Peace on His Lips, War in His Words

Abiy Ahmed’s “irreversible” claim to the Red Sea exposes the forked tongue of ambition—diplomacy as disguise, threat as policy.

by Ghidewon Abay Asmerom

On October 28, 2025, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed stood before Ethiopia’s parliament to declare that his country’s claim to sea port ownership was “irreversible.” He spoke of “peace,” yet his every word carried menace. He appealed for “mediation,” but the subtext was unmistakable: give me what I demand, or face what follows.

Beneath the bluster and the bombastic rhetoric lies a man desperate for face-saving. His much-trumpeted Somaliland MOU was torn to shreds before the ink had dried. His trip to Türkiye, where he sought to coax Somalia into offering him a strip of coastline, ended in humiliation. Djibouti dismissed his arrogance outright, the offer of Tadjourah has now vanished from the table, and now he is glancing nervously over his shoulder, fearing that Egypt may one day call his bluff and turn the war of words into a war over the Nile itself.

Cornered by failure, he is turning towards Eritrea, pleading, posturing, crying for a shred of relevance. But this is not diplomacy; it is desperation dressed as destiny. Instead of publishing half-baked, plagiarized a series of “medemer” books, he would do better to sit down and read history, real history; Eritrean history, the history of resilience and courage of the Eritrean people, the history of the EPLF in particular. The EPLF, a movement that did not flinch before Mengistu’s blood-soaked tyranny and blood-filled bottle throwing rant, will not flinch before the delusions of a man intoxicated by his own myths.

When Abiy declared, “Our first choice is peace—but if the world remains indifferent, that will not last forever,” he was not offering dialogue; he was issuing an ultimatum. These are not the words of a statesman seeking reconciliation, but the warning of a gambler threatening to upend the table if he cannot win. His words were a velvet glove over a clenched fist. Peace spoken through clenched teeth is not peace at all; it is the prelude to conflict. The forked tongue of Abiy Ahmed seemed to call for peace, but beneath its word run venom—peace on his lips, provocation in his heart. His facial expressions betrayed him.

“We do not wish for war,” he insisted, “but peace requires action, not silence.” It is the timeless rhetoric of the aggressor; the wolf’s appeal to reason before the lunge. Abiy seeks to appear the reluctant warrior, the reasonable man pushed too far. But history has heard this music before: every empire hums the same tune before it marches. His speech was not diplomacy—it was theater. He promised peace yet spoke like a man rehearsing for war. It was the language of coercion, blackmail wrapped in courtesy. He sought to appear the peacemaker while pointing the finger of blame outward—to Eritrea, to the international community, to geography itself—rather than inward, where Ethiopia’s real problems reside.

The Myth of Injustice

Abiy Ahmed portrays Ethiopia as a victim of injustice; wronged, robbed, and resentful—claiming it “lost its seaport illegally,” as though it had ever been the rightful owner of a shore it held only by force for thirty-nine years (1952-1991). His claim that Ethiopia “lost its seaport illegally” belongs to the realm of myth, not history.

If injustice is to be found, he need not look north to Eritrea but inward to his own imperial legacy—to Emperor Menelik II, whose Shoan kingdom of barely seventy thousand square kilometers ballooned sixteen-fold through conquest, stretching over 1.1 million square kilometers of territory seized from southern, eastern, and western neighbors. Menelik expanded not by diplomacy, but by the gun.

He had multiple opportunities to negotiate for coastal territory through French or British Somaliland: via Zeila, Tadjourah, or Obock, the very routes he used to export slaves and import European weapons. Yet, blinded by greed and arrogance, he chose the commerce of human misery over the sea. That moral failure, not foreign injustice, made Ethiopia to be landlocked.

Menelik himself, after the Battle of Adwa, explicitly requested that Ethiopia’s northern border with Eritrea be drawn sixty kilometers from the coast, and its eastern boundary with Italian Somaliland set one hundred and eighty miles inland. This kind of border specification is almost unique in Africa’s colonial borders, matched only by the Anglo-French Convention of 10 August 1889, which fixed The Gambia’s border with Senegal as a 10-kilometer buffer on either side of the Gambia River.

Exclusion from the sea thus was self-imposed. In short, Menelik’s desire was not to gain access to the sea, but to ensure that Italy stayed away from the territories he had illegally conquered during the Scramble for Africa. Ethiopia’s loss of the sea was thus not a curse inflicted by others, it was a choice born of conquest, calculation, and moral blindness.

