A landlocked country may seek access to the sea. It may negotiate port use, transit corridors, customs arrangements, and commercial agreements with neighboring coastal states. That is normal diplomacy. What it may not do is transform economic need into a claim of sovereign entitlement over another country’s coastline. That distinction, between access and ownership, is the line separating lawful cooperation from territorial revisionism.
For the past three years, Ethiopia’s leadership has intensified a political and rhetorical campaign aimed at redefining the country’s relationship with the Red Sea. At the center of this campaign is the claim that Ethiopia possesses an inherent sovereign right to access the sea through Eritrea. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has repeatedly described Ethiopia as a “prisoner of geography” and referred to the Red Sea as Ethiopia’s “natural boundary.” Such language goes far beyond a normal discussion of trade logistics, port services, or economic development. It implies a claim of entitlement over another state’s coastline.
This rhetoric is not merely careless language. It carries legal, historical, and regional consequences. It challenges settled borders, distorts history, and risks reviving a dangerous logic that Africa’s founding principles were designed to prevent.
Access and Ownership Are Not the Same
International law recognizes the rights of landlocked states to transit and commercial access through negotiated agreements. It does not, however, recognize any right by a landlocked state to acquire another country’s coastline, ports, or sovereign territory.
To conflate commercial access with sovereign ownership is legally dangerous and politically destabilizing. It challenges the territorial integrity of internationally recognized states and creates a precedent that Africa, with its many landlocked countries and colonial-era boundaries, cannot afford to normalize.
The distinction between access and sovereignty is therefore essential. Eritrea’s ports can be used through agreements based on mutual respect, regional cooperation, and international law. But no state, however large or landlocked, has the right to turn its economic need into a claim of ownership over Eritrea’s coast. Ethiopia’s demand for access can be discussed as a matter of trade, transit, and diplomacy with its neighbors, but it cannot be dressed up as a sovereign right to Djiboutian, Eritrean or Somali territory.
The Historical Record Is Clear
The historical record is equally clear. Like all modern African states, Ethiopia’s present territorial form is the product of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial order. Between 1889 and 1952, Ethiopia did not possess direct or indirect sovereign ownership of even a single inch of the Red Sea coastline that became Eritrea. Nor was there any period between the decline of Aksum in the seventh century and the colonial treaties of the late nineteenth century during which the highland empire of Abyssinia exercised internationally recognized sovereignty over the Eritrean Red Sea coast.
Before the establishment of Italian Eritrea in 1890, the Red Sea coast was not the sovereign possession of the Abyssinian highland state. Different portions of the coast passed through successive forms of authority, including Ottoman influence, Ottoman-Egyptian administration, local Afar and Beja power structures, Egyptian rule, Italian colonial administration, and finally British Military Administration after Italy’s defeat in World War II. Massawa, for example, had been under Ottoman influence since the sixteenth century and later came under Egyptian administration. Abyssinian rulers and warlords may at times have exercised influence over parts of the adjacent highlands, but they did not possess sovereignty over the Red Sea coastline that later formed Eritrea.
By the standards of modern international law and recognized sovereignty, Ethiopia did not own the Eritrean Red Sea coast before its annexation of Eritrea in 1962. Even then, Ethiopia’s control was not lawful sovereignty but occupation, imposed in violation of Eritrea’s right to decolonization like other former colonies in Africa. Thus, Ethiopia’s twentieth-century connection to the Red Sea coast began not as historic ownership, but through a disputed federation, followed by unlawful annexation and occupation.
Ancient Aksum Is Not Modern Legal Title
Some Ethiopian writers invoke the ancient Kingdom of Aksum and its connection to Red Sea ports such as Adulis as evidence of a historical Ethiopian claim to the coast. The argument sounds impressive only until it is examined. Yes, the Aksumite state controlled parts of the Red Sea littoral in antiquity. But Aksum was an ancient empire, not the modern Ethiopian state. Ancient imperial reach is not a land deed, and mythology is not international law.
