Abiy’s Document Hunt: He Seems to Have Misplaced the Truth

by David Yeh

Abiy Ahmed now resembles a drunken sailor adrift in his own storm of lies and delusions, staggering without direction, shouting commands to ghosts no one else can see. He lurches through a sea of confusion, desperate, delusional, and dangerously close to sinking beneath the weight of his own deceit.

Fano is seizing Amhara lands, his army is captured by the thousands, Ogaden, Afar, and Oromia are on fire, Tigray in limbo, the nation crumbling yet he dreams of “occupying Eritrean ports.”

In a brazen act of deception, Abiy Ahmed stood before his docile parliament and claimed that he had scoured every archive in Addis Ababa—the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Cabinet minutes, and parliamentary records—yet found no evidence that Ethiopia had ever decided to “give up the Red Sea.”

The performance was less an inquiry than a political stunt, crafted to pin the blame on the EPRDF government—and, more precisely, on the TPLF. But Abiy was not searching for truth; he was staging a denial. The irony is that he himself had already acknowledged, in writing and before the world, that the Red Sea is not his to claim.

Abiy Ahmed has deliberately inflamed tensions by declaring that there exists “no official record or institutional decision” showing how Ethiopia lost access to the Red Sea. In making this claim, he is not engaging in historical inquiry—he is questioning the very legitimacy of Eritrea’s existence. Such statements are not slips of the tongue; they are reckless provocations.

Abiy must be held accountable—for his words, his distortions, and the dangerous narratives he is unleashing. His conduct is socially corrosive, politically reckless, diplomatically irresponsible, and morally indefensible.

Now, let us refresh his memory with a few undeniable historical facts going way back to the beginning, as Ethiopia was in labor to be born :

• Treaty of Addis Ababa that abrogated the Wichale Treaty where Italy abandoned its claim of a protectorate over Ethiopia and recognized Ethiopia as a sovereign nation, and Ethiopia recognized Eritrea as an Italian colony. (October 26, 1896)
• Treaty on Border Delimitation of the Central Sector (July 10, 1900)
• Treaty on Border Delimitation of the Western Sector (May 15, 1902)
• Treaty on Border Delimitation of the Eastern Sector (May 16, 1908).
• Federation of the State of Eritrea with Ethiopia (came into effect September 11, 1952)
• Annexation of Eritrea by Ethiopia (November 14, 1962)
• Eritrea was liberated (May 24, 1991)
• UN observed referendum (April 23-25, 1993)
• Algiers Agreement (December 12, 2000)
• EEBC final and binding delimitation decision (April 13, 2002)
• EEBC final and binding demarcation (November 30, 2007)
• Last but not least Joint Declaration of Respecting each other’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, peace and friendship of July 9, 2018 (Asmara, Eritrea), and September 16, 2018 (Jeddah, KSA).

On July 9, 2018, Abiy signed the Joint Declaration of Peace and Friendship between Eritrea and Ethiopia in Asmara—a document that explicitly accepted the final and binding decision of the Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC) and called for unconditional implementation. Two months later, on September 16, 2018, Abiy had reaffirmed that commitment by signing the Agreement on Peace, Friendship, and Comprehensive Cooperation between Ethiopia and Eritrea in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, before an audience of global witnesses: UN Secretary-General António Guterres, AU Commission Chair Moussa Faki Mahamat, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan.

It was not a secret meeting in the dark; it was all over the news. It was also an agreement hailed by the United Nations Security Council itself, recorded in its official communiqués. As then–Council President, UN Ambassador to the UN, Nikki R. Haley announced in the Security Council’s press statement, welcomed the agreement as a decisive act of peace between two sovereign nations with the following words.

“The members of the Security Council welcomed the Agreement on Peace, Friendship and Comprehensive Cooperation signed by the President of the State of Eritrea and the Prime Minister of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia on 16 September 2018, in Jeddah and expressed appreciation to the role played by His Majesty King Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud of Saudi Arabia, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, and by the Government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in facilitating this agreement.  They took note of the commitment of the two countries to open a new era of peace, friendship and comprehensive cooperation as well as promote regional peace and security. The normalization of relations between Ethiopia and Eritrea is a boost for peace and security in the Horn of Africa region and on the continent as a whole.instead.”

The Jeddah Agreement of September 16, 2018, officially titled the Agreement on Peace, Friendship, and Comprehensive Cooperation between Eritrea and Ethiopia, formally ended the state of war between the two nations and opened a new chapter of bilateral relations. Among its key provisions—most notably Article 4—the parties committed to: Implement the final and binding 2002 Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC) decision.