The Red Sea Was Not Stolen — It Was Liberated

Eritrea did not “take” the sea; it earned it—through blood, sacrifice, and the unyielding right of self-determination. Its sovereignty was not bestowed as a favor, nor inherited by chance. It was won in struggle and affirmed by international law.

If Abiy seeks proof, he need not rummage through dusty archives in Finfinie. He should walk the sacred grounds of Nakfa, Afabet, Massawa, Beylul, and Assab—where Eritrea’s claim to its coast was not written in treaties but in the courage and sacrifice of its people. There, the Red Sea was reclaimed not by decree, but by valor.

To call that achievement “illegal” is to desecrate the memory of Eritrea’s martyrs and to mock the countless Ethiopian conscripts sent to die in vain under leaders intoxicated by imperial delusion. Such words are not only an insult to Eritrea—they are an affront to the entire African decolonization struggle, to the generations who bled so that borders might be drawn by justice, not ambition.

The Sea Won’t Feed Ethiopia

For thirty four years, Ethiopia’s hardship has not flowed from its lack of a coastline but from the corruption, mismanagement, and myth-making of its own rulers. From 1952 until 1974, during Haile Selassie’s reign, Ethiopia was in occupation of Eritrea’s two ports, yet Ethiopia was miserably poor, to a point that it couldn’t feed its own people. Famine ravaged northern Ethiopia while the emperor hoarded wealth in Swiss banks and ordered cakes from Paris for his 80th birthday. The Derg, too, ruled over a country with full access to the Red Sea, and still the great famine of 1983–85 claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Geography was not the culprit then, nor is it now. Governance was—and remains—the difference between prosperity and poverty. If Abiy laments Ethiopia’s poverty today, he should look not to maps but to mirrors. How much of Ethiopia’s treasure is spent on vanity projects, drones, and bombs falling over Amhara and Oromia, while its farmers starve, its children dies and its youth flee? And here we are, a government that cannot feed its people fantasizing about ports.

Abiy’s boast that Ethiopia has “begun to rebuild its navy—not to swim in a cup of water” exposes the truth of his ambition. No nation builds a navy for a sea it does not own unless it dreams of invasion. It shows how his rhetoric about “peaceful access” is camouflage for coercion. When he says Ethiopia “cannot and will not remain landlocked forever,” he speaks not of cooperation but conquest. His appeal for mediation by global powers is an attempt to internationalize a fantasy, to force legitimacy upon a claim that violates international law.

Abiy’s invocation of population as destiny—his boast that Ethiopia grows by “three million people each year, the size of Eritrea’s population;” this reveals both arrogance and insecurity. This is not strength; it is desperation. Population does not confer entitlement to another’s land. Nothing does.

And to Ethiopia’s people, the real victims of this dangerous rhetoric, the truth must be said plainly. The sea will not save Ethiopia. It will not fill empty stomachs or calm ethnic wars. The true enemy is not distance from the coast, but distance from good governance. Geography does not feed a nation; social justice, honest labor, and selfless governance do.

Eritrea’s sovereignty is not a subject for mediation

The Red Sea is not a negotiable asset. Assab is not a bargaining chip. No nation or institution—neither the African Union, the United Nations, nor any of the powers Abiy petitions—has authority to redraw sovereign borders affirmed by international law. The principle of uti possidetis juris—that Africa’s borders remain as they stood at independence—settled this matter long ago. What Abiy calls an “existential question” is, in truth, an existential threat: not to Ethiopia’s geography, but to Africa’s postcolonial order.

Eritrea’s position is simple: sovereignty is not for negotiation. Eritrea’s sovereignty is not a subject for mediation. Its ports are not for lease or sale. They are the inheritance of a people who fought for their freedom and intend to keep it. The Red Sea does not, and will never entertain delusional ambitions.

Peace Begins Where Delusion Ends

Abiy Ahmed’s “irreversible claim” will be remembered not as a visionary promise but as a confession of failure—the cry of a leader who mistook geography for destiny. History has already judged those who believed arrogance could substitute for wisdom. Abiy is merely the latest to test that verdict.

The Red Sea does not bend to delusion. Peace cannot coexist with provocation. Sovereignty is not a favor to be granted, it is a fact to be respected.

If Abiy truly desires peace, he must first silence the war within his own mind. Otherwise, he will not be remembered as the man who reached for the sea, but as the one who drowned in his own ambition.