By that logic, earlier polities centered around Adulis, which at different times influenced or controlled parts of what is now northern Ethiopia, could just as easily claim ownership over Ethiopian territory today. Would Ethiopian writers accept that argument? Of course not. They invoke antiquity only when it serves their expansionist appetite, and reject it the moment the same logic is turned against them.
The attempt to convert Aksumite history into modern Ethiopian title is therefore not scholarship; it is selective memory dressed up as legal argument. More than a thousand years of political rupture, demographic change, religious transformation, territorial reconfiguration, and state formation separate ancient Aksum from modern Ethiopia. No amount of imperial nostalgia can bridge that gap.
Worse still, many of the loudest voices now claiming exclusive inheritance from Aksum belong to political traditions and populations that, not long ago, were themselves treated as outsiders within the old Abyssinian order. Their sudden discovery of Aksumite ancestry is less a historical argument than a convenient costume. It is the politics of borrowed antiquity: wearing the crown of a vanished empire in order to lay claim to another people’s coast.
Ancient Aksum may belong to the shared history of the region, but it does not give modern Ethiopia sovereignty over Eritrea’s Red Sea coastline. Historical memory can enrich identity; it cannot manufacture legal ownership. The Red Sea coast is not inherited through legend, revived through grievance, or claimed by chanting the name of an empire that disappeared more than a millennium ago.
History cannot override international legitimacy. Historical association does not create contemporary sovereign ownership. Eritrea’s independence was achieved through a bitter armed struggle based on the right to decolonization and ratified by an internationally supervised referendum whose results were accepted by Ethiopia and recognized by the international community. The legal question was settled in 1993. Historical memory cannot retroactively invalidate internationally recognized sovereignty.
Ethiopia Did Not “Lose” a Coastline in 1993
Following the defeat of Italy in World War II, Eritrea remained separate from Ethiopia under British administration. Throughout this period, Ethiopia did not possess sovereignty over the Eritrean coast. Only after United Nations General Assembly Resolution 390 A(V) did Ethiopia obtain disputed access in 1952—disputed because the federation was imposed on the people of Eritrea in violation of their right to self-determination. That arrangement provided Ethiopia access to the Red Sea through Eritrea for the first time in the twentieth century. It did not convert Eritrea’s coastline into Ethiopia’s historic sovereign possession.
The internationally recognized coastline belonged to Eritrea before the federation, remained Eritrean in law during the federal arrangement, was absorbed only through Ethiopia’s unlawful annexation in 1962, and returned fully to the sovereign State of Eritrea upon independence.
For this reason, the often-repeated claim that Ethiopia “lost its Red Sea coast in 1993” is historically imprecise and legally misleading. Ethiopia did not lose a sovereign coastline that had historically belonged to it. Rather, those who claim to be heirs of Aksum had no history of ownership of a sea coast for more than one thousand three hundred years.
Menelik’s Eyes Were Elsewhere
By the late nineteenth century, Menelik’s strategic priorities were not directed toward the Eritrean Red Sea coast. As a Shoan king first and foremost, his attention was fixed much more naturally on Zeila (in Somalia) and Tadjoura (in Djibouti). These ports were geographically closer to Shoa, more directly connected to its caravan routes, and economically more useful to Menelik’s expanding kingdom.
Control or influence over the routes leading to Zeila and Tadjoura would have allowed Shoa to tax caravans coming from the west and south as they passed through its territory. In other words, Menelik’s commercial and strategic imagination looked eastward and southeastward through Shoa’s natural trade corridors, not northward toward Massawa and Assab.
This point is crucial because Menelik’s own diplomacy confirms his priorities. His treaties, proposals, and frontier agreements do not show a ruler determined to recover or preserve a Red Sea coastline. They show a ruler willing to accept Italian Eritrea while pursuing interests closer to Shoa’s natural commercial world. At the same time, Menelik was expanding aggressively to the west, south, and east of his kingdom, annexing vast territories that had never been part of Abyssinia.
