|
|
Five Nations Under Siege
| Article
# : |
10550 |
|
|
Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
|
| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1986 |
2,559 Words |
| Author
: |
Ray S. Cline
|
Ethiopia, September 1974 - The emperor Haile Selassie was deposed and Soviet backed rebels took power. Angola, February 1976 - A Soviet-Cuban backed government was established. Cambodia, January 1979 - Soviet backed Vietnamese troops invaded Phnom Penh and established Heng Samrin government. Nicaragua, July 1979 - Soviet and Cuban - backed Sandinista rebels took power. Afghanistan, December 1979 - Soviet troops invaded Kabul. President Reagan in his speech to the United Nations last year highlighted these five nations in which communism is at war with six million people. This month, The World & I presents an in-depth analysis of each country's situation and the prognosis for a possible solution.
In the November, 1985 summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, President Ronald Reagan won a victory in comparison with other recent summits by holding the Soviet team hitless, notably on the crucial Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). He also scored modestly by getting on the board at Geneva the point that peace and independence should be restored to five besieged nations now being torn apart by military conflicts in which the Soviet Union and its client states have intervened on one contending side in each local political struggle, naturally on the side of the Marxist-Leninist dictatorship. The states in jeopardy are the ones singled out in Reagan's presummit speech at the United Nations, on 24 October 1985: Afghanistan, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Angola, and Nicaragua. Soviet-oriented regimes supported by Soviet, Vietnamese, or Cuban troops are in place in all five countries, but in all of them substantial nationalistic freedom forces are fighting against Soviet, Cuban, or Vietnamese domination.
World under Communism
Should the victories for Soviet-supported regimes be unequivocal in all five battles, another sixty million people and much geopolitically valuable real estate will have been added to the sphere of Soviet hegemony, already controlling approximately 460 million residents of Communist countries and approximately one-fifth of the habitable land surface of the globe. If Communist China (PRC) is added, which is logical in view of steadily improving relations between Moscow and Peking, the hard-core Marxist-Leninist sphere includes over one and one-half billion people (one-third of the world's population) and one-quarter of the territory of the whole world. If the pattern of the past forty years prevails, these five nations under siege will in time be subdued and provide another increment to the power and prestige of the totalitarian regimes of this era. These governments are expressly committed to the Marxist-Leninist view that an inexorable conflict with the politically pluralist market economies of the non-Communist world will go on until the powerful capitalist and democratic societies perish.
Why should this aggrandizement of what is essentially an imperial zone of influence projecting the power of the Soviet Union into new regions be accepted? It has always been clear, and Leonid Brezhnev made it explicit in his celebrated doctrine enunciated after Soviet military occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, that once Moscow accepts a Marxist-Leninist regime as legitimate that country can never reestablish democratic freedoms if Moscow can prevent it.
The Real Wars
The outcomes of these five Soviet-sponsored sieges of
...
Read Full Article
|
|
