Let us begin not with emotion, but with facts. The editorial published by EBC Dotstream speaks of “a calculated foreign conspiracy” and “internal betrayal” as the reasons Ethiopia became landlocked. This is a narrative dressed in the language of victimhood while deliberately erasing the most inconvenient truth in the Horn of Africa: Eritrea was never Ethiopia’s to begin with.
History Does Not Lie
Emperor Haile Selassie illegally dissolved the UN-mandated Ethiopian-Eritrean Federation in November 1962, unilaterally annexing Eritrea and declaring it a province of Ethiopia — in clear violation of United Nations Resolution 390(V) of 1950. The Emperor banned Eritrean political parties, suppressed the free press, and dissolved Eritrea’s autonomous parliament — not by mutual agreement, but at gunpoint. That act of aggression, not foreign conspiracy, is the true starting point of this story.[wikipedia +1]
What followed was thirty years of one of the longest and most determined liberation wars in modern African history. From September 1, 1961, when Hamid Idris Awate fired the first shot in the Eritrean mountains, through the epic battles of Afabet in 1988 and the liberation of Massawa in 1990, the Eritrean people — Christian and Muslim, highland and lowland, men and women — bled and sacrificed to reclaim what Ethiopia had taken from them. Between sixty and eighty thousand Eritreans died in that struggle. Fifty thousand children were orphaned. Nearly half a million were made refugees. This was not a “conspiracy.” This was a people refusing to be erased.[ebsco +2]
The Referendum Was Sacred
In April 1993, under United Nations supervision, Eritreans went to the polls for three days. The result was unambiguous: 99.8 percent voted for independence, with a turnout exceeding 93 percent. The UN Observer Mission, UNOVER, certified the process as free and fair. Ethiopia itself — under the EPRDF transitional government — formally recognized the result and recognized Eritrea as a sovereign state. The EBC editorial now calls this a “history of betrayal.” The international community called it democracy.[shabait +2]
To invoke “the people’s will” today while ignoring the people’s will as expressed in 1993 is not history. It is selective memory in the service of expansionism.
Eritrea Was Generous
After independence, Eritrea did not turn its back on Ethiopia. In September 1993, the two nations signed the Transit and Port Services Agreement, granting Ethiopia full and unrestricted use of Assab and Massawa, free movement of goods, exemptions from Eritrean taxes and customs duties, and the right to pay in Ethiopian Birr. Ethiopian Maritime and Transit Services had branch offices in Assab. The Ethiopian Customs Authority operated there. Eritrea — a newly independent nation barely on its feet — gave Ethiopia access because the region’s stability demanded it. It was Ethiopia, not Eritrea, that walked away from Assab in 1998 when border tensions erupted, convinced that the boycott would hurt Eritrea more.[facebook +1]
The EBC editorial asks why Ethiopia should remain a “prisoner of geography.” The honest answer: because Ethiopia voluntarily accepted the terms of Eritrean independence, signed the Algiers Agreement in December 2000, and the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission delivered a final and binding ruling in April 2002. Eritrea honored that ruling. Ethiopia refused to implement it for sixteen years. The “prisoner” lived in a house it refused to leave.[wikipedia +2]
International Law Is Clear
The Fordham International Law Journal analyzed this matter carefully: Ethiopia, as a landlocked state, has the right of access to the sea under Article 125 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea — but that is a right of transit access, not a right of ownership or sovereignty. The 1964 African uti possidetis principle, which declared colonial-era borders sacrosanct, protects Eritrea’s territorial integrity from any claim of “historical ownership” by Ethiopia. No matter how far back one reaches in Aksumite history, no international court recognizes ancient empire as a legal basis for modern border revision.[eritrea-focus +2]
The EBC editorial says: “We are not asking for what was never ours, but for what once was ours.” That argument, applied consistently, would redraw every border on the African continent and set the entire region on fire.
The Real Crisis Is Inside Ethiopia
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. By 2020, he had launched a devastating war in Tigray that displaced over three million people, resulted in mass famine, and drew condemnation from the United Nations and human rights organizations worldwide. The Tigray conflict inflicted an estimated $22 billion in economic damage on that single region alone. Today, the Amhara and Oromia regions — together representing roughly 60 percent of Ethiopia’s population and economic base — are in open rebellion against Addis Ababa.[borkena +3]
The economic picture is just as alarming. The World Bank projects Ethiopia’s poverty rate to reach 43 percent by 2025, up from 33 percent in 2016, driven by conflict, governance failure, and soaring inflation. Over 86 million Ethiopians are classified as multidimensionally poor — deprived in income, education, and health. Ethiopia defaulted on its external debt in 2023, and the IMF and World Bank declared the country’s debt “unsustainable”. About 15 million people remain reliant on food aid. A full 72 percent of Ethiopians expressed disapproval of how the economy is being managed.[worldbank +3]
This is the Ethiopia whose prime minister tells parliament he is “a million percent certain” the country will not remain landlocked, and invokes the examples of Ukraine and Gaza as warnings to Eritrea. Analysts have been direct about what is happening: Abiy Ahmed’s weakening hold on power is driving a calculated effort to deflect attention from internal crisis through nationalist mobilization and manufactured external confrontation. One observer with access to a closed-door Prosperity Party meeting reported that Abiy allegedly referenced Gaza as a potential model for how Ethiopia might approach Eritrea. If that report is accurate, it is not a sea access strategy. It is a confession of desperation.[moderndiplomacy +1]
A Word on the EBC Editorial’s Logic
The EBC piece argues that small states cannot protect major trade corridors and that Ethiopia’s exclusion opens the door to piracy and terrorism. This is curious reasoning from a country that invited Eritrean forces onto its own soil during the Tigray war to commit well-documented atrocities against its own citizens. Ethiopia cannot protect its own internal borders, cannot feed a significant portion of its people, and cannot resolve a half-dozen active internal conflicts — yet it presents itself to the world as the indispensable guardian of Red Sea security. That argument does not deserve serious engagement. It deserves honest rejection.[wikipedia +1]
The Path Forward
Eritrea’s position has been consistent and principled: sovereignty is non-negotiable, but cooperation is welcome. Eritrea never denied Ethiopia access to its ports — that access was governed by signed agreements. Any future arrangement must be built on the same foundation: mutual respect, legal frameworks, and bilateral negotiation — not threats, not historical romanticism, and not the weaponization of a landlocked population’s genuine frustration for political survival.[facebook +1]
The EBC editorial ends with the words: “The diplomatic seed we sow today will tomorrow become the fruit of prosperity.” We agree. But diplomacy rooted in the denial of Eritrean sovereignty is not diplomacy. It is pressure dressed in polite language. Real diplomacy begins when Addis Ababa stops treating Eritrea’s independence as a reversible mistake and starts treating it as the settled, internationally recognized, blood-purchased reality that it is.
Ethiopia’s political elite would do better to direct their considerable energy toward feeding their 130 million people, rebuilding the communities destroyed in Tigray, Amhara, and Oromia, and stabilizing a national economy that the World Bank has flagged as being in debt distress. That is the adventure their generation owes history. The Red Sea is not going anywhere. Neither is Eritrea.
