Research and Information Department
Ministry of Foreign Affairs

The recent flurry of statements, articles, and commentaries circulating through think-piece echo chambers and partisan blogs, amplified by the theatrical stand-up performances of Ethiopia’s leadership and its surrogates, reveals not strength, but a profound crisis of narrative. What is unfolding is a political establishment struggling to reconcile long-held illusions with present realities. In doing so, it projects a distorted understanding of Ethiopia’s normative rights to access the sea and of international law, conveniently omitting its own 75-year history of Red Sea ambitions, destabilizing regional policies, scorched-earth tactics at home and abroad, and the immense human cost of these actions. The latest wave of performances by Prosperity Party cadres epitomizes this crisis.

This orchestrated chorus of statements and reports is a futile attempt to recast Ethiopia as a de facto Red Sea key stakeholder. Its “sovereign” port-access arguments, framed through selective invocations of security, historical memory, and economic necessity, are legally untenable. They deliberately omit foundational facts: the inviolability of State sovereignty; the African Union and United Nations Charters’ norms on territorial integrity; Ethiopia’s two-decade occupation of sovereign Eritrean territory; and the conflation of legitimate development needs with extraterritorial claims no regional or international framework can legitimize.

Ethiopia’s latest narrative laundering, wrapped in appeals to security, stability, economic necessity, and “kinship”, is a calculated attempt to transform a strictly bilateral matter into a regional obligation. This is not merely misguided; it is strategically dangerous.

At the core of this campaign lies a deliberate identity construction designed to legitimize claims for “sovereign access” to the Red Sea, using security discourse as a Trojan horse to smuggle in political ambitions that supersede established borders and sovereign arrangements. By laundering these ambitions through the language of regional necessity, Ethiopia seeks to normalize exceptional remedies that international law categorically rejects and that no sovereign state can be compelled to entertain.

What is conspicuously absent from the many Prosperity Party narratives is no accident. These omissions are deliberate. Never mentioned are Eritrea’s sovereign right to its coast, its internationally recognized borders, the Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission’s final and binding 2002 decision that conclusively settled the purported border dispute over Badme and its environs, or Ethiopia’s subsequent, 18-year, illegal occupation of sovereign Eritrean territory in open defiance of the Algiers Agreement and international law.

Instead, attention-grabbing threats such as piracy, or subsea cable vulnerabilities are invoked as pretexts to argue that Ethiopia must “protect regional commerce,” thereby justifying a maritime presence and claiming a so-called right to “sovereign access the Red Sea”. This follows a historic pattern in which security anxieties are weaponized to rationalize territorial expansion.

Coastal states bear primary responsibility for the security, management, and stewardship of their own coastlines. Ethiopia, as a landlocked state, cannot assume the role of Viceroy over Eritrea’s sovereign maritime domain. Yet, in a predictable pattern, these threats are framed not as genuine calls for regional cooperation but as a pretext for advancing Ethiopian illicit claims. Proponents suggest that Ethiopia’s need to “protect regional commerce” legitimizes a permanent maritime presence along Eritrea’s coast, a reinterpretation that would effectively override Eritrea’s sovereignty.

International law recognizes that a landlocked State has a right of access to the sea through the transit States. However, this right is conditional and must be secured through mutually negotiated agreements and contracts with the coastal state. It does not grant sovereignty, control, or authority to deploy military or permanent security forces in the littoral State’s territory. Attempts to reframe conditional access rights as a license for unilateral maritime presence distort both the spirit and letter of the law. Eritrea’s internationally recognized borders and its sovereign prerogative over its coast remain inviolable.  Any effort to transform these conditional rights into a mechanism for Ethiopian oversight or enforcement along Eritrean waters constitutes a direct challenge to Eritrea’s sovereignty and sets a dangerous precedent for regional maritime governance.

