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Abstracts and Bios

Ethio-Sudanese Relations and the Pattern of Refugee Flow in the Horn of Africa, (1970s-1990s)

Solomon A Getahun, Department of History, Central Michigan University
getah1sa@cmich.edu

In the last decades of the twentieth century, Africa and the Africans have suffered most from the refugee crises. In those times, almost one in every three refugees in the world was an African. Of the African refugees, many have been from Africa south of the Sahara. The majority of these have been from the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti and Sudan), an area that has been in “permanent emergency” for decades. Of the countries of the Horn, Ethiopia accounted for the largest refugee production in Africa. While Ethiopia evolved as one of the main source of refugees in Africa, Sudan became the main destination for Ethiopian refugees between the 1970s and early 1990s.
The concern of this paper, however, is not why Ethiopia turned out to be the largest source of refugees in Africa—a subject matter which is fairly studied—but to explore why Sudan become the favorite destination of Ethiopian refugees in the said period. Based upon interviews, state department archives and secondary sources, the paper attempts to display the role of geography, long-distance caravan trade, religion, Cold War politics and bilateral relations in shaping and reshaping, and determining refugee flows between the two African countries.