Commentary: Condemn Abiy Ahmed Regime’s Threats to Invade Eritrea

Commentary: Condemn Abiy Ahmed Regime’s Threats to Invade Eritrea

Amb. Andebrhan Welde Giorgis

This is the first instalment of a three-part commentary on the constant confrontation between the Ethiopian expansionist narrative and the Eritrean nationalist narrative. Relying on the perspectives of history and international law, the concise commentary debunks Ethiopia’s baseless expansionist claims over Eritrea and buttresses the legitimacy of Eritrea’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity. 
 

Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, has threatened to invade Eritrea, seize its port of Asseb and acquire ownership of its coastline. His initial posturing seemed a propaganda stunt to divert public attention from Ethiopia’s worsening domestic problems and mobilise support to shore up his fragile and failing ethnoreligious sectarian regime. His deployment of military assets, including Eritrean pawns, in Samara, the capital of the Afar Regional State adjoining Eritrea, however, signals a turn from bluffing to brinkmanship and a shooting war. As a prelude, Abiy displayed a map of Africa that incorporates a large territory of Eritrea (and parts of Djibouti and Somalia) into Ethiopia during the AU Summit in Addis Ababa in mid-February 2025. These measures constitute a flagrant violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Eritrea and effectively signify a declaration of war on the State of Eritrea. 

 In an address to the Ethiopian Parliament on 13 October 2023, Abiy Ahmed upped the ante and officially issued a very dangerous threat against the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ethiopia’s proximate Red Sea and Gulf of Aden littoral neighbouring states, particularly focused on Eritrea. 

Since the threat impacts not only the question of war and peace between Eritrea and Ethiopia but also the stability and security of the Horn of Africa, it is a grave matter that requires an appropriate and timely démarche. Quite in keeping with costly past failures, Eritrea failed to immediately lodge a proper démarche to the UN and the AU just for the record. The regime’s similar failures in the past are the product of President Isaias’s deep hostility and contempt for domestic and international rule of law and antipathy for diplomacy as well as lack of proper understanding of the significance of timely démarches.  

Abiy’s Oromo-dominated Prosperity Party and Oromuma government minions have used the state and social media to spread a plethora of ignorant, frenzied and virulent warmongering emulating the prime minister’s brazen threat to aggress Eritrea. The threat to invade Eritrea contravenes the UN Charter, the AU Constitutive Act, the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and the 2018 Joint Declaration of Peace and Friendship between Eritrea and Ethiopia. Abiy’s infantile politics and illusory ambitions have already immersed Ethiopia in a quagmire of ethnic wars and internecine conflicts. Aggression against Eritrea would be playing with fire. His defiance of international law - the foundation of normal relations among nations - and resort to the ‘law of the jungle’ against Eritrea would spell disastrous defeat for Ethiopia and further destabilise, unravel and disrupt war-torn Ethiopia itself. 

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and his Oromummaa ‘Prosperity Party’ have been busy orchestrating a series of cheeky statements in meetings with parliament, businessmen, senior military officers and party cadres declaring his territorial designs on Eritrea. Abiy has formally crossed the red line in making the false claim, in an address to the Ethiopian parliament, that Ethiopia has a “natural right” to possess direct access to the Red Sea; that the Red Sea forms the “natural border” of Ethiopia; and that, direct access to the Red Sea based on historical, geographic, ethnic and economic grounds, is an existential necessity for Ethiopia, and has recently boasted that he is one step closer to the ownership of sea access. 

The fabricated history that feeds the false expansionist narrative has nurtured the dream of a greater Ethiopia with access to the Red Sea and driven successive Ethiopian regimes to wage devastating wars (1961-1991, 1998-2000) and sustain humiliating defeats in trying to dominate Eritrea. Even though population size and firepower do matter, Eritrea’s experience during the last six and half decades shows that, in the final analysis, war is primarily a contest of will power. The total military victory of the armed struggle and the successful foiling of Ethiopia’s attempt to reoccupy Eritrea after independence are the outcome of the resolute determination and resilience of the Eritrean army and people in resisting Ethiopian aggression and their indomitable will to safeguard Eritrea’s sovereign statehood. 

