Abiy went full soap opera, in front of Erdoğan:
130 million people held hostage by geography!
Nig, nobody is blocking Ethiopia’s trade. Djibouti, Berbera, Port Sudan, and even Eritrea (if you want) - the region has been carrying Ethiopia for years.
What you want isn’t access. It’s ownership. You're deceiving no one!
So, stop selling tears. 
Erdoğan, can’t gift you someone else’s port.
BTW, you’re about to get exiled to the UAE.
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Opinion
Ethiopia’s Potemkin Port Narrative: Assab Belongs to Eritrea, Not History or Propaganda
By David Yeh
https://redseabeacon.com/ethiopias-pote ... ropaganda/
February 16, 2026
Few claims in contemporary Horn of Africa politics have been wrapped in as much fabricated passion, and obscured by as much distortion, as Ethiopia’s renewed assertion of entitlement to sovereign maritime access through Assab. Framed as historical correction or sovereign necessity, the argument trades heavily on falsified emotion and selective memory. Yet once stripped of rhetoric and examined through the lens that actually governs territorial questions, international law, it then collapses. This is not a debate about nostalgia, strategy, or scale. It is a question of sovereignty. And sovereignty is not awarded by desire, infrastructure, or demographic weight, but by recognized borders and the right of peoples to self-determination. Measured by those standards, the conclusion is unambiguous:
Assab is sovereign Eritrean territory.
A. 1952 Did Not Transfer Sovereignty
Any serious analysis must begin with conceptual clarity. It is simply incorrect to assert that Ethiopia acquired sovereign rights over Eritrea, in 1952. The federation created under United Nations General Assembly
Resolution 390 A (V) did not constitute a legitimate, voluntary, or permanent transfer of Eritrean sovereignty to Ethiopia. As the record makes clear, it was an arrangement orchestrated to serve the geopolitical interests of those who had shaped the postwar international order—not the will of the Eritrean people.
The historical record further shows that the federation was imposed and fundamentally unjust, a solution applied to Eritrea alone and denied to more than fifty other African colonies that proceeded through full decolonization. Eritrea’s independence, therefore, was neither secession nor cession; it was the belated exercise of a right to decolonization that had been unlawfully withheld.
Ethiopia itself rejects the proposition that Fascist Italy acquired lawful sovereignty over Ethiopian territory, during the 1935–1941 occupation. The principle in Eritrea’s case is, directly, analogous. What followed 1952 was not a consensual union, but a grave failure of international responsibility that culminated in illegal occupation.
Nor did Ethiopia possess any maritime sovereignty, prior to 1952. There was no recognized Ethiopian coastline, and no sovereign Ethiopian access through any part of Eritrea’s coast—including Assab or Massawa—before the illegal occupation from 1952 to 1991. Eritrea was never historically Ethiopian property, that could later be “restored.” Sovereignty cannot be reclaimed, where it never legally existed.
B. The Armed Struggle Was a Question of Sovereignty, Not Federal Grievance
Precision is equally essential, when tracing the origins of Eritrea’s armed struggle. The struggle did not arise as a reaction to the dismantling of the federation, in 1962. Eritrean resistance began much earlier—indeed, almost immediately after the onset of the British Military Administration. By the late 1940s, roughly three-quarters of Eritreans favored independence. Organized resistance for independence was already underway, well before the federation was formally abolished.
The timeline, is unambiguous. The Eritrean Liberation Movement emerged, in 1958. The Eritrean Liberation Front was formed, in 1960. The armed struggle itself began in 1961, all predating the 1962 dissolution of the federation. These facts alone, dismantle the claim that the war was triggered by federal violations. Eritrea’s resistance was rooted instead in the inadequacy and injustice of the 1950 UN decision, which denied Eritreans full and equal decolonization. From the outset, the issue was sovereignty.
Accordingly, the three decades of armed struggle, preceded and accompanied by years of peaceful resistance, were defined in these terms. This was not a constitutional protest within Ethiopia, nor a dispute over administrative arrangements. It was a decolonization struggle against imposed rule, waged to resolve a single fundamental question: who possessed sovereign authority over Eritrean territory.
To reduce the war to a quarrel over federal dismantling is, therefore, a profound distortion of Eritrea’s legal and historical foundation. The core issue was always sovereignty, about who had the right to govern Eritrea. That question was answered decisively with the complete military victory in 1991 and confirmed, beyond dispute, by the 1993 referendum.
The sovereign authority belonged to the Eritrean people.
In 1993, following a UN supervised referendum, Eritrea’s independence was internationally recognized. Ethiopia, formally, accepted the result. This recognition carried legal consequences: Eritrea had regained its defined territorial boundaries, including its full Red Sea coastline.
Under the doctrine of
uti possidetis juris the principle safeguarding post-colonial African borders, newly independent states inherit their administrative boundaries at independence. This doctrine underpins continental stability and has been consistently upheld by the African Union and its predecessor institutions. This means, Eritrea’s coastline is not negotiable. It is part of the legally settled territorial framework, established at independence.
