ETHIOPIA: The Plums of Neutrality

From Addis Ababa last week, TIME Correspondent James Bell cabled: “His face as sadly impassive as that of a Byzantine saint. His Imperial Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie I rose from a straight-back chair in his paneled library as I bowed into the room. As we shook hands before a large window overlooking a garden, a peacock screamed and a large lion walked by on the lawn. Then the Emperor gave me the news about his ancient Christian kingdom, perched Swiss-green and cool above Africa’s desert heat. The news: Ethiopia has adopted a new posture in foreign affairs which approximates that of ‘our great friend,’ Yugoslavia’s Marshal Josip Broz Tito.”

The first nation to fall under Fascist guns, Ethiopia, with bitter memories of the League of Nations’ ineffectually in coping with Mussolini in 1935, was quick to send troops to Korea under the U.N. flag in 1951. Generally siding with the West. Ethiopia has received in the last seven years $107 million in U.S. aid. But the Ethiopians never thought it was enough and grumbled about having to keep books on how they spent it.

An initial meeting with Tito in 1954 opened Haile Selassie’s eyes to another kind of bargaining. Under the tutelage of the Yugoslav fence-straddler—the Emperor and Tito have twice traded visits, Tito has presented the monarch with a yacht, and Ethiopia has built a palace in Addis Ababa just for Tito—Haile Selassie has veered away from the West to sample the plums of neutralism. After a triumphant red-carpet tour of Europe and the Iron Curtain this summer, the Emperor came home counting his blessings like beads on a string: $5,000,000 from the Czechs, $7.14 million from the Germans, $10 million from Tito, plus a passel of economic advisers who now virtually manage Ethiopia’s economy, and a grand prize of $100 million from the Russians, together with 125 Soviet teachers and technicians already on their way to Ethiopia.

Sugar-Coating. How much all this would benefit the majority of Ethiopians was open to question. The nation’s most pressing need is land reform. But the Ethiopian Orthodox Church owns 40% of all land, and feudal landlords the rest, and the Emperor is helpless to take on either group.

In Addis Ababa, jodhpur-wearing Ethiopians can sit in the King George bar and read the news flashing a la Times Square across the top of the Modanova department store. And in Haile Selassie I Square, Volkswagens and Fords jostle for position in daily traffic jams, unheard of a few years ago. But outside Addis Ababa, 90% of Ethiopia’s people are illiterate farmers, some of whom still live in a barter economy where 2 Ibs. of hand-picked wild coffee will fetch one fingernail’s worth of nail polish. As a result of these feudal economics, 180 million acres of the world’s richest farm land lie fallow in Ethiopia, despite periodic famines and a growing trade deficit. Foreign aid at best merely sugarcoats Ethiopia’s deep-seated economic woes.

Time to Swallow. Most volatile issue in Ethiopia today, however, is not economics but relations with the neighboring Somalilands (TIME, Sept. 14). In the rise of a Pan-Somalia movement among the tribes of French, British and Italian Somaliland, the Ethiopians fancy they discern the bogeyman of British and Italian imperialism. This, plus Italian Somali-land’s decision to demand a U.N.-supervised referendum in Somali grazing lands inside the borders of Ethiopia, constitute one of the chief sources of Haile Selassie’s growing suspicion of the West. With an age-old fear of Moslem encirclement, the Ethiopians would like to annex the Somalilands themselves, as they did Eritrea in 1952. In the meantime, they clearly hope to win the aid of their new Eastern friends in blocking the emergence of a united, independent Somalia.

“Don’t bite unless you are prepared to swallow,” says an old Ethiopian proverb, and a good bit of swallowing is ahead for Haile Selassie in return for his take of the East’s goodies. Several thousand refugees from the rule of his great friend Tito are due to be deported back to Yugoslavia soon. Chinese envoys, disguised as journalists, have already arrived in Addis Ababa in hopeful anticipation of Ethiopian diplomatic recognition of Red China. And some time next year, the Emperor has been warned to expect a visit from Communism’s senior traveling salesman, Nikita Khrushchev himself.