Abiy’s stated objective of the forcible ownership of Eritrea’s Asseb port and establish a naval base on Eritrea’s maritime coast represents a virtual declaration of war on Eritrea. Has Ethiopia ever in its history owned a sea outlet or a port on the Red Sea prior to the UN federation of Eritrea in 1952? Definitely no! 

Is the obsession for ownership of a sea outlet and a port on the Red Sea or the pursuit of Greater Ethiopia or Greater Tigray new? What about the hostile narrative that many members of the Ethiopian and Tigrean ruling elites invoke constantly regarding the sovereignty of Eritrea? Is the narrative correct or false? And what would constitute a durable solution? 

Reviving the Expansionist Narrative

In making the claim of Ethiopia’s natural right to own access on Eritrea’s Red Sea coast, Abiy Ahmed is simply peddling expansionist ambitions of generations of contemporary Ethiopian rulers and ruling elites over Eritrea. The Ethiopian expansionist narrative maintains that Eritrea had been an integral part of Ethiopia for millennia. It has, once again, reared its ugly head. 

It is an open secret that Abiy and his inner circle have been propagating the surreptitious scheme not only to acquire a port, a corridor and a naval base on the Eritrean Red Sea coast but also to invade and bring Eritrea back under Ethiopian domination. Such a scheme has been tried before and failed miserably at a devastating human and material cost to both countries. Its revival would only aggravate the history of bad blood between the two countries.

The scheme’s public declaration has set Abiy on a collision course to provoke war and play a zero-sum game with dire consequences for the peoples, economies and future of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia. The genie is out of the bottle. His equivocal, contradictory and constantly shifting assertions alternate between pursuing peaceful or forcible means to seize Asseb while at the same time boasting of completing military preparations for the invasion of Eritrea and his parading troops on the salute in a display of military bravado shout “the sea is ours; the port is ours; the ships are ours” can only exacerbate the damage done and widen the credibility gap created by his stream of pathological lies. His new map, frequent threats and military deployment near the Eritrean border have upped the ante. 

Certainly, war is a multi-edged sword that will cut and visit death and destruction on both sides. It would wreak havoc and cause immense suffering to the peoples of Eritrea and Ethiopia with destructive spillover effects on the entire region of the Horn of Africa. It would also jeopardise maritime security in the vital sea-lanes of the southern Red Sea. Furthermore, war would pose a clear and present danger to international peace, stability and security.   

The Scourge of Delusion 

Abiy has long been intimating that the ultimate home of the Ethiopian navy established in Lake Tana will be Eritrea’s Red Sea coast. During the heyday of their bromance, President Isaias was prudently advised, including by the author via a trusted high-level visitor friend of Eritrea, to conclude an agreement with Abiy on a reciprocal recognition of the colonial treaty border as the international boundary between the two countries. Instead of using his immense leverage at the time to secure Ethiopia’s formal recognition of the colonial treaty border as the basis for durable peace between the two countries, Isaias rejected the valuable advice stating that “the issue of the boundary is not our priority now” and chose to awaken a dead dream buried thirty-four years ago. 

Once again, Isaias missed a golden opportunity to agree on and settle the precise location and eventual physical demarcation of the international boundary between the two countries with his Ethiopian counterpart. Such a formal bilateral agreement could have foreclosed the ongoing false accusations of Eritrean occupation of Ethiopian (Tigrean) territory constantly repeated by certain Prosperity Party and Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) leaders and cadres as well as bellicose members of the Ethiopian and Tigrean elites. 

His tempting gift of a map of Eritrea’s Red Sea coastline, compulsive reiteration that Abiy would lead and represent Eritrea and Ethiopia from then on, and obsessive declaration that whoever thinks that Eritrea and Ethiopia are two peoples does not know the reality might have prompted false hopes and aroused Abiy’s territorial ambitions over Eritrea. In fact, Isaias showed no reaction beyond beating his chest in glee when Abiy joyfully declared, while lavishing him a grand state dinner that “what I and Esu (Isaias) will share is Asseb”. Abiy had reportedly offered territorial swap, equity shares or federation or confederation between Eritrea and Ethiopia in exchange for Asseb. 

