In the Horn of Africa, power is counted in decades, and geography is treated as a debt that history still owes. On Monday, in Addis Ababa, Abiy Ahmed was sworn in for another five-year term as prime minister of Ethiopia. And the first thing the newly anointed ruler asked of his parliament and his country was the sea.
Ethiopia, Abiy insisted, must have access to the Red Sea. It is the oldest obsession of the highland empire. When Eritrea won its independence in 1993, Ethiopia — populous, landlocked, proud — was sealed off from the water, and its ambition has had no harbour since. A prime minister who speaks of the coast from a mountain capital is speaking of correcting the map.
The war at his back
The demand did not come in peacetime. According to Al Jazeera, Abiy made it as Ethiopian forces pushed back an opposition offensive in the northern region of Tigray — a fight in which the rebels are backed by Eritrea itself, the very state whose secession took the coast away. Relations between Addis Ababa and Asmara, allies and enemies by turns for three generations, have collapsed again: Ethiopia expelled ten Eritrean diplomats, shut its embassy in Asmara, and Eritrea answered by severing all diplomatic ties as the fighting spread through Tigray, Amhara and Afar.
The war moves by the week. Government troops retook the airport of Mekelