In troubled waters

IN TROUBLED WATERS

SINGULARITY LITTLE seems to be written these days about the Indian Ocean. The thought occurred to me, yet again, on running my eye down the contents page of the latest issue of Strategic Survey (1985-86), just published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (of which I am a long-standing but dormant member). Lots of topics, lots of areas, but only oblique references to that vast stretch of water between Africa and Australia.

Let me try, then, to fill the gap concerning this strategically vital area.

From the Soviet standpoint, the key points are: Aden and its hinterland (the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen or PDRY), Ethiopia, Mozambique, Madagascar and the Seychelles, India, and Vietnam.

When factional fighting flared up in Aden last January, the Soviets lost no time in dumping their former ally, President Ali Nasser Mohammed, who had been showing signs of pragmatism in his relations with neighboring countries. Their luck was out, however, as their protege, Abdel Fattah Ismail, an ex-president who was being groomed as Moscow's puppet, was killed in the fighting. The new president, Haider Abu Bakr al-Attas, has been playing his cards close to his chest, but it looks as though nothing will be done to weaken the Soviet hold on its only true satellite in the Arab world.

In an interview on October 25, 1984, the Soviet economic advisor in Aden, P. Kadirov, ticked off the major Soviet projects there, which included the installation of night-flying facilities and the expansion of runways on the airport. The harbor, too, is being expanded. Other Soviet facilities in the area include the sheltered anchorage at Socotra (in the PDRY) and on the Dahlak Islands of Ethiopia, the main base for the Soviet Indian Ocean fleet's support squadrons, and the airfield at Asmara (Ethiopia).

In August and November 1984, respectively, the PDRY reached agreement with the USSR on Soviet supplies of naval defense equipment, and on a protocol on Soviet fishing activities. "Fishing" sounds peaceful, but Soviet trawlers are heavily into espionage.

In one of those outbursts of candor so helpful to watching columnists, Admiral Sergei Gorshkov (retired by Gorbachev not long ago after a lengthy innings as naval C-in-C) told Pravda in 1977 that "maritime transport, fishing, and scientific vessels are part of the Soviet Union's naval might." Waters fished in by the Soviet fleet are, ipso facto, troubled.

The Soviet fleet has access to two other Ethiopian ports, Assab and Massawa, and drops in occasionally on Maputo in Mozambique. The Soviets, however, are much exercised by the thought of U.S. air-naval facilities on Diego Garcia, which they cannot quite match. They have made slightly less headway in this direction than they might legitimately have hoped in the socialist Seychelles. True, Soviet vessels and military transport planes do drop in, but President Rene, taking his cue from the political leader he is known to admire above all others, Fidel Castro, obstinately maintains that he is "non-aligned" and, in a formal sense, won't allow the Soviets to transform his island republic into a Soviet base. Just to show what he meant by "non-aligned," Rene sent Defense Minister Berlouis to the United States last November. Back home, Berlouis extended the Seychelles-U.S. space-satellite agreement.

Madagascar is another target area for the Soviets, who recently supplemented their large embassy with a consulate-general in Tamatave, where the harbor and airfield are available to them.

By far the biggest Soviet naval base in the Indian Ocean area, though, is the former American naval base at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam (under the French, who also had a base there, it was called Tourane). Many of the twenty to 25 Soviet vessels operating out of Cam Ranh have nuclear capabilities. There are also 36 Soviet reconnaissance, strike, and defense aircraft there, including 14 MiG Floggers. At one time, Soviet naval auxiliary (but never combat) vessels enjoyed bunkering, victualing, and repair facilities in Singapore. But the island republic's doughty leader, Lee Kian Yew, stopped all that when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.

Not unexpectedly, the invasion signaled a dramatic rise in the Soviet naval presence in the Indian Ocean, when about thirty ships were counted by interested Westerners.

IT IS against this background that recurrent Soviet calls to turn the Indian Ocean into a "zone of peace" should be judged. The point of such calls is invariably to label the "imperialists," headed of course by the United States, as the sole source of destabilization in whatever area is chosen for propaganda exercises.

One example among many: On June 21, 1985, Pravda accused the Americans of seeking confrontation with the Soviet Union "from the Persian Gulf to the Aleutian Islands." In pursuit of this alleged aim, the Americans were said to be creating a new "military-political structure" in the Indian Ocean.