For almost five decades the states of the Horn of Africa have been in the throes of a continuous internal, regional and international crisis. One of the main causes of political instability, the protracted Eritrean revolution and the response of two successive Ethiopian governments, was rounded off with the independence of Eritrea. The Eritrean armed struggle (that broke out with the dissolution of the Eritrean/Ethiopian federation set up by the UN in 1952) lasted from 1961 to 1991. The full extent of the human and material waste of this fratricidal war defies statistics. The first Ethiopian revolution, conducted against Emperor Haile Selassie, was another source of internal instability. The ideas that propelled the Ethiopian revolution of 1974 were class based; in this enterprise, the Ethiopian student movement (in the early ’sixties) played a pivotal role in formulating the political and ideological language. The first Ethiopian revolution was directed against the ancient monarchical system and the feudal structure that supported it. Its ambition was also to accommodate the demands of the different ethnic groups of Ethiopia by creating a socialist commonwealth. This revolution was hijacked by a military/communist junta known as the Derg (Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police, and Territorial Army).