“Like It or Not”: Ethiopia’s Military Parade Reveals a Blatant Disrespect for Neighbor’s Sovereignty

A choreographed public threat at a stadium signals that the era of fake diplomatic pretense is over—and regional peace hangs in the balance.

by By B. Tekle 

The message was spelled out in living color, held aloft by thousands of hands, approved by the highest offices in the land, and delivered with the subtlety of a battering ram: Ethiopia wants Eritrea’s port, and it doesn’t particularly care who objects.

At a military parade in Hawasa, Ethiopia, his week, attended by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, his senior generals, and broadcast to millions, performers executed a card stunt that transformed a stadium into a canvas of territorial ambition. The image was impossible to misinterpret: an Ethiopian soldier in full combat gear, boot planted against a door, splintering it open, advancing toward a ship emblazoned with the words “Assab Ethiopia.” Above it, the slogan: “Like it or not, we will not remain closed off.”

Let there be no confusion about what was depicted here. Assab is not Ethiopian. It is a sovereign Eritrean port city on the Red Sea, recognized as such by the United Nations since Eritrea’s independence in 1993. It has never belonged to Ethiopia under any modern legal framework, not by treaty, not by referendum, not by international adjudication. The imagery at that parade was not historical nostalgia. It was not artistic license. It was a threat, choreographed, sanctioned, and performed before the nation’s military and civilian leadership.

The Architecture of Aggression

This spectacle did not emerge from nowhere. It is the culmination of a narrative Abiy Ahmed has been constructing since 2022, one that has evolved from diplomatic aspiration to public demand to, now, military theater.

In 2023, addressing Ethiopia’s parliament, Abiy declared sea access an “existential necessity.” He did not frame Ethiopia’s landlocked status as a geographic challenge to be solved through bilateral agreement, transit access, or regional cooperation. He framed it as a historical wrong to be righted, an injustice inflicted upon Ethiopia that demanded correction. When questioned about methodology, he offered a phrase that echoed far beyond the chamber: Ethiopia would achieve its objectives “through agreement or other means.”

Ethiopian state media have amplified this message relentlessly. Documentaries, maps, and prime-time commentary on the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation and affiliated platforms have repeatedly portrayed Assab and Eritrea’s Red Sea coastline as historically Ethiopian territories, lands supposedly stripped away by colonial manipulation and international conspiracy. This is historical fiction. His adviser, Daniel Kibret, went even further, openly calling for Ethiopia to discard colonial treaty borders altogether. Assab was an Italian colonial possession before it was anything else. Eritrea’s independence was ratified by one of the most decisive referendums in African history. The Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission ruled on the border in 2002. None of this is contested in international law. All of it is contested in Ethiopian state media.

The Machinery of Preparation

Words, in this case, have been accompanied by hardware.

Ethiopia has not demobilized in the wake of the catastrophic Tigray War (2020–2022), which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and devastated the northern region. Instead, it has expanded its military capabilities, acquiring armed drones, building air assets, and maintaining a large standing army. Western intelligence and regional observers have noted the repositioning of Ethiopian forces in the Afar region, the geographic corridor that provides the most direct route from the Ethiopian interior to Eritrea’s Red Sea coast.

In January 2024, Ethiopia signed a memorandum of understanding with Somaliland, the breakaway territory of Somalia, granting Ethiopia coastal access in exchange for recognition. The move was rejected by Somalia’s federal government, the African Union, and the broader international community. It demonstrated two things: Ethiopia’s determination to secure sea access, and its willingness to operate outside established international frameworks to achieve it.

Eritrea, a nation of approximately 4 million people, shares a border with an Ethiopia of 120 million. Eritrea maintains one of the world’s highest rates of military service, not because it harbors expansionist ambitions, but because it has learned, through painful experience, what it means to live beside a thorny porcupine neighbor that has occupied its territory, bombed its cities, and now parades with its sovereign port labeled as a prize to be seized.

When Parades Become Policy

Military parades are not entertainment. They are instruments of political communication, carefully scripted, reviewed at the highest levels, and designed to convey messages to domestic audiences, regional neighbors, and international observers alike.

When a government organizes, rather than prevents, a display in which uniformed soldiers break down doors toward ships bearing the name of a sovereign neighbor’s territory, it is communicating something specific. It is not speaking in code. It is preparing the ground.

The international community has responded to Ethiopia’s escalating rhetoric with the tools of cautious diplomacy: statements of concern, private demarches, appeals for restraint. The Hawassa parade suggests that quiet diplomacy has failed to produce quiet rhetoric. Ethiopia’s leadership has been and is preparing its population, and its military, for a confrontation it is increasingly framing as inevitable.

The Question Before the Region

The Horn of Africa cannot afford another war. The Tigray conflict demonstrated that modern warfare in this region produces not victory but devastation—widespread death, regional displacement, economic ruin, and the erosion of whatever fragile stability exists.

Yet the parade in Hawasa forces a question that can no longer be avoided: What exactly is Ethiopia prepared to do to fulfill the promise made in that stadium? And what is the international community prepared to do to ensure that a choreographed threat does not become a lived catastrophe?

The cards have been held up. The message has been read. The only question remaining is whether anyone will act before the imagery of that parade becomes the reality of the region.