ABSTRACT
The countries of the Horn of Africa selected for study are Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia,
and Sudan.1 The selection is based on the substantive questions raised with respect
to variations in political violence and refugee situations in these countries. For
example, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Sudan went through higher levels
of political violence and generated an estimated 240,000 refugees who sought
exile in neighboring countries (Akol 1987). The violence subsided as a result of
the 1972 Addis Ababa Accord and a significant number of Sudanese refugees were
repatriated. After the Sharia-an Islamic law that regulates individual as well as
public behavior-was adopted in 1983, violence erupted again and refugees in large
numbers sought asylum in many countries. At present, conflicts continue in many
parts of the country, and these are in addition to the protracted conflict in the southern
part of the country. Therefore, Sudan has long struggled to hold itself together
Similarly, Ethiopia and Eritrea exhibit the necessary variations with respect to
political violence and refugee formations. As the severity of violence increased
virtually in every corner of the country in the late 1970s and all of the 1980s, the
regime of Mengistu resorted to an all out war against various groups to hold the
country together and this caused massive refugee outflows in every conceivable
direction. Thus, by the latter half of the 1980s, the number of refugees climbed to
more than a million.2 After the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam was overthrown
and Eritrea became independent in 1991, relative peace was established and the
numbers decreased significantly. However, there still remained more than 300,000
Eritrean refugees in camps in Sudan at the end of 2001, some ten years after the
cessation of hostilities and the establishment of cordial relationships between Eritrea
and Ethiopia (USCR 2003). Unfortunately, the recent conflict between them has
caused the deaths of tens of thousands of combatants on both sides and the exile of
thousands of Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia. The necessary variations in conflict and
refugee formations are also found in Somalia. It was relatively peaceful until the
first half of the 1980s and had not generated refugees until the late 1980s. However,
with the violence of the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, it became one
of the major refugee-generating countries of the region. Like the governments in
Ethiopia and Sudan, the government of Siad Barre also resorted to brute force to
hold the country together. In sum, the political violence and refugee situations in the
countries of the Horn of Africa show enough variations across time not only within
a country but also between countries in the region. This makes each of the countries
appropriate cases to study the nexus of conflicts and refugee situations.