Beyond his pipe dream, Abiy seems too naïve, too ignorant or too delusional to realise that his bargaining offers of (1) territorial swap, (2) equity shares in Ethiopian Airlines or the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), (3) federation or confederation of Eritrea and Ethiopia are non-starters. Federation and confederation suggest a hidden expansionist agenda for which there exists a bitter historical memory of betrayal, war and bloodshed. Neither the land swap nor the equity shares are equivalent to the intrinsic value of a coastline with its extensive territorial waters and exclusive economic zone endowed with abundant marine and mineral resources. 

Venting apparent frustration with his failure to whet his appetite for Asseb peacefully, Abiy has resorted to asserting Ethiopia’s purported “natural right” and declared a dangerous adventure to invade Eritrea, forcibly occupy the port of Asseb to possess a sea outlet and establish a naval base on the Eritrean Red Sea coast as an existential necessity and a condition for Ethiopian sovereignty.

It would of course be a bonanza for any land-locked country to own a transit corridor and an outlet to the sea. However, no transit country would willingly compromise its sovereignty and territorial integrity, rendering the possibility a case of “if wishes were horses, beggars would ride them”. Obviously, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia have repudiated Abiy’s assertion. 

It is also crucial to underscore that port ownership on the Eritrean Red Sea coast is neither an existential necessity nor a condition of sovereignty nor an obstacle to the development of Ethiopia, as Abiy falsely claims. Ethiopia has other options in the region and has used them as a matter of choice during the last twenty-five years. 

Otherwise, trying to externalise or divert attention from the internal causes of Ethiopia’s underdevelopment is wrong, myopic and counter-productive. Any attempt to gain such ownership by the threat or use of force constitutes a dangerous gamble. No transit state would allow the wilful violation of its independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity in flagrant breach of international law. Such aggression is bound to be a double-edged sword that could destroy, disrupt and dismantle Ethiopia. 

Viewed from the perspective of the prevailing national and regional dynamics, Abiy’s agenda is delusional, dangerous and unattainable. The thinly veiled invocation of ‘it is our turn to rule Ethiopia and dominate the region’ in the context of Ethiopia’s perniciously ethnicised politics portends disaster for Ethiopia and trouble for its proximate neighbours. Whether or not Abiy Ahmed will be able to impose the narrative of the Oromo elite’s ‘turn to rule and dominate’ and be allowed to commit aggression on the neighbouring countries depends on developments in Ethiopia. His repeated references to Ethiopia’s large and growing population size, however, represents the implicit threat of throwing human waves of invading hordes menacing small Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia. 

Déjà vu. Hitler’s Germany tried it in Europe with catastrophic consequences for Germany, Europe and the world. Abiy’s predecessors - Emperor Haile Selassie, President Mengistu and Prime Minister Meles - tried it against Eritrea and failed. History teaches that any similar adventure of his fragile, beleaguered and increasingly ethnicised regime can only meet the same fate. Abiy Ahmed must thus learn from the disastrous failures of the past, rethink his futile but dangerous agenda and reverse course. He needs to sober up and put a bridle on his illusory territorial and maritime ambitions over Eritrea and the other Red Sea littoral states of Djibouti and Somalia.

The Perilous Mix of Ignorance and Arrogance 

Abiy’s false and reckless claim of the Red Sea as the natural border of Ethiopia by invoking Axum, Ras Alula and Haile Selassie signifies his crass ignorance of the history of the Kingdom of Axum and Eritrea. His claim that the Red Sea forms the natural border of Ethiopia and that Eritrea formed a natural part of Ethiopia are patently false. 

Were it not for the dangerous consequences of his ignorant narration, belligerent assertion and arrogant threats, his deceptive and mendacious claims could have been dismissed as infantile figments of a covetous imagination. Since they are being officially disseminated and repeated ad nauseam by the state media and pro-regime social media outlets, however, let me offer him and his ilk a quick recap of Eritrean History 101. 

