there was no interference as "Operation Solomon" was mounted in 34 Israeli and 1 Ethiopian aircraft chartered by the Israeli government.

Three thousand Ethiopians were denied permission to participate on grounds that they were not Jewish. Another 2,000 to 3,000 Ethiopian Jews are believed to have remained in Gondar province.

The display of US influence with all three Marxist-line rebel factions, who occupied the capital after completion of the airlift, as well as with the Marxist government they toppled, contrasted sharply with attitudes during the Cold War, when such groups could safely play one superpower against another. It also contrasted with the reception accorded a request by the Bush administration to the Israeli government not to settle any of the airlifted Ethiopian Jews in the occupied territories. Predictably, while thanking the US profusely for the support that made "Operation Solomon" possible, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's government did not respond to Bush's one request.

It was not the only disquieting omen for a new world order" in which, so far, some people seem considerably more equal than others. The airlift "brings nothing to Ethiopia," a Western relief worker told Washington Post correspondent Jennifer Parmalee in Addis Ababa. "It is a travesty. They have doctors on every plane going out, but are bringing nothing in. Just one of these planes sent down to the (famine-stricken) Ogaden would save so many lives."

Ironically, even the former "Falashas, now "Beta Yisrael" in an adopted homeland very different from the highland valleys in which their ancestors are said to have lived for more than two millennia, may soon be asking their Israeli and American benefactors one plaintive question: just who or what is it from which they have been so dramatically saved?

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.