At its core, Ethiopia’s effort to recast its access as a “regional necessity” is not about security or stability. It is an attempt to reshape regional norms and reinterpret international law to accommodate a geopolitical aspiration long constrained by history, treaties, and the sovereign rights of its neighbors. By framing its ambitions as a “regional obligation,” Addis Ababa seeks to transform a bilateral matter into a perceived collective interest, obscuring the reality that it is pursuing unilateral expansion at the expense of Eritrea’s internationally recognized sovereignty.

As intimated above, international law is clear and unequivocal: access for a landlocked state must be negotiated through mutually agreed, binding arrangements with the coastal State. Sovereignty cannot be circumvented by power politics or coercive rhetoric. Attempts to establish “sovereign corridors,” port rights, or special zones without Eritrea’s consent would constitute a direct violation of the principle of uti possidetis, which preserves inherited colonial borders, as well as Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits the use or threat of force against the territorial integrity of a State.

Moreover, Ethiopia’s framing dangerously conflates regional security with unilateral entitlement. By invoking threats such as piracy, instability in the Red Sea, or conflicts in Yemen, Addis Ababa seeks to portray its ambitions as a collective good, masking the strategic reality. This narrative laundering, a recurring tactic in Ethiopia’s foreign policy, repurposes historical grievances and security anxieties to rationalize expansionist aims while sidelining the legal rights and sovereign prerogatives of Eritrea.

Beneath the theatrics lies a deeper reality: an abnormal psyche conditioned to view maritime entitlement not as ambition but as destiny. Certain Ethiopian elites have cultivated an obsession with the Red Sea so deeply ingrained that it functions as an ideological reflex, passed from the imperial court to the Prosperity Party. Its foundations are political mythology, not law or geography: a conviction that maritime access is Ethiopia’s “right” and that any obstacle is an “injustice”.  Today, PP cadres simply repackage old fantasies as “integration,” “shared security,” or economic necessity. The message remains unchanged: Ethiopia’s untenable ambitions take precedence over the sovereignty of others.

Ethiopia has never held a lawful sovereign presence on the Red Sea, except during its occupation of Eritrea under the federation and the subsequent unilateral annexation, neither of which was lawful or internationally recognized. For decades, Addis Ababa sought to treat Eritrean territory as its own, ignoring the will of the Eritrean people and international law. Any claims today that Ethiopia possesses a “right” to the Red Sea are a continuation of this historical revisionism. International law is unambiguous: sovereignty over coastal territory belongs to the littoral state, and access for landlocked neighbors must be secured through mutually negotiated agreements, not imposed through coercion, force, or political rhetoric. Ethiopia’s attempts to reframe its historical occupation as entitlement cannot obscure the simple truth: Eritrea alone holds lawful sovereignty over its coastline.

This historical record of unlawful occupation forms the backdrop for the selective narratives that the PP is promoting today, revealing a persistent pattern of distortion and denial.

Ethiopia’s Foreign Minister Gedion recently delivered a sweeping narrative on Ethiopia–Eritrea relations, stitching together selective memory, legal half-truths, and political nostalgia. His account omits key developments that fueled the 75-year conflict, causing his narrative to collapse under its contradictions. When he claims that “the Ethiopia–Eritrean file seems to be one of the perennial flashpoints,” he deliberately sidesteps the root cause: Ethiopia’s occupation of sovereign Eritrean territories. Backed by external patrons, Ethiopia engineered and later dismantled the UN-mandated federation imposed on Eritrea, undermining its right to decolonization, abrogating international obligations, annexing Eritrean territory in violation of UN resolutions, and becoming the first African state in the modern era to colonize another African territory,  actions that forced Eritrea into a 30-year struggle for independence.

After Eritrea’s independence in 1991, it was Ethiopia that waged the expansionist war of 1998–2000. Though the Algiers Agreements ended the conflict, Ethiopia violated them by occupying sovereign Eritrean territories for 18 years, defying the EEBC’s final and binding decisions. Ethiopia also played out its surrogate role in orchestrating nine years of UN Security Council sanctions against Eritrea. This legacy of unaddressed violations, not any supposed Eritrean “pathology”, is the real “perennial flashpoint.”

