Sovereignty Is Not a Bill to Be Collected

By Aron Abraha

Recent commentary treating Eritrea’s sovereignty as something now subject to settlement or correction reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of international law or history, but on a recurring political assumption: that Eritrean sovereignty is provisional and subject to revision when regional power balances shift. This assumption has been tested repeatedly over the last three decades—and has failed every time.

Eritrea’s independence is not disputed under international law. In 1993, following a 30-year armed struggle against successive Ethiopian regimes, Eritrea conducted a United Nations–supervised referendum in which 99.83 percent of Eritreans voted for independence. The result was immediately recognized by Ethiopia itself and formally admitted into the United Nations later that year. This process fully satisfied the legal requirements of self-determination under international law.

If Eritrea is to be smeared as a “colonial creation,” then it shares that history with more than fifty African states. Djibouti. Somalia. Sudan. Kenya. Tanzania. Nigeria. Ghana. The list is long because colonial-era formation is how modern Africa was made. Eritrea is not an exception. It is the rule.

What makes Eritrea different is not its history. It is Western geopolitics.

During the Cold War, U.S. and allied strategic interests deliberately blocked Eritrea’s right to complete decolonization. While other African nations gained independence through negotiations in European capitals, Eritrea was denied that path. Its people were told to wait, to accept annexation, to surrender their sovereignty for someone else’s strategic convenience. Eritreans did not get Lancaster House. They got napalm, mass displacement, and thirty years of war.

Eritrea’s independence was not granted. It was fought for, village by village, family by family, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. That is not a weakness in Eritrea’s legitimacy. It is an indictment of the international system that forced a colonized people to bleed for a right others were handed.

Today’s revisionism shifts the goalposts to Ethiopia’s landlocked status and pretends this is some new injustice created in 1993. It is not. Ethiopia was already landlocked by choice. At the height of Abyssinian expansion, Ethiopian rulers willingly signed treaties with Italy, France, and Britain that defined Ethiopia’s borders. Those agreements, made after Adwa and during the Scramble for Africa, locked in Ethiopia’s frontiers. No one forced Ethiopia into those treaties. They were strategic decisions by Ethiopian emperors pursuing imperial consolidation.

Eritrea’s borders are not accidental. They were established in the colonial era, recognized internationally, and accepted by Ethiopia for decades. Ethiopia reaffirmed that legal reality in the Algiers Agreement in 2000. In 2018, the current government publicly committed to implementing the final and binding border ruling without conditions. You do not get to accept treaties when it suits you and deny them when you feel nostalgic.

International law is crystal clear. Landlocked status does not entitle any country to another country’s ports. Access is negotiated. Sovereignty is not. Switzerland does not claim Italy’s coast. Uganda does not demand Kenya’s ports. Botswana does not claim Namibia’s shoreline. Dozens of landlocked states function through agreements, not territorial fantasies.

What is being sold today is not economics. It is entitlement. It is imperial memory dressed up as development policy. It is the refusal of some Ethiopian elites to accept that Eritrea’s decolonization is final—and that Ethiopia’s imperial moment is over.

This is not about trade routes. It is about unresolved imperial psychology.

Eritrea is not a temporary mistake in someone else’s history. It is a sovereign state that completed an aborted decolonization against overwhelming odds. Its borders are settled. Its sovereignty is not conditional. And its existence is not up for renegotiation to soothe wounded imperial pride.

The truth some refuse to accept is simple: Eritrea did not take Ethiopia’s sea. Ethiopia lost its empire.

And no amount of revisionist rhetoric will change that.

Eritrea has never rejected on regional economic cooperation. What it has rejected, consistently and unequivocally, is the reframing of cooperation as entitlement. Ports are sovereign assets. Access to them must be based as a commercial and diplomatic arrangement, not implied as a geopolitical correction.

Assertions that Eritrea’s security posture represents militarism overlook the region’s documented history of aggression, border violations, and unfulfilled legal rulings. In 2002, the Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC) delivered a final and binding decision delimiting the border between the two states. Eritrea accepted the ruling in full. Ethiopia did not implement it for more than sixteen years, despite repeated international affirmations that the ruling was legally binding. During this period, Eritrea maintained defensive mobilization while pursuing diplomatic remedies, an approach later validated when the border decision was finally acknowledged in 2018.

In such a context, military preparedness is not ideological; it is precautionary. States that have experienced invasion, occupation, and prolonged non-compliance with international rulings do not outsource their security to rhetoric or goodwill.

Equally concerning is the selective framing of peace processes. The 2018 normalization of relations between Eritrea and Ethiopia was widely welcomed, but subsequent Ethiopia’s delusion of grandeur detoriorated relations.

Human suffering across the region is real and undeniable. Eritreans, Ethiopians, and others in the Horn have borne the costs of war, displacement, and economic disruption. Accountability for violations of international humanitarian law is essential, but accountability must be impartial and universal, not selectively applied through political narratives that absolve some actors while condemning others.

What is ultimately at stake is not Eritrea’s willingness to engage, but whether engagement will be conducted on the basis of equality between sovereign states. Peace built on coercion, moral hierarchy, or demographic arithmetic is not peace; it is deferred conflict.

Eritrea’s position remains clear and consistent: Sovereignty is non-negotiable. Regional cooperation must be voluntary, lawful, and reciprocal. Disputes must be resolved through diplomacy grounded in international law, not pressure or insinuation.

The future of the Horn of Africa will not be secured by declaring that one nation’s independence has expired. It will be secured when all states, large and small, are treated as equal participants in shaping a stable, cooperative regional order.

Sovereignty is not a bill to be collected. It is a right earned, defended, and recognized.