By Gamini Weerakoon; from the independent "Island" of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Winds of change are blowing across Africa, sweeping away juntas and dictators. The 16-year-old Angolan war recently ended with the signing of a peace agreement in Lisbon. While this historic event was taking place, 10,000 people were demonstrating against Ivory Coast President Felix Houphouet- Boigny, calling for his resignation. Time is apparently drawing near for the 85-year-old president, who has ruled this former French colony in West Africa since 1960. More dramatic was the flight of Ethiopian President Mengistu Haile Mariam to Zimbabwe, ending his rule of 14 years. In January of this year, Somalian President Mohammed Siad Barre fled his country as rebel forces fought their way into the capital, Mogadishu. Before that, Liberian President Samuel Doe was overthrown and killed in a rebellion. In most instances, such changes can be traced directly to the end of the cold war, combined with domestic factors. Most of the conflicts on the African continent, such as those in Angola, Ethiopia, and Somalia, were essentially proxy wars for the superpowers. Dictators were propped up by arms, money, and, at times, even troops from the superpowers or their allies. But now, with superpower detente, the Soviet Union's internal turmoil, and the U.S. placing human rights as a top priority over many strategic interests, African strongmen have begun to flee their countries as rebel groups close in.

The outcome of some of these changes is indeed bizarre. For example, the rebels who took control of Addis Ababa with the backing of the U.S.--the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front--are Marxists. The fact that the U.S. backed the rebels indicates that Marxism will have little to do with the outcome in Ethiopia, although the leaders still continue to mouth Marxist rhetoric.

Recent developments in and around the Horn of Africa--in Somalia, Ethiopia, and Yemen on the Arabian peninsula--demonstrate how rivalry between the superpowers in this region, of vital importance to them only a few years ago, has diminished. Until the 1960s, the region around the Red Sea was devoid of political rivalry and was relatively free of warships. It was in the 1960s that the superpowers' buildup of their navies commenced with the birth of the Somali republic. Somalia, facing powerful adversaries, looked around for external allies. It succumbed to the wooing of the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev and provided naval facilities at the port of Berbera on the Gulf of Aden and air facilities at Mogadishu. In exchange, the Soviet Union trained 10,000 soldiers of the Somali army. During that time, the U.S. had Ethiopia under Emperor Haile Selassie as its ally in the region.

When Marxist groups overthrew Selassie, the Marxist Mengistu regime first sought the assistance of the U.S. But the U.S. at that time had not been inclined to give support to the Ethiopian regime, and the Mengistu regime became a Soviet ally. The importance of Ethiopia to the Soviet Union was such that in the Somali-Ethiopian conflict, an estimated 20,000 Cuban troops were sent to Mengistu's assistance. Meanwhile, Somalia had changed sides, and the port of Berbera was given to the U.S.

The Horn of Africa appears to have lost much of its strategic value to the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. The Soviet Union lost South Yemen when North and South Yemen united last year. When the lease on the Berbera base expired last year, the U.S. did not bother to renegotiate it, and when Siad Barre was threatened by rebels, there was no response from the U.S. The fall of pro-U.S. and pro-Soviet dictators and diminishing strategic interests will certainly bring about a radical transformation in the politics of the African continent.