The binding legal reality remains the EEBC’s final and binding decisions, which Ethiopia rejected for almost two decades. The EEBC placed Badme, the casus belli, inside Eritrea. Ethiopia accepted the Algiers Agreement affirming these decisions as “final and binding,” yet repudiated the ruling upon issuance. No state can invoke international law in one breath and discard it in the next; credibility begins with honoring treaties.

For 25 years, Ethiopia has waged an intensive smear campaign to distort international narratives on Eritrea, framing Eritrea as a “problem” to mask its own ambitions. The recent campaign is merely its latest iteration. The Minister’s romanticization of Ethiopia’s “courage” in 2018 and its role in “rehabilitating Eritrea’s international standing” is equally misleading. Eritrea’s so-called “rehabilitation” was not Ethiopian benevolence; it was the international community recognizing that the sanctions lacked credible evidence. The Monitoring Group repeatedly stated it could not substantiate the allegations.

Ethiopia played its part in manufacturing these narratives, working in conjunction with actors in Brussels, Washington, and various multilateral forums who harboured a negative agenda against Eritrea. The irony is unmistakable: the same State that once worked hand in glove with powers intent on isolating Eritrea now seeks to claim credit for “repairing” the very damage it helped engineer.

Revisionism peaks with the claim that “the Eritrean colony was deliberately created to block Ethiopia’s access to the sea”, a historically false and legally absurd notion. Eritrea’s borders were established through international treaties and in accordance with normative State-formation processes in modern day African nations.  Eritrea is not an anti-Ethiopian construct; it emerged through protracted historical and legal processes; occupation under various colonizers; UN-imposed federation, resistance to illegal annexation, an internationally supervised referendum, and UN admission.

The accusation that Eritrea “acts as an instrument for all forces hostile to Ethiopia” is the most laughable of all. Ethiopia’s own history shows a consistent pattern of external instrumentalization, from the Korean War to Cold War alliances to post-9/11 militarism, leveraging global powers to pursue regional dominance. Ethiopia’s complicity and orchestration of the 2009 UN sanctions, using the AU, IGAD, and Western patrons, is the clearest example. Projection cannot replace accountability. But the rhetoric continues…

In another article, Biruk Mekonnen, Ethiopia’s Ambassador to the UK and Ireland claims, Ethiopia stands for:

“…sovereignty, mutual respect, and non-interference in the internal affairs of other states…”

Yet if Ethiopia truly adhered to these principles, it would not issue a continual stream of misleading statements on “sovereign access to the sea,” nor perpetuate its daily barrage of anti-Eritrea narratives. Respecting Eritrea’s sovereignty would have sufficed.

He further writes:

“…The Horn of Africa and the Red Sea corridor deserve genuine partnership, but partnership built on respect, not paternalism; on collaboration, not competition…The only durable stability is that which emerges from mutual respect, development, and the spirit of the African Union, where sovereignty, equality, and noninterference are not selective principles but shared commitments…”

These sentiments ring hollow against Ethiopia’s record, from interventions and lobbying to vilification campaigns.

Mekonnen notes that “stability” and “security” often mask “old ambitions dressed in new attire.” No State in the region has deployed such language more consistently than Ethiopia to obscure hegemonic aims. Imperial, military, and federal governments alike have framed expansionist policies as “unity,” “stability,” or “African solutions.”

Similarly, Zerihun Abebe, Director General for African Affairs at Ethiopia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, reveals the deeper psychology of the ruling party. He argues that:

“…Ethiopia is closely linked to its neighbors through shared peoples, resources, and infrastructure…and if it grows in isolation, it risks becoming a ‘lonely decoration.’…”

This is another favourite refrain by PP’s senior cadres, who now dress expansionist intent in the language of “interdependence,” as though neighbouring States must somehow adjust their sovereign rights to accommodate Ethiopia’s ambitions. It is, in truth, a recycled version of the old “kinship” narrative once used to rationalize territorial claims. Haile Selassie invoked this same rhetoric, insisting that Eritreans were “Ethiopians by race and tradition,” and that they were “Ethiopians in blood, language, and faith”, to justify annexation and secure unfettered access to the Red Sea.