C. Security Claims Do Not Create Sovereignty
Ethiopia, is not a Red Sea littoral state. Geography is not a grievance; it is a fact. Appeals to “
security”, to justify claims over Eritrean territory are therefore a red herring. International law does not allocate sovereign territory on the basis of strategic anxiety, naval ambition, or perceived vulnerability.
Landlocked states exist throughout the world, including in regions far more volatile than the Horn of Africa. Their rights are safeguarded through negotiated transit arrangements, port access agreements, and cooperative regional frameworks—not through the revision of internationally recognized borders.
Ethiopia faces no security threat, that could plausibly justify demands to occupy or lay claim to a neighbor’s sovereign territory. Security concerns may warrant diplomacy and cooperation; they do not create sovereignty. Strategic desire cannot override territorial integrity under the UN Charter, nor can it be used to legitimize encroachment on another state’s land.
D. Infrastructure, Ethnicity, and Historical Administration Do Not Confer Title
Infrastructure investment during the federation period, does not generate permanent ownership or legal entitlement. Structures were built on occupied land; occupation does not confer rights, nor does it entitle the occupier to compensation. If investment were to be treated as a basis for ownership, then Ethiopia would first have to account for four decades of exclusive use of Eritrea’s ports, as well as compensate Eritrea for the extensive destruction inflicted on civilian life and infrastructure during the years of occupation and war. That argument, collapses under its own weight.
Occupiers, are not entitled to compensation on sovereign land. If they were, colonial rule would still enjoy legal title across Africa. The historical analogy, is instructive. During the 1936–1941 occupation of Ethiopia, Fascist Italy constructed extensive infrastructure: thousands of kilometers of paved roads, including the Addis Ababa–Adi Grat highway with more than 1,800 bridges; hundreds of kilometers of repaired railway lines; major urban redevelopment projects; industrial facilities, dams, and hydroelectric plants; and extensive military infrastructure. Yet Italy never claimed compensation for these projects, after its occupation ended. Nor could it. Construction carried out under occupation, creates no enduring sovereign rights. That is precisely the point.
Ethnicity fares no better, as a basis for territorial claims. Afar communities span Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Djibouti, just as ethnic groups traverse borders throughout the Horn of Africa and beyond—between Ethiopia and Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, and South Sudan. If ethnicity were a legitimate criterion for sovereignty, Somalia could claim Ethiopia’s Somali Region, Kenya could assert rights over large parts of Oromia- where the Oromo (Borana) straddle the common border, and South Sudan could lay claim to areas where the GERD now stands. Such reasoning does not lead to justice; it leads to chaos.
It was precisely to avert this kind of perpetual instability, that the African legal order explicitly rejected ethnic redrawing of borders. Ethiopia itself was among the strongest advocates of accepting inherited colonial boundaries—“
good or bad”—during the 1963 OAU debates, motivated in no small part by the fear of losing the Ogaden. Borders were fixed not to erase identity, but to safeguard peace. Identity can cross borders; sovereignty cannot.
Sovereignty derives from recognized borders and the right of self-determination—not from ethnicity, not from development projects, and not from retrospective historical narratives crafted for political convenience.
Finally, clarity is required regarding negotiation. As long as Ethiopia maintains claims over Eritrean territory, it has no standing to engage in discussions concerning port access. Dialogue presupposes, mutual recognition of sovereignty.
The prerequisite for any future cooperation is not goodwill or transactional bargaining, but explicit acknowledgment that Ethiopia has no valid historical, legal, or moral claim over Eritrean sovereign land. Only after that acknowledgment can discussions of access- never ownershi- begin. Access, is a matter for diplomacy. Sovereignty is not.
Conclusion: Law, Not Narrative
The record establishes that Ethiopia had no sovereign Red Sea coastline, prior to 1952. The unjust federation, did not constitute a lawful permanent transfer of sovereignty. The Eritrean struggle, was a question of sovereign authority. Independence in 1993 and subsequently the final and biding EEBC demarcation decision, has legally settled the territorial question. Security, ethnicity, and infrastructure arguments do not override recognized borders.
Assab belongs to Eritrea, under international law. Ethiopia’s desire for reliable maritime access, may be understandable. But that access must be pursued within the framework of legal equality and mutual recognition, not through revival of dissolved arrangements or nationalist myth.
Regional stability in the Horn of Africa depends on respecting settled sovereignty, not reopening it.
Access can be negotiated but only after sovereignty is unequivocally acknowledged.
The question of Assab is not emotional, historical, or demographic. It is legal. Eritrea did not secede in 1993, it reclaimed its independence; it completed an unfinished act of decolonization through internationally recognized self determination. The 1952 arrangement did not confer permanent sovereignty on Ethiopia, and its dissolution cannot now be reinterpreted to manufacture territorial entitlement. The armed and peaceful struggle was a sovereignty question and it was resolved through total independence and recognition. Security concerns, infrastructure investment, ethnicity, and historical administration do not override settled borders.
International law is clear: sovereignty rests with the recognized territorial state.
Assab is Eritrean territory. If future stability is to prevail in the Horn of Africa, it must be built on one principle: acknowledged sovereignty first, cooperation second. Access may be discussed in time, but only after any claim to ownership is unequivocally abandoned.
courtesy of Ahmedani Mohamed)
courtesy of 
