Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed woke up one lazy Fall in 2023 and remembered that it’s time he spoke up about the tragedy of Ethiopia’s land-locked-ness and started pining for Ethiopia’s Sea. Among other things, Abiy Ahmed referred favorably (ዊዝደም ነው) to the claims of one 19th century General Alula Aba Nega* who apparently said the Red Sea is Ethiopia’s natural border. The next day, the Horn of Africa, which is always one degree of separation away from Failed State status, began churning. The argument was novel: Ethiopia is too big not to have permanent sea access and if the neighbors–Djibouti, Somaliland, Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan– don’t give Ethiopia one, then clearly it is the neighbors’ fault if a desperate Ethiopia of a future generation decides to get what was denied peacefully by war. We are not going to be prisoners of geography!
Geography spoke: the neighbors gave their answers. Djibouti (hell no: he wants a land corridor under Ethiopia’s sovereignty); Somaliland (Yes! No! Maybe!), Somalia (Never! Maybe! Let’s See), Eritrea (Don’t Be Provoked, Ignore It), Sudan (Ahmmm, we are busy.)
Thus, to the extent that people were tuning in to listen to what President Isaias Afwerki had to say in his interview with State media on July 19, the only interest was what he will say about Ethiopia. We already knew he wouldn’t say anything about Eritrea, and we already knew he was going to spend two hours talking about his Two Traumas. Since nobody can understand Isaias’s often-terrible decision-making process, we should spend a little time on his traumas that are stuck in his head, like a needle on an album groove.
The Isaias Traumas
Those of you who are employed in the administration of education know that one of the biggest challenges Instructors & Professors have is how to deliver the same instruction over and over and over without boring people to death. There is an entire industry dedicated to addressing this: professional development, peer reviews, curriculum update, gamification, new textbooks with updated information, student engagement. Isaias has no time for that. He is going to say the same thing, in the same boring way, over and over and over, completely oblivious to its impact on the audience. This is easy to do if you have a large, committed audience who hangs on to every word you say as if it is revealed knowledge from God.
1942: The first trauma happened when he was 4 years old. Every country that was a European colony got its independence but the victors of World War II denied Eritrea its independence. This terrible decision resulted in a long, bitter and lonely war that Eritreans waged peacefully (1941-1961) and violently (1961-1991) at considerable cost in lives wasted, maimed and uprooted and opportunities lost. This is not something he knows second hand but first hand: for most of Eritrea’s Armed Struggle he was the Secretary General of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), the organization that brought about Eritrea’s independence. After Eritrea’s independence, his attitude was “forgive and forget”–he talked Eritreans out of asking for reparations–but 80 years later, he has neither forgiven nor forgotten. This is because they keep wounding him by insisting he gets punished for behavior they had told him 12 times not to do but he insists on doing anyway. From his standpoint, ignoring them is perfectly logical: if he had listened to them, Eritrea would have never been an independent country. The lesson he learned is: Don’t listen to them: they will come around.
1991: The second trauma happened when he was about to become Eritrea’s president. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR/Soviet Union) dissolved the same year Eritrea gained its independence. This was not coincidental: USSR armed the country Eritrea was fighting against, Ethiopia, to the teeth enabling it to launch massive “Once-And-For-All” Campaigns throughout the 1980s, including use of chemical weapons and cluster bombs. By the late 1980s, the Soviets had told the Ethiopians there would be no more weapons and the pragmatic EPLF had concluded, “if the Europeans who invented Marxism couldn’t create the desired and decades-long-rehearsed Dictatorship of the Proletariat, what hope is there for it to work in Eritrea” which barely has any proletariat class? Naturally, they embraced Western liberalism including constitution with civil liberties, private press, student union, and privatization of State-owned enterprises, earning Eritrea praise from the Guardians of NeoLiberalism (Clinton etc)
2001: The third trauma occurred when he arrested half his closest colleagues. By 2001, with the neoliberals demanding that he implement the constitution, re-open the private press, free political prisoners, Isaias Afwerki was nostalgic for the USSR. The Cold War, with all its imperfections, was preferrable to the Unipolar world which was responsible for all the ills in the world, including loss of national sovereignty. Recall that one of the biggest points of contention between Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and EPLF ideologues was the nature of the Soviet Union. It is an imperial, reactionary force said TPLF which admired the purity of Albanian socialism; no, it is a progressive force that is making a mistake supporting Ethiopia’s Derg, said EPLF cadres. After all, the USSR had the right values: equality, stability, collective progress, women’s rights—even if the cost was repression, inefficiency, and suffering: a sacrifice Isaias was all too willing to make on behalf of the people for the sake of “nation building.” You won’t appreciate your sons and daughters perishing in endless wars, your niece disappearing, your nephews exiled, but your great great grandchildren will be appreciative of it when they are reading history, just as you do now when recalling the Armed Struggle.
Ethiopia
Two young Eritrean state media journalists with greying hair interviewing an aging President with pitch-black hair is one of those things that define the passage of time in Eritrea. There is an odd familiarity to it: it must be why North Koreans screech inconsolably when one of their Hereditary Tyrants passes away: it is the loss of the known.