What Ethiopia now brands as an “Afar question” is, in reality, a deliberate identity fabrication designed to erode Eritrea’s territorial integrity and manufacture a pretext for sovereign claims to the Red Sea. By politicizing Afar identity across borders, reducing a proud people to geopolitical instruments, Addis Ababa is attempting to naturalize the idea that “Afar kinship” entitles Ethiopia to corridors, ports, or territory inside Eritrea

This mirrors the old imperial script: Haile Selassie invoked cultural affinity to justify federation, then annexation; the Prosperity Party recycles that logic under the guise of regional stability. Yet Eritrea’s Afar communities are not pawns in a maritime chessboard, nor do shared ethnic ties dissolve the sanctity of international borders. Eritrea’s coast and its sovereign rights remain inviolable. Ethiopia’s attempt to repackage expansionist ambition as communal protection or regional necessity is not only historically dishonest, but also a direct threat to legal order in the Horn.

Despite these tenuous claims of kinship, successive Ethiopian regimes committed widespread violence in Eritrea: gross atrocities, destruction of villages, burning of farmland, and dismantling of social and economic life. The “kinship” narrative masked domination, not unity. Its revival today serves the same purpose: softening expansionist aims with cultural language. Just as Haile Selassie instrumentalized kinship to colonize Eritrea, the PP leadership is now instrumentalizing Afar identity to advance geopolitical objectives.

Cross-border kinship exists across Africa; it does not confer a right to annex. Indeed, Ethiopia itself would be severely balkanized if this logic is pushed to its limits.  Oil-rich Ogaden would be incorporated into Somalia; Benishangul into South Sudan etc. By invoking Afar identity, Ethiopia seeks to frame Eritrea’s sovereign coastline as a natural entitlement. Statehood and littoral status are legal facts, not demographic or emotional constructs. Ethiopia’s size does not convert a landlocked state into a littoral one.

PP’s latest campaign for “dialogue” is disingenuous. Even as it speaks the language of peace, it amasses weapons and openly promises to use “millions” of Ethiopian lives to “overpower” Eritrea’s small population and seize sovereign Eritrean territories. A regime that treats its youth as expendable assets, human fuel for geopolitical ambition, cannot be trusted. Such rhetoric exposes not a commitment to dialogue, but a readiness to sacrifice its own people in pursuit of territorial revisionism. Despite decades of aggression and condescension, Eritrea has upheld its sovereignty. By contrast, the Prosperity Party continues to burn bridges, undermining prospects for peace for Ethiopians who seek development, not conflict.

The Prosperity Party’s leadership is touting the Medemer philosophy, presenting it as the definitive playbook for peace, stability, and prosperity in the region. Its record tells a starkly different story. Over the past few years, it has brought nothing but death, destruction, and the displacement of millions. Beneath the glossy façade lies an Ethiopia teetering on the edge, imploding under the weight of corruption, crippling debt, and governance failures.

In this context, Foreign Minister Gedion’s mockery of the Nakfa Principles as a “syndrome” is revealing. Nakfa embodies self-reliance, discipline, resilience, and national sacrifice, the very values that have allowed Eritrea to maintain stability and sovereignty despite decades of external aggression. By dismissing Nakfa as a “syndrome,” Gedion exposes not Eritrea’s shortcomings, but Ethiopia’s discomfort with a neighbor whose discipline, independence, and cohesive national ethos it cannot easily comprehend. Where Medemer remains a rhetorical project, Nakfa is a lived reality: a blueprint of survival, governance, and unwavering defense of the people and the state.