ABSTRACT
Soviet-American competition in the Horn, of course, was just one reflection of their global contest, which neither knew quite how to lessen. East-west rivalries in the Horn long preceded Ethiopia's upheaval. Their destinies were inexorably interlinked if only because religious, ethnic and political differences rendered life more precarious still in Ethiopia, the Somali Democratic Republic and Djibouti, the former French-ruled Territory of the Afars and Issas. If the affairs of the Ethiopians, given their traditional isolation, seemed tangled to most outsiders, they were not nearly as complex as those which attended the emergence of modern Somalia. The Ethiopians attributed their defeat by fascist Italy in the 1930s to France's unlawful closure of Djibouti. Ethiopia, in mid-1977, was gripped by revolutionary turmoil which persisted long after the emperor's deposition. Eritrea, in mid-1977, was a bioodsoaked land in the sixteenth year of a struggle for independence from Ethiopian rule.
