A response to Ambassador Biruk Mekonnen on Ethiopia’s quest for sea access
In his letter to the Guardian on 15 October, Ethiopia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Biruk Mekonnen, argues that Ethiopia’s pursuit of Red Sea access should not be portrayed as a threat merely because it challenges “neighbouring states’ preferences”. In a companion article in The Brief, he accuses Eritrea of preaching respect for territorial integrity while violating Ethiopia’s, insisting that sovereignty cannot be a one-way street. On that principle he is right. But the principle he invokes against Asmara applies with equal force to Addis Ababa’s campaign for sovereign access to the Red Sea. A principle that holds only when it serves one’s own government is not a principle. It is a negotiating position.
The ambassador reminds readers that the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission found Eritrea’s resort to force at Badme in 1998 unlawful. He draws a clear lesson: “A territorial claim does not confer the right to use military force.” I agree entirely. Yet that lesson does not stop at Badme. It applies just as squarely to Assab.
The ambassador also faults Eritrea’s “preferred version of history” for leaving out inconvenient chapters. Ethiopia’s official narrative has inconvenient chapters of its own. In 1950, the United Nations federated Eritrea with Ethiopia under the Ethiopian crown, an arrangement shaped by the strategic interests of the great powers rather than the wishes of the Eritrean people. Even so, the federation guaranteed Eritrea its own parliament, constitution, political parties and free press. Ethiopia’s absolute monarchy could not tolerate a multiparty civic democracy on its doorstep. It began dismantling those freedoms almost immediately: parties were suppressed, the press was muzzled, and Eritrea’s official languages were replaced with Amharic. In 1962 the emperor abolished the federation altogether and annexed Eritrea to be ruled directly from Addis Ababa. Three decades of armed struggle followed, marked by a brutal campaign to subdue the Eritrean people, including the massacres of civilians at Ona in 1970 and She’eb in 1988.
That is the history behind the coastline. In October 2025, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed told parliament that there was no official record or institutional decision documenting how Ethiopia lost access to the sea, and called it a legal, historical and existential question. The record says otherwise. Eritrea’s independence was the exercise of a right to self-determination that Ethiopia had denied by force for 30 years. It was confirmed by a UN-observed referendum in 1993, and Ethiopia recognised the result. In the 2000 Algiers Agreement, both states committed to a final and binding border delimitation. In 2018, Abiy himself announced Ethiopia’s full acceptance of that settlement. That was the very act for which he received the Nobel peace prize the ambassador now defends. Ethiopia cannot celebrate the 2018 peace as a historic achievement while treating the borders it confirmed as provisional.
None of this diminishes Ethiopia’s real economic predicament. A country of well over 100 million people with no coastline carries a heavy burden, and its interest in secure, affordable access to the sea is legitimate. International law recognises that interest. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea grants landlocked states a right of access to and from the sea, but it is exercised through the territory of transit states, on terms agreed with them, and with the transit state’s full sovereignty expressly preserved. It creates no entitlement to coastline, naval bases or “sovereign” ports.
Nor has that access ever been denied. Ethiopia’s neighbours have consistently offered it the use of their ports. When the two countries made peace in 2018, President Isaias Afwerki publicly welcomed Ethiopia to use Assab and Massawa, and the two governments agreed to reopen Eritrean ports to Ethiopian trade. Djibouti already handles the bulk of Ethiopia’s trade, and Sudan, Kenya and Somalia have all opened their ports to Ethiopian commerce. Addis Ababa now says that Eritrea showed little willingness to make Assab operational. Whatever the truth of that, a stalled commercial arrangement is a reason to negotiate harder, not to claim another country’s territory. The real question was never access. It is sovereignty. No government anywhere would hand over a sovereign port to a neighbour, and Ethiopia, rightly protective of its own borders, would never accept such a demand if the roles were reversed. The word “sovereign” is precisely what turns a legitimate commercial aspiration into a territorial claim. A state’s sovereignty over its own coastline is not a “preference”. It is the same principle the ambassador appeals to when Eritrean troops are reported inside Tigray.
Language matters here, because it shapes how neighbours read intentions. Eritrea has told the UN Security Council that Ethiopia seeks sovereign access to the sea through negotiation if possible and force if necessary. Addis Ababa insists it wants only dialogue. But when senior officials describe the sea as an existential question, and federal forces advance towards the Eritrean frontier, a neighbour can be forgiven for hearing a threat rather than an invitation.
The ambassador asks why Eritrea’s suspicion of Ethiopia has persisted across successive Ethiopian governments. Part of the answer is that Ethiopia’s ambition towards the Red Sea has also persisted across successive governments, from the imperial court to the present day.
Nor is Eritrea the only neighbour to have felt it. Ethiopia’s January 2024 memorandum of understanding with Somaliland, which reportedly envisaged an Ethiopian naval presence on a coastline Somalia regards as its own, triggered a serious diplomatic crisis with Mogadishu that took Turkish mediation to defuse. The region is reading a pattern, and Ethiopia’s diplomacy should take that seriously.
The danger now is that the sea question becomes fused with the war in Tigray. An internal conflict risks becoming an interstate war. The Horn of Africa cannot afford another war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. The last one, fought over a dusty border town, cost tens of thousands of lives and poisoned relations for two decades.
The ambassador writes that dialogue must not reward aggression or pressure Ethiopia into concessions. Eritrea is entitled to the same assurance: it cannot be asked to surrender sovereignty as the price of peace. There is a better path, and it begins with the reciprocity the ambassador rightly demands. Ethiopia should state unequivocally that it seeks no sovereignty over any part of a neighbour’s territory or coastline. It should pursue port access through negotiated commercial agreements, diversified across Djibouti, Berbera, Port Sudan, Lamu, Massawa and Assab, within African Union and IGAD frameworks. Shared corridors, joint port investment and regional trade integration can turn geography from a grievance into an opportunity. Ethiopia’s interests are best served by integration, not acquisition.
Ambassador Mekonnen is right that sovereignty cannot be a one-way street. But neither can it be a road that leads, step by step, to someone else’s shoreline. If Addis Ababa wants its neighbours to respect its borders, it must give them the same assurance it asks of them: that their borders are not up for negotiation either.
Abdurahman Sayed is a political analyst and founder of the Horn of Africa Centre for Regional Integration.