That expansion transformed a relatively small Abyssinian kingdom into the modern Ethiopian state by increasing its territory several-fold. Much of what is today Oromia, Sidama, Wolayta, the Somali Region, Hadiya, Gambella, Benishangul, and the homelands of many other peoples and nationalities were incorporated through this imperial expansion. These peoples were not historically “Ethiopian” in the modern political sense; they were made Ethiopian through conquest, incorporation, and diplomatic arrangements carried out in the same colonial age that produced Africa’s present borders. Menelik’s record, therefore, does not reveal a ruler obsessed with the Red Sea. It reveals an inland imperial builder whose eyes were fixed on expansion where it was more strategically useful, commercially profitable (slave trade), and politically attainable.
Wuchale and the Recognition of Italian Eritrea
This helps explain the diplomatic record of the period. By the Treaty of Wuchale, signed on May 2, 1889, Menelik recognized Italian possession of Eritrea. Later that same year, on October 1, 1889, Menelik and Italy agreed that the boundary between Eritrea and Ethiopia would reflect “the actual state of possession.” By then, Italian authority had already extended beyond the coast into the Eritrean highlands, reaching the line of the Mareb River in the west, the Belesa in the center, and the Muna in the east.
On January 1, 1890, Italy formally proclaimed the Colony of Eritrea. From that point forward, the ports of Massawa and Assab, together with the rest of Eritrea’s coastline, were administered as Italian colonial territory. This arrangement was not a temporary accident of occupation; it became part of the recognized diplomatic and territorial order of the region.
Adwa Did Not Change the Coast Question
Even after Ethiopia’s victory at the Battle of Adwa in 1896, Menelik did not use that victory to demand sovereignty over the Eritrean coast. Instead, after the war, Abyssinia and Italy first signed an armistice on March 16, 1896. Seven months later, on October 26, 1896, they concluded the Peace Treaty of Addis Ababa.
That treaty annulled the disputed provisions of Wuchale, but it did not erase Eritrea as an Italian possession. On the contrary, it preserved the existing provisional frontier and stated that, until the boundary was finally fixed, both parties would observe the status quo and refrain from crossing the provisional line marked by the Mareb, Belesa, and Muna rivers.
This is one of the most important points in the historical record. Adwa was a decisive Abyssinian victory, but it was not used by Menelik to claim Massawa, Assab, or the Eritrean coastline. If the Red Sea coast had been an indispensable historic possession in Menelik’s view, or Ethiopia’s “natural border”, the post-Adwa settlement would have been the moment to assert that claim. He did not.
The Sixty-Kilometer Frontier
Menelik’s later conduct further confirms this point. In 1897, he himself proposed that the northeastern boundary of Abyssinia should continue at a distance of sixty kilometers from the coast. This was a remarkable admission. A ruler who considered the Red Sea coast an essential or historic possession would not have voluntarily proposed a frontier leaving the coastline outside his sovereignty.
The proposal reflected Menelik’s actual priorities: he was not seeking Massawa or Assab. His eyes remained on the commercial arteries closer to Shoa, especially the routes toward Zeila and Tadjoura.
This principle was later formalized in the Treaty of May 16, 1908. Article I stated that “ From the most easterly point of the … 10th July, 1900 the boundary proceeds in a south-easterly direction, parallel to and at a distance of 60 kilometers from the coast, until it joins the frontier of the French possessions of Somalia.” This agreement placed the Eritrean coastline firmly outside Ethiopian sovereignty and confirmed the separate legal and territorial status of Eritrea. This along with the 1900, and 1902 border treaties was used in the Eritrea and Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC) ruling of 2002. The boundary was drawn to be 60 km from the coastline.
