Burning the Bridge, Blaming the River: Ethiopia’s Doughy Diplomacy

by Ghidewon Abay Asmerom

A Tigrinya lament captures Ethiopia’s current predicament with almost uncomfortable accuracy:

• “ባዕላ ሰቒላቶ ረሓቐ፣
• ባዕላ ሰንኪታቶ በሓቘ፣
• ቀደም ከይትሕዞ ብጥንቃቐ፣
• እዛ ሃላይ ቆልዓ ሕንቃቐ።”

Loosely it translate as:

• She pushed it in on the shelf, now it lies beyond her reach.
• She baked it, yet the loaf came out doughy.
• She should have tended it carefully, but how could she?
• She was spoiled in a house that never taught her the weight of responsibility.

Analysis & Meaning
This poem serves as a critique of someone who has ruined their own situation through negligence and/or arrogance.

Line 1 (The shelving Metaphor): “She pushed it in on the shelf, and now it lies beyond her reach.” This is a common Tigrinya idiom. It refers to someone who creates a situation that they cannot manage, essentially placing the solution out of their own reach.

Line 2 (The Baking Metaphor): “She baked it, yet the loaf came out doughy.” Behaquwe specifically refers to dough that is not well baked and has become useless. It implies the person wants to have a meal (by baking) but she ruined the result.

Lines 3 & 4 (The Root Cause): The poem concludes that these failures happened because the subject acts like a “Hinquq” (a spoiled child who constantly cries to be carried or pampered) and lacked the maturity to handle matters carefully (“with care”) from the beginning.

Few images capture Ethiopia’s self-inflicted predicament over Red Sea access more precisely. After Eritrea’s liberation, during the seven years from 1991 to 1998, Ethiopia enjoyed peaceful, lawful, and internationally recognized avenues to the sea: open ports, cooperative arrangements, and agreements it entered into willingly. Nothing was imposed on it. These channels existed because trust existed, because respect existed, because parity existed.

But instead of safeguarding what it had, Ethiopia mishandled it. It politicized the ports, weaponized the relationship, and ultimately destroyed the very arrangements that served its own national interest. It lifted its future onto a high shelf and then behaved as though it would never need to reach for it again. It prepared opportunities for itself but pulled them out half-baked. It squandered advantages through arrogance, impatience, and the fantasy that geography would submit to desire.

Now it stands beneath the same shelf—bewildered, resentful, and shouting for the world to hand it a ladder to fix a problem it built with its own hands.

Nothing reveals this contradiction more clearly than the sudden wave of “dialogue” messaging from Ethiopian embassies in Beijing, Ankara, and elsewhere. For two years, Ethiopian officials spoke a single language at home: maps brandished as threats, proclamations of historic destiny, talk of existential necessity, and slogans like “the sea or death” and “from the GERD to the Red Sea Port.” Abiy Ahmed did not rely solely on thousands of coordinated social-media trolls; he also hired street performers and propagandists who shouted in Oromiffa and Amharic that Ethiopia was “not like other Africans,” boasting “we could overrun Eritrea while brushing our teeth,” and repeating his own dehumanizing metaphor that Ethiopia’s population was a vast lake while Eritrea’s was a mere puddle, meaning no bullets would be needed at all. The fantasies they spewed about overwhelming Eritrea demographically were so crude and vulgar that they are not worth repeating in any forum where ideas matter.

Yet the moment international community began to notice Ethiopia’s nakedness and Ethiopia’s internal cracks deepened, the bravado vanished. The very same officials who spoke of demographic destiny and maritime conquest abruptly adopted a softer script for foreign consumption. Abroad, they now present themselves as calm petitioners, pleading for “good-faith diplomacy,” “regional cooperation,” and “peaceful engagement.” This transformation is not the product of reflection or sincerity. It is the diplomacy of a government alarmed by its own rhetoric, cornered by its internal crises, and suddenly aware that the world is not buying the fantasy it spent two years selling. It’s fig leaf hoping it will cover their naked agression.

The Ethiopian Embassy in Beijing recently announced: “The Government of Ethiopia is ready for dialogue… We call on the international community to press Eritrea to engage in good-faith talks.” This performance is painfully familiar. It reads almost like the script Seyoum Mesfin delivered on the morning of April 13, 2002, when Ethiopia pretended—briefly and theatrically—to “accept” the final and binding EEBC decision before spending the next two decades defying it. This is not new behavior; it is the Ethiopian diplomatic tradition. Anyone who has followed events with even minimal honesty can see this is not diplomacy but panic dressed in diplomatic vocabulary. The statement is a recycling of PP official statements, the same distortions, the same inversion of responsibility, the same attempt to recast Ethiopia as the victim of a crisis it deliberately manufactured. It is the political equivalent of burning down the bridge you need and then insisting the river is at fault.

The embassy “dialogue campaign” cannot conceal Ethiopia’s internal collapse: rebellion in Oromia, armed resistance in Amhara, humanitarian suffocation in Tigray, and the unraveling of a federation weighed down by debt, inflation, and displacement. A state struggling to govern its own regions cannot credibly claim that its crisis originates across the border.

This behavior is not confined to a single minister, embassy or office. It is a long-standing state habit. Officials such as Gedion, Taye Atske-Selassie, Bacha Debele, Dina Mufti, and a succession of retired diplomats have perfected a choreography of contradiction: threats for domestic audiences, pleading for donors, and accusations for social media. They issue one message in Addis Ababa, another in Brussels, and a different one in Washington.

Readers need only recall Dina Mufti—the most vivid embodiment of this double-speak. In 2021 he announced, with astonishing confidence, that Eritreans “do not respect or even like the day they were separated from Ethiopia.” The claim was not merely false; it was an insult. May 24 is the cornerstone of Eritrean national identity, a date sanctified by the sacrifice that secured it. To belittle that day is to reveal a total ignorance of Eritrea’s history and meaning. Yet Dina did not stop there. In his summer essay, Transcending the Ethio–Eritrean Conundrum, he dressed the same old imperial nostalgia in academic language and tried to pass annexation off as “integration.” He argued that Ethiopia and Eritrea are too intertwined to exist separately—conveniently ignoring that Ethiopia shares similar or deeper cultural overlaps with Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti, Sudan, and South Sudan. If cultural proximity were the measure of sovereignty, half the region would collapse into Ethiopia overnight.

The irony, of course, is sharper in Dina’s own case. As an Oromo, his cultural, linguistic, and historical ties are far closer to Kenya than to Eritrea. Yet here he is, denying the sovereignty of a people whose identity was forged resisting the very imperial mindset his arguments now echo.

Ethiopia’s crisis is that it pushed the sea away with its own hands and now blames the tide for retreating.