The accord was grounded in the EEBC’s internationally recognized ruling that settled the boundary question once and for all. True to his color Abiy Ahmed is now into duplicity and revisionism.  Unless the Prime Minister suffers from political amnesia, he cannot feign ignorance and blame the EPRDF or the TPLF. He, with his own signature, on the Jeddah Agreement affirmed Eritrea’s sovereignty and statehood and that he has no legal claim to a coastline along the Red Sea.  What he now denies, he had endorsed before the world.

Full text of the agreement reached between ERITREA and Ethiopia a.k.a Jeddah Accord follows:

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Agreement On Peace, Friendship And Comprehensive Cooperation Between The Federal Democratic Republic Of Ethiopia And The State Of Eritrea

The Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia and the State of Eritrea hereinafter referred to as the Two Parties;

• Considering the close bonds of geography, history, culture and religion between the two countries and their peoples;
• Respecting each other’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity;
• Desiring to achieve lasting peace and cement their historical ties to achieve their lofty objectives;
• Determined to establish comprehensive cooperation on the basis of complementarity and synergy;
• Determined further to contribute actively to regional and global peace and security;
• Reaffirming the Joint Declaration on Peace and Friendship that they signed on July 9, 2018 in Asmara;
• Reiterating their commitment to the principles and purposes of the Charter of the United Nations;

This Agreement was made at Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on September 16, 2018 in two original copies in Amharic, Tigrinya, Arabic and English languages; in case of discrepancy in interpretation, the English version shall prevail.

The State of Eritrea, Isaias Afwerki; President

The Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed Ali; Prime Minister

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If Abiy is still rummaging through dusty archives in search of “documents” to prove otherwise, he might start by examining his own signature—it’s there, twice.  Of course, he knows that.  He’s simply pretending not to see it, performing selective blindness for political theater.  The proof sits on his own shelf, next to the Order of King Abdulaziz medal that King Salman personally put on his neck when he signed the agreement.  His denial isn’t ignorance—it’s passive-aggressive deceit dressed as patriotism.

This means that Massawa, Assab, and the entire Red Sea coastline have never been Abyssinian territory—not since the eighth century, when the kingdom of Aksum collapsed.  And they have certainly never been Ethiopian territory since the modern state came into being and the three boundary treaties of 1900, 1902, and 1908 were signed.

As the Algiers Agreement of December 12, 2000 reaffirmed—and as the Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC) unanimously concluded—these three treaties definitively sealed the border between Eritrea and Ethiopia.  The record is clear: before those treaties, Ethiopia had no legally recognized claim to the Red Sea; after them, its borders were fixed by international law.

If Abiy wishes to call that the “Prison of Geography,” he should direct his complaint not at Eritrea but all those who didn’t care about the sea for 1200 years, and at Menelik II—the very emperor who signed the 1900, 1902 and 1908 treaties and closed Ethiopia’s path to any coast ownership with his own hand.

Menelik II signed those treaties not under duress, but willingly, not out of goodwill or foresight, but out of imperial calculation. He did so after Adwa, while basking in victory against Italy, yet simultaneously waging wars of annihilation against Abiy’s own ancestors, the Oromo and their neighbors in what later became provinces of Welega, Illubabor, Kaffa, Gamu Gofa, Sidamo, Bale, Hararghe, Arusi, and Shewa. Entire communities were burned, enslaved, and sold in the slave markets of Tadjourah and Zeila, victims of an empire that proclaimed “unity” through the crack of the whip.

If there is a “Prison of Geography,” it is one constructed by Menelik’s pen and sealed by his cruelty, not by Eritrea, and certainly not by the Red Sea.

So when Abiy resurrects these delusions of coastal entitlement, he is not just distorting history, he is denying Eritrea’s hard-won legitimacy. But sovereignty is not a favor to be granted, nor a document to be signed; it is earned through struggle, sacrifice, and the indelible mark of liberation. Eritrea’s independence was written not in ink but in blood, on the mountains of Nakfa, Afabet, Massawa, and Assab where truth was paid for in lives, not signatures. But if one wants signatures, they are there also.

Abiy’s outbursts, then, are not acts of conviction, they are the desperate thrashings of a leader drowning in his own deceit. History will not remember him as a visionary reclaiming a sea, but as a man who mistook delusion for destiny, and wrecked himself upon the very shores he claimed to seek.

David Yeh