The Kingdom of Axum and Eritrea

The land of modern Eritrea and the ancient port of Adulis, located about 40 kms south of the port city of Massawa, formed the cradle and the geographic centre of the Kingdom of Axum. At the zenith of its power during the 4^th and 5^th centuries A.D. (4), the Kingdom Axum extended across northern present-day Ethiopia, northern Sudan, southern Egypt, southern Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Djibouti and north-western Somalia. During the 7^th century, however, its power and influence “declined as a direct consequence of the Arab invasion of Egypt” forcing the Beja tribes of eastern Egypt and northern Sudan to move southwards and push their kinsmen already settled in the Northern Highlands and Barka lowlands on to the Central Highlands of contemporary Eritrea. 

The Beja invasion, the subsequent spread of Islam into the coastal areas and the destruction of Adulis in 710 A.D. cut off Axum from access to the Red Sea. These events disrupted Axum’s maritime trade, the main source of its prosperity and power, and precipitated its decline. The loss of Adulis and the Red Sea littoral to nascent Islam forced the Christian Axumites to withdraw southwards to the isolation of their highland bastions, never to return to the Red Sea. Once it declined, Axum never revived. From the downfall of Axum until the late 13^th century (1270), “the whole of Eritrea was still under the Beja Confederacy”. 

Following a century of fragmentation, Eritrea’s Central Plateau formed the core of the Medre Bahri, or the Land of the Sea, between the 15^th and 18^th centuries, enjoying sovereignty under the rule of the Bahri Negasi, or the King of the Sea. Despite recurrent reciprocal invasions across the Mereb-Belesa-Muna Rivers during Abyssinia’s “era of the princes”, the Central Plateau, the Northern Highlands, the Western Lowlands and the Coastal Plains that constitute the territory of modern Eritrea remained separate from Abyssinia. James Bruce, a Scottish explorer who set out from Massawa to trace the source of the Blue Nile River in Lake Tana in 1770 reported that the “Medre-Bahri and Abyssinia were distinctly separate political entities constantly at war with each other”.

No Abyssinian ruler or invader, including Ras Alula, ever dominated the entire Medre Bahri or reached the shores of the Red Sea during the period from the fall of Axum in the 8^th century to the federation of Eritrea with Ethiopia in 1952. 

During the immediate precolonial era, however, the land of Medre Bahri faced another period of fragmentation due to internal dynamics and external encroachment. In the east, Ottoman Turkey, which had taken control of Massawa and Hirgigo in 1557, remained in occupation of the port city and the coastal plains until their transfer to Khedivate Egypt in 1872. In addition, Khedivate Egypt invaded the Gash-Setit Basin, occupied the Bogos region and established a garrison in Keren in the mid-1880s and invaded the Central Plateau. 

From the south, Abyssinia invaded the Central Plateau and battled Egypt whence Ras Alula, having tricked Ras Welde Michael Solomon into submission, set quarters in Asmera. Italy established a foothold in the Bay of Asseb in the extreme southeast in 1869 from which it proceeded, at the behest of the British eager to forestall possible French expansion into Eritrea from Djibouti, to occupy the whole of Eritrea. In 1890, Italy declared Eritrea its first born (primo genito) African colony.  

The historical evidence posits the longstanding existence of Medre Bahri as a self-governing political entity autonomous of and in constant conflict with Abyssinia. Several rival kingdoms arose and fell in Abyssinia during the span of eleven centuries between the fall of the Empire of Axum and the advent of European colonial rule in the Horn of Africa. However, neither any of the rival kingdoms that arose and fell in Abyssinia during that era, nor any contemporary state today can justifiably claim to be the direct heir of the Empire of Axum. Nor can any of them rightly claim dominion over the Eritrean Red Sea coast. 

The incontestable historical fact is that no Abyssinian ruler or invader, including Ras Alula, ever dominated the entire Medre Bahri or reached the shores of the Red Sea during the period from the decline of the Axumite Empire in the 8^th century to the federation of Eritrea with Ethiopia in 1952.