Malex

MANUFACTURING A DISPUTE TO FORCE A NEGOTIATION Ethiopia’s Prosperity Party has been constructing a case for the Red Sea since early 2020. It did not begin with the Prime Minister’s 2023 speech. Activists were already arguing that Ethiopia should seize the Red Sea by force. Nothing in the current campaign is new, and nothing in it is accidental. The case rests on two claims. The first treats the annexation of Eritrea, an act Eritreans never accepted and always regarded as illegal, as evidence of an Ethiopian right to the sea. The second asserts that Eritrea’s ancient history belongs not to the people of ancient Adulis but to modern Shoan Ethiopia. Together they reverse the order of things. They make Eritreans appear as late arrivals in a land that supposedly belongs more to someone from Wollega, Arsi, Ogaden or Gambella than to the people who have lived there since the early first millennium BC. Eritreans have been on this coast for three thousand years. The annexation itself was justified by twisting that history. None of this is unprecedented. In the 1940s Ethiopia described both Eritrea and Italian Somaliland as lost provinces, and later applied the same language to Djibouti. When Somalia and Djibouti proved unreachable, it concentrated on Eritrea. Through a historical accident, Eritrea was handed over. That decision has cost both peoples dearly for three-quarters of a century and ought to be a source of regret, even in Ethiopia. Instead the present government is using an earlier wrong to justify a new one. The purpose of the noise is to compel Eritrea to negotiate over its own sovereign territory. PP floods every available channel, domestic and international, with the claim until it begins to sound plausible. It then waits for outside parties, alarmed enough to summon both countries, to press Eritrea into concessions. This has been the plan from the start. War remains unlikely, but if fighting occurred PP appears to believe that any Eritrean territory seized would serve the same purpose, a bargaining chip for sovereign access to the sea. Eritrea has nothing to place on that table. Its border was settled long ago, most recently by the Algiers Agreement and the Boundary Commission ruling that followed more than twenty years ago. Every argument Ethiopia advances today was already heard and decided. Expansionist Ethiopia can speak of the Red Sea for five years or for a hundred as it has done for 80 years. Insistence creates no title and should never be allowed to. If PP genuinely believes Ethiopia risks becoming a failed state without access to an Eritrean port, despite five neighbouring countries through which it can reach the sea, it can request the peaceful use of Assab. Before doing so it would first need to retract, publicly and without qualification, every statement claiming sovereign Eritrean territory. A neighbour who asserts ownership of your property cannot be welcomed into your house. If PP truly believed Assab alone stood between Ethiopia and failure, importing through a tiny port is not going to save it. In reality Ethiopia is not on the verge of collapse because it does not own Assab. The claim was never meant to withstand scrutiny. It was meant to alarm external actors who lack the time to examine every inflated assertion but possess the power to impose outcomes. Expansionist fever of this kind has to be contained if the Horn is to have a period of peace.