V o L u m e I : a d

The ANC itself, banned in April 1960 by the white Afrikaner National

Party, was forced to work underground and in exile. This drew the ANC and

the SACP closer still, to the extent that some have claimed that the exiled

ANC leadership was dominated by the SACP. This is an exaggeration. The

leading figures in the ANC—including Albert Luthuli, the ANC leader who

was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1961; Oliver Tambo, the leader in

exile from 1960 who succeeded Luthuli as ANC president; and Nelson Man-

dela, who with the other leading members of MK was sentenced to life

imprisonment on Robben Island in 1964—were not communists.

Thabo Mbeki, who would ultimately succeed Mandela as South Africa’s

president in 1999, was a member of the ANC for a time and went to Moscow

for military training along with many other ANC members. Whereas the

ANC’s rival, the Pan-Africanist Congress, established relations with China in

the 1960s, it was the Soviet Union that provided the ANC with the bulk of its

funding and all its military support and hardware. In South Africa itself, many

underground or imprisoned ANC members were, in the 1970s, influenced

by the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). Adherents of the BCM who

joined the ANC tended to oppose the organization’s close ties with the SACP.

African National Congress

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Supporters of South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) gather on 12 August 1952 in Johannesburg as part of a

civil disobedience campaign to protest the apartheid regime of racial segregation. The protesters were later arrested.

(AFP/Getty Images)

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Aideed, Mohamed

Farah

(1934–1996)

From a Cold War perspective, the United States long viewed the ANC as

pro-Moscow and a “terrorist” organization, and it was not until the late 1980s

that an ANC leader was invited to Washington. The ANC and MK always

maintained that throughout their armed struggle they only targeted govern-

ment structures and not civilians, although by the mid-1980s they were

forced to admit that civilians sometimes got caught in the cross fire. Many

young ANC members were radicalized by the repression meted out by the

South African government from the Soweto Uprising of 1976 on, especially

during the People’s Uprising of the mid-1980s. The ANC then began to talk

of ending both apartheid and capitalism by establishing a socialist state in

South Africa.

The ANC leadership in exile was more attuned to international currents,

however, and by the mid-1980s conceded that if the ANC came to power it

would do so in the context of a multiparty system and would not be able to

introduce socialism, at least in the short run. As the Cold War began to wind

down, important voices in both the SACP and ANC renewed the call for a

negotiated settlement.

The governmental ban of the ANC and SACP was lifted in February

1990 by South African President F. W. de Klerk. By then, with the collapse

of communism in Eastern Europe, the whites’ fear of communism had

waned, and within the ANC itself the influence of communism had greatly

diminished. With the Cold War virtually ended, Mandela toured the United

States after his release from prison in February 1990 and received a rapturous

reception. He would not, however, visit the former Soviet Union until many

years later. Since the establishment of majority rule in March 1994, the ANC

has been the governing party in South Africa. Although its alliance with the

SACP has endured, its policies have been far removed from socialism.

Christopher Saunders

See also

Botha, Pieter Willem; Mandela, Nelson; South Africa

References

Adams, Simon. Comrade Minister: The South African Communist Party and the Transition

from Apartheid to Democracy. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science, 2001.

Ellis, Stephen, and Tsepo Sechaba. Comrades against Apartheid: The ANC and the South

African Communist Party in Exile. Oxford, UK: James Currey, 1992.

McKinley, Dale T. The ANC and the Liberation Struggle: A Critical Political Biography.

London: Pluto, 1997.

Controversial Somalian warlord who opposed the United Nations’ peace-

keeping mission in Somalia of 1992–1995. Born Mohamed Farah Hassan on

15 December 1934, probably in the central highland region of the former

Italian Somaliland, Hassan preferred the moniker of “Aideed,” a childhood

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Aideed, Mohamed Farah

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nickname. After joining Somalia’s Police Corps in 1954, he attended infantry

school near Rome and soon after became chief of police in Mogadishu. Fol-

lowing his promotion to lieutenant in 1960, he spent three years in Moscow

at the Frunze Military Academy. He later served as chief military advisor to

Mohammed Siyad Barre’s regime and then as Somalia’s ambassador to India

during 1984–1989.

In January 1991 Aideed successfully led opposition forces in deposing

Barre and then embarked on a brutal military campaign to overthrow the

interim government that resulted in a full-blown civil war and ignited intra-

clan hostilities that soon turned Mogadishu into a shattered war zone. The

mounting crisis was magnified by the onset of a severe drought in the region,

which prompted the United Nations (UN) to intervene in Somalia in April

1992. Aideed responded to the UN presence by ordering his militia to seize

all foreign food aid shipments meant for the starving population. In May 1993,

after the successful relief efforts of Operation 

RESTORE HOPE

, UN peace-

keeping forces were ordered to police the region and maintain stability.

Aideed’s militia fought back viciously, repeatedly wounding UN troops.

On 3 October 1993, a bloody confrontation between Aideed’s militia and U.S.

military forces resulted in heavy casualties for both sides. The high-profile

battle led the United States to withdraw from Somalia, allowing Aideed to

consolidate his power for a time. In September 1995, shortly after the com-

plete departure of UN personnel, Aideed declared himself president of the

Somali Republic. He was, however, under constant threat from rival clans,

and on 2 August 1996 he died in southern Mogadishu from a gunshot wound

following an intraclan skirmish.

Scot D. Bruce

See also

Africa, U.S. Interventions in; Barre, Mohammed Siyad; Somalia

References

Bowden, Mark. Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War. New York: Atlantic

Monthly Press, 1999.

Clarke, Walter, and Jeffrey Herbst, eds. Learning from Somalia: The Lessons of Armed

Humanitarian Intervention. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997.

Stevenson, Jonathan. Losing Mogadishu: Testing U.S. Policy in Somalia. Annapolis, MD:

Naval Institute Press, 1995.

Term used for a nuclear warhead detonation in the atmosphere. In nuclear

weapons doctrine, air bursts are usually reserved for use against populated

areas, where the effects of the blast and spread of radiation are maximized by

an above-ground detonation. Air bursts can also be used to increase the dam-

age caused by the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) created by a nuclear weapon.

EMP is an electromagnetic charge somewhat similar to a solar flare that can

Air Burst

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Air Burst

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