The interviewers don’t have fresh questions, or follow-up, because the Press Proclamation is dead and there is nobody–no law, no journalism advocates, no human rights organization, no institution of any kind– to protect them if they ask the wrong questions. In fact, the reason it is the same two journalists, every year, who interview him is precisely because they know “the culture”–the unwritten rules of what one should and shouldn’t say.
For a journalist employed by a totalitarian State, the safest thing to do is to read to the President his own words from prior speeches back to him and ask him to elaborate. 90% of the time, the question will trigger one of his traumas and we will go back to World War II, Cold War, Unipolaralism, NGOs and how unfair it was that Sudan was split into two countries.
The question about Ethiopia followed the same formula: quoting back to him what he said on his Independence Day address on May 24. That speech itself followed the same formula: most of the time was dedicated to addressing The Trauma: Ethiopia was the last entry, an after-thought. In that speech, Isaias had described Ethiopia as a country hampered by internal divisions, economic fragility, and security challenges all caused by agents of the Unipolarists repackaging their poison under different guises: ethnic federalism, Prosperity, “Issue of Water”, “Nile and the Red Sea”, “Access to the Sea”, “Ideology of Orommuma” who are all too-willing to be the surrogates of the surrogates.
No, then as now, Eritrea was barely mentioned but he has already a book out with the title “My Struggle for The Eritrean and African People” so I hope you Eritreans are not offended. You are being selfish: he has to care about Niger and Mali too. In his address in May, Isaias had said that big changes are coming to Eritrea beginning the second half of 2025 but nobody believed him and, therefore, nobody is disappointed nothing has happened. We have tears to shed for Mali and Burkino Faso.
But seriously, Mr. President, why is there so much rehashing of ancient talk about access to Sea coming from some quarters with 130 million people? Why did Ethiopia file a complaint with the UN Secretary General and other institutions and countries against Eritrea?
Because there is no government in Ethiopia, nor a ruling party. Isaias told us that the whole reason we are in this current situation is due to ዕሽላዊ ዕንደራ of Ethiopia’s leaders. The country is run by an infantile adventurer practicing Infantile Adventurism. That’s why not just a war, but wars have been declared upon us. And whom do you think you are intimidating by talking about your 135 million population? Drones? Missiles? Planes? The psychological warfare you are waging is backfiring. Abiy thinks Isaias’s problem is that he is too old, and Isaias thinks that Abiy’s problems emanate from him being too childish.
We are not going to be prisoners of history! announced Isaias. Great: The Child doesn’t want to be a prisoner of geography and The Old Man doesn’t want to be a prisoner of history.
Then Isaias said those words which shifted my odds of war breaking out between Eritrea and Ethiopia from 49% (unlikely) to 51% (likely): “we have never willingly engaged in a war of expansion. Every war has been forced upon us. And if it comes, we face it.” Because everybody who is about to go to war says that.
But Why?
If there is no government, nor a ruling party in Ethiopia, why did Abiy Ahmed suddenly start talking about the Red Sea five years into his administration? To hear Abiy describe it, how Ethiopia became landlocked is something that really disappoints/saddens him (በጣም ያስቆጨኛል) and, he said without presenting any evidence at all, that he had expressed this sentiment 15 years earlier. Notwithstanding the facts that Ethiopia barely had any control of the Sea in the last 500 years, Abiy continues to tell the narrative that Ethiopia always had its sea port, from time immemorial, it is just that the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) that handed our ports to Eritrea and rendered us landlocked. በጣም ያስቆጨኛል::
Isaias has a different story: Abiy is just enforcing the wishes of UAE President (Mohammed Bin Zayed, or MBZ), although he didn’t mention him by name. The man has huge ambitions to control the entire sea–the African coastal areas of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean all the way to Dar es Salam in Tanzania. Abiy is a mere hired hand.
“MBZ? You mean the same guy you gave the keys to Assab to establish a military base to bomb Yemen and disrupt the lives of Eritrean Afars,” I asked but I am not a licensed journalist so he didn’t hear me.
So, that’s it. Ethiopia doesn’t want to become a prisoner of geography, and Eritrea doesn’t want to become prisoner of history. Therefore, Ethiopia will do whatever it has to do to gain sea access (except, apparently, ratify the one thing it needs: The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and by Sea Access it means land corridor under its sovereignty to control its Navy and trade. And Eritrea will do whatever it has to do, including to partner with the one party that it told us are the least reliable, most treacherous organization in the world: TPLF. The same party that Eritrea wasted untold (literally: we still don’t know) lives to protect Ethiopia from it.
Unless some Big Government that both countries listen to is involved–USA, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia–the crawl to war appears to be here to stay because both see each other as an existential threat. Isaias is not going to bother Trump in 2025 he said, out of respect for Trump’s priorities. As for waiting for the Habesha People to say “ENOUGH!!” that is a fight against the most stubborn quality they have: their warrior culture and their extreme deference to their leaders.
* From the Department of Irony: Abiy’s selection of Ras Alula as a source of admirable quote–Ethiopia’s natural border is the Sea–was 2 years after the Tigray Defense Forces (TDF) enforced Tigray’s “natural borders” by evicting Ethiopia’s army from Tigray. The campaign was called “Operation Ras Alula.”
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