This article rests on a selective interpretation of international law, an incomplete account of the history of the #Horn of #Africa, and a troubling attempt to recast legitimate concerns regarding #sovereignty and territorial integrity as evidence of political insecurity rather than lawful state responsibility. It is therefore necessary to address several of the issues raised in this selectively framed piece.

The title itself is particularly revealing. It reflects an increasingly common tendency in certain Prosperity Party (PP) political and intellectual circles to delegitimize Eritrea’s invocation of sovereignty by portraying it not as a foundational principle of international law, but as a form of concealment, obstruction, or paranoia. That framing is deeply problematic.

Sovereignty is not something #Eritrea must “hide behind.” Sovereignty is the cornerstone of the modern international legal order, enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and the Constitutive Act of the African Union. For African states in particular, many of which emerged from colonial partition, territorial disputes, occupation, and prolonged external interference, the defense of sovereignty and territorial integrity cannot be dismissed as rhetorical posturing; these are existential legal principles rooted in painful historical experience.

For #Eritrea, these concerns are not theoretical. Eritrea emerged from a long anti-colonial and anti-annexation struggle following federation, annexation, and decades of war. #Ethiopia was not merely a neighboring state in #Eritrean historical memory; it was Eritrea’s former colonizer. That historical experience inevitably shapes Eritrea’s understanding of sovereignty, borders, and national survival.

As the Amharic proverb aptly states: “የወጋ ቢረሳ የተወጋ አይረሳም” — “The one who inflicted the wound may forget, but the one who was wounded never does.” The proverb captures an essential reality often ignored in external analyses of #Eritrea: historical memory shapes national security consciousness. States and peoples that endured annexation, war, occupation, territorial disputes, sanctions, and prolonged external pressure do not, and cannot, approach questions of sovereignty lightly or abstractly.

From an #Eritrean perspective, sovereignty is therefore not an abstract diplomatic slogan or tactical political shield. It is inseparable from the sacrifices made during one of Africa’s longest liberation struggles and from the determination to prevent any return, direct or indirect, to arrangements perceived as compromising Eritrea’s hard-won independence and territorial integrity.

To suggest that Eritrea’s insistence on sovereignty somehow masks illegitimate motives effectively reverses the legal burden. It implies that smaller states defending internationally recognized borders must justify their concerns, while larger regional powers, advancing inflammatory hegemonistic ambitions and openly invoking “historical rights,” “natural entitlement,” or “strategic necessity” regarding maritime access, are treated as merely pursuing economic pragmatism.

From Eritrea’s perspective, the issue has never been whether Ethiopia, as a landlocked state, possesses legitimate developmental interests in commercial maritime access. Eritrea has never disputed that principle. International law already recognizes the rights of landlocked states to negotiated access and freedom of transit. The issue is whether such ambitions are being articulated and pursued in a manner consistent with the UN Charter, sovereign equality, and the prohibition against the threat or use of force.

Article 2(4) of the @UN Charter prohibits not only the use of force, but also the threat of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of states. International law does not require states to wait for military invasion before taking seriously rhetoric, strategic signaling, or political discourse carrying coercive implications. Preventive vigilance regarding credible coercive signaling is fully consistent with the sovereign right of states to safeguard their territorial integrity and political independence.

Against this backdrop, Eritrea’s concerns regarding Ethiopia’s increasingly assertive discourse on Red Sea access are neither irrational nor propagandistic. Senior Prosperity Party (PP) officials, including Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, have repeatedly framed maritime access in existential and revisionist terms, invoking notions of “historical rights,” “natural entitlement,” and strategic inevitability. #Ethiopia|n political discourse surrounding Red Sea access has at times gone even further, with prominent figures openly declaring that Ethiopia would obtain maritime access “peacefully if possible and militarily if necessary.”

This rhetoric has not emerged in isolation. It has been accompanied by a broader climate of increasingly normalized irredentist discourse on Ethiopian social and political media platforms, including circulation of altered maps depicting Assab and portions of sovereign Eritrean territory as part of Ethiopia. Independent fact-checking organizations documented multiple instances in which maps were digitally manipulated to incorporate Assab into Ethiopian territory amid heightened public debate surrounding #RedSea access.

Equally troubling were images and videos circulated from military-linked events and social media accounts showing #Ethiopia|n military figures displaying maps incorporating portions of southern #Eritrea into #Ethiopia during public ceremonies associated with special forces mobilization and nationalist messaging. Whether officially sanctioned or not, the widespread dissemination of such imagery contributed to a political environment in which revisionist territorial narratives increasingly entered mainstream discourse.

Taken together, these developments cannot reasonably be dismissed as harmless nationalist symbolism. In a region with a long history of interstate war, contested borders, and unresolved territorial grievances, such rhetoric and imagery carry legal and security implications that responsible states are entitled to take seriously under the precautionary logic embedded within Article 2(4) of the @UN Charter.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed himself publicly characterized Red Sea access as an existential issue for Ethiopia and suggested that the matter could not remain unresolved indefinitely. International media and regional analysts increasingly warned that such rhetoric, combined with military mobilization and nationalist agitation surrounding Assab, risked contributing to renewed regional instability and fears of interstate confrontation.

The 2024 Memorandum of Understanding between Ethiopia and #Somaliland further heightened tensions, particularly as Somalia formally rejected the arrangement as an infringement upon its sovereignty and territorial integrity. These developments underscore precisely why questions of maritime access in the Horn cannot be divorced from wider legal and security considerations.