Thus, the historical record does not support the claim that Menelik regarded the Eritrean Red Sea coast as an indispensable part of Abyssinia. His treaties, proposals, and strategic choices show the opposite. Menelik accepted Italian Eritrea, preserved the colonial boundary after Adwa, and even proposed a frontier that kept Abyssinia sixty kilometers away from the coast. His primary interest lay not in Massawa or Assab, but in the nearer and more economically relevant outlets of Zeila and Tadjoura, whose caravan routes were tied to Shoa’s own geography and commercial ambitions.
The Real Meaning of the Current Rhetoric
The implication of the provocative rhetoric coming out of Ethiopia is unmistakable: Ethiopia’s current borders are portrayed not as internationally recognized realities but as historical injustices requiring correction. More than thousand-year-old claims are being projected onto a modern Ethiopian state that did not exist in that form. Worse still, these claims are increasingly framed as if the loss of sea access were the result of Muslim, Ottoman, or Arab injustice against Christian Ethiopia. This is not a discussion about access. It is a discussion about territorial expansion.
Such framing is dangerous because it shifts the issue from commercial or economic need to civilizational grievance. Once geography is described as imprisonment and another state’s coastline as a “natural boundary,” the language of cooperation gives way to the language of entitlement.
Access Is a Right. Sovereignty Is Not.
International law recognizes the special challenges faced by landlocked states. States without direct maritime access are entitled to negotiate transit rights and commercial arrangements with neighboring coastal countries. Such mechanisms exist throughout the world and form a routine part of international commerce.
What international law does not recognize is an inherent right to another state’s coastline, ports, territorial waters, or sovereign territory. This distinction is fundamental.
Access facilitates trade. Sovereignty determines ownership, jurisdiction, and political authority. A state may negotiate access. It may not claim entitlement.
No legal principle allows a country to acquire coastal territory because geography has placed it at a disadvantage. Economic necessity may justify diplomacy; it does not justify territorial claims.
The OAU Principle at Stake
The implications of Ethiopia’s claims extend far beyond Eritrea. In 1964, the Organisation of African Unity adopted the Cairo Declaration, establishing the principle of uti possidetis juris—the preservation of inherited colonial borders upon independence.
The principle was not adopted because African borders were considered perfect. It was adopted because African leaders understood that reopening colonial boundaries would unleash endless interstate conflict.
For six decades, this principle has served as one of the foundations of continental stability. The irony is difficult to ignore. The African Union, successor to the OAU and guardian of this principle, is headquartered in Addis Ababa itself.
Any attempt to normalize territorial claims based on geography, historical grievance, or economic necessity directly challenges one of the central doctrines upon which post-colonial Africa was constructed.
Cooperation or Revisionism (Rewriting of History)
Ultimately, the debate is not about whether Ethiopia should have access to the sea through Eritrean, Djiboutian, or Somali territory. It already can and does through negotiated arrangements. The real question is whether access will be pursued through diplomacy or through narratives that imply a sovereign right to another state’s territory.
The Horn of Africa has endured enough conflict born from historical grievances and competing territorial ambitions. Its future depends upon preserving the principles that prevent those conflicts from re-emerging.
Eritrea’s coastline is not an unresolved question of ownership. And no state, however large, populous, or strategically important, possesses a legal right to redraw borders because geography has become inconvenient.
Conclusion
The issue before the region is not simply ports, trade routes, or maritime logistics. It is whether settled borders will be respected or reopened whenever a fragile neighbor at war with itself finds them inconvenient. It is whether history will be studied honestly or weaponized selectively. It is whether international law will govern relations between states or be replaced by grievance, demography, and force.
Ethiopia has no right to claim sovereignty over Eritrea’s coast. Access can be negotiated for the right price. Sovereignty cannot be demanded. Ports can be shared through treaties. Territory cannot be taken through rhetoric.
The principle at stake is larger than Ethiopia or Eritrea. It concerns the future of Africa itself: whether the continent will be governed by law, sovereignty, and cooperation, or by the dangerous belief that necessity can rewrite settled borders.
