The Third World War: August 1985

In neighbouring Zaire, in spite of greater resources, both in raw materials and men, there was little enthusiasm for waging war outside the country’s own territorial limits. Their experience of communist intervention in the latter 1970s had not endeared the Soviet Union or her proxy soldiers to the rulers of Zaire any more than the uses made by these of Katangan rebels. The former president had long since retired to his retreat on Lac Leman. The new president of Zaire had been in office for nearly five years; during this time he had reorganized the armed forces, and had turned more to France and Belgium for economic aid, shunning the Soviet Union’s attempts to include Zaire in their haul of Marxist states. After all, with its diamonds, copper, oil, cobalt and zinc, and with its 30 million people, Zaire was a rich land. Frontier forays had gone on — from Angola, from Congo-Brazzaville and from Burundi. The army had not succeeded in controlling the Simba rebels on Zaire’s eastern border. But all in all Zaire had reason to be content.

Soviet, Cuban and Jamaican influence and presence did not stop short in Central Africa. They had established themselves almost everywhere in West Africa. In Equatorial Guinea, Sierra Leone, Guinea itself, Nigeria and Mali, instructors, advisers and troops at once represented and encouraged the growth of Marxism.

If we leave aside the strategic value of ports, airfields and communications southwards, the principal factor in West Africa was, of course, Nigeria, with a population of some 70 million and armed forces of nearly 250,000. Her army had tanks and heavy artillery; her navy had frigates and landing craft; her air force had interceptors, ground attack and transport aircraft and helicopters. What is more they had battle experience spreading over twenty years — civil war, battle in Central Africa, the great triumph in Namibia. Guided, equipped and encouraged by the Soviet Union and Cubans, they would be a force to be reckoned with in the coming struggle for South Africa. The head of state, formerly Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces and a declared radical, had in the end found his own presence at the summit of affairs to be preferred to a return to constitutional rule. The fact that Nigeria supplied an increasing share of US oil imports was no small factor in the situation. Nigeria may have been a long way from Pretoria. It did not intend that distance should muffle its voice or lessen its hostility.

North-west Africa was mercifully free of much of the turbulence which prevailed in the central, southern and north-eastern areas. Most North-west African states had had their struggles for liberation from the colonial powers; they had had their internal struggles for governments of their own; they had had their experiments in external fishing in troubled waters; they now wanted to be left alone. At the same time they did not wish to be totally excluded from the luxurious game of not letting others alone. Morocco was prepared to offer both advice and troops. But the likelihood of Moroccan troops being deployed as far south as the new seat of war was not great. In any event, quarrels with Algeria and Mauretania, never far below the surface, were simmering once more.

Algeria herself was the joker in the pack. She was not willing to risk a single Berber or a single dinar in a cause that could be of no direct and immediate economic or political benefit to herself. It was not for nothing that the Algerians had understudied the French for so long.

Libya was totally different again. Incredibly, Colonel Farouk, Libya’s radical nationalist leader, had survived. Most of the countries in which he had attempted to intervene had shrugged off his intervention. He was always seeking out trouble but never taking up arms; always meddling and threatening, but never acting; never in battle, but never out of it.

All this was bound up with what was happening in Egypt. President Hassan el Samdi had long wanted to have a proper hold on his paymasters — Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Gulf states. It was not for him but for his successors to achieve this. When President el Samdi was removed as a result both of food riots and of public disillusion over the Israeli settlement he was succeeded by the somewhat unlikely coalition of the Vice-President, Ahmed Mohamed and the War Minister and Commander-in-Chief, General Aziz Tawfik.