Equally problematic is the article’s selective treatment of the 1998–2000 Eritrea–Ethiopia border conflict.Eritrea’s borders were not undefined or ambiguous constructs. They were established through the 1900, 1902, and 1908 treaties concluded between imperial Italy and imperial Ethiopia. These treaties formed the legal basis upon which the Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC), established under the Algiers Agreement, based its delimitation ruling.

Critically, the EEBC’s final and binding decision awarded Badme, the principal flashpoint and casus belli of the 1998–2000 conflict, unequivocally to #Eritrea. That fact is legally fundamental. It demonstrates that the territorial dispute centered on areas ultimately determined by the competent international arbitral body to fall within Eritrean sovereignty.

The article also misrepresents the role of the Eritrea–Ethiopia Claims Commission by implying that it definitively adjudicated the broader origins of the war. As legal scholars, including analyses published in the European Journal of International Law, have noted, the Claims Commission was not specifically mandated to comprehensively determine the origins of the conflict. The independent investigative mechanism envisaged under Article 3 of the Algiers Agreement for that purpose was never constituted.

Thus, no authoritative international process ever fully examined the broader antecedents of the conflict, including tensions arising from contested administration, local clashes, militia activity, mapping disputes, and allegations of encroachments into sovereign Eritrean territory during the 1990s, as well as the unprovoked assault by Ethiopian troops against an #Eritrean army unit in the Badme area on 5 May 1998. What was conclusively determined, however, was the territorial issue itself. And on that question, the #EEBC ruled in #Eritrea’s favor.

The defining legal and political crisis of the post-war period therefore was not Eritrea’s rejection of international law, but Ethiopia’s refusal, for nearly two decades, to implement a binding arbitral ruling it had expressly agreed would be “final and binding.” This remains one of the most consequential contradictions in discussions surrounding the rule of law in the Horn of Africa.

At stake was not merely a bilateral border dispute, but the integrity of international arbitration itself. If states may disregard binding arbitral rulings when politically inconvenient, the credibility of peaceful dispute resolution mechanisms under international law is fundamentally undermined.

The article’s treatment of the 2009 sanctions regime is similarly incomplete. From #Eritrea’s perspective, the sanctions imposed under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1907 emerged from a highly politicized process shaped by Ethiopia’s manipulation of #IGAD and the @AfricanUnion. The allegations underpinning the sanctions were strongly contested and were never established through an independent judicial process meeting accepted evidentiary standards.

For many Eritreans, the sanctions episode remains a troubling example of the instrumentalization of multilateral institutions for geopolitical purposes. Indeed, many #Africa|n observers viewed the process with deep discomfort, recognizing the damaging precedent of one #Africa|n state mobilizing punitive international measures against another amid contested allegations. The eventual lifting of sanctions in 2018 further underscored the fundamentally political nature of the process.

The article also presents Eritrea’s National Service Program in a highly reductionist manner. While external narratives often portray the program solely through a militarized lens, Eritrea’s national service system has long included substantial civic and developmental components. National Service graduates contribute across ministries, schools, colleges, hospitals, infrastructure projects, local administrations, and diplomatic missions abroad.

More importantly, the statutory 18-month duration of National Service was prolonged largely as a consequence of the prolonged no-war-no-peace environment and continued security threats emanating from unresolved tensions with successive Ethiopian governments.

At the same time, Ethiopia itself has, in recent years, undergone extensive military mobilization, major arms acquisitions, and repeated internal armed conflicts across multiple regions. Numerous international organizations, media investigations, and even #Ethiopian institutions have documented serious abuses in regions such as Amhara and Oromia, including extrajudicial killings, drone strikes affecting civilians, arbitrary detentions, mass displacement, and attacks on civilian infrastructure.

A balanced and credible analysis cannot selectively invoke human rights concerns only where they reinforce preferred geopolitical narratives while minimizing or contextualizing large-scale violence elsewhere.

More broadly, #Eritrea’s foreign policy has consistently emphasized sovereign equality, non-interference, regional ownership, and resistance to hegemonic arrangements in the Horn of Africa. #Eritrea’s invocation of sovereignty is not “camouflage”; it reflects the historical experience of a state that emerged from one of Africa’s longest liberation struggles and subsequently endured war, sanctions, prolonged territorial occupation, and sustained external pressure.

Regional integration and economic cooperation in the Horn are both necessary and achievable. Eritrea has never opposed negotiated frameworks for trade, connectivity, or maritime access grounded in mutual consent and international law. What Eritrea rejects, correctly, is the normalization of rhetoric implying that the strategic ambitions or demographic weight of larger states entitle them to exceptional arrangements at the expense of the sovereignty and security concerns of smaller neighbors.

Ultimately, the issue is not opposition to Ethiopia’s development. It is the insistence that all regional ambitions remain firmly anchored within the principles of international law: sovereign equality, territorial integrity, non-interference, pacta sunt servanda, and the prohibition against coercion enshrined in the Charter of the @UN.

As for future Eritrea–Ethiopia relations, or “settlement,” as the author characterizes it, prudence, realism, and historical experience counsel patience rather than premature and unrealistic optimism.

Genuine peace and stable relations between neighboring states cannot be manufactured through diplomatic slogans, external pressure, or intellectual wishful thinking. They must emerge organically, gradually, and on the basis of mutual respect, consistency, reciprocity, and trust built over time.

Lasting peace cannot be rushed, especially after the considerable goodwill and historic opportunity extended in 2018 were ultimately undermined by a leadership in Ethiopia that failed to consolidate reconciliation internally, regionally, and institutionally. Sustainable peace in the Horn of Africa will require seriousness, strategic patience, and above all, an #Ethiopia that is first at peace with itself.

By Ambassador Sofia Tesfamariam
Published by AS Geopolitical Analysis