| | Horn of Africa; Eritrea, Ogaden, northern Kenya, southern Sudan; military regimes; ancient regime in Ethiopia; Dergue, TPLF, EPLF Manifold violent social conflict is the hallmark of contemporary history in the Horn of Africa. Most contributions to this issue of ROAPE unavoidably refer to it, and our first article provides a survey of its militarisation. Though armed struggles began in the early 1960s in Eritrea, Ogaden, northern Kenya and southern Sudan, the world's attention was not caught until 1974, when the quaint imperial regime in Ethiopia was toppled by a class upheaval. The drastic consequences of that event - the military regime it spawned, that not only claimed to be socialist but acted as if it meant it; the massive intervention of the Soviet Union on its behalf; the great escalation of the struggle in Eritrea subsequently; the head-on collision between Ethiopia and Somalia in the Ogaden - all focused international attention on the region, though none of these developments were really novel. Some years earlier, military regimes in the Sudan and Somalia had also laid claim to socialism, though neither the circumstances, nor the consequences were as dramatic as in Ethiopia. Nor was the Soviet Union a newcomer to the region, for it had been Somalia's patron since the early 1960s, and had for a time courted the Sudanese 'socialist' regime. Ethiopia and Somalia had their first bout in the Ogaden in 1963 and have been at daggers drawn ever since. The Eritrean revolution had been gaining momentum throughout the 1960s without however gaining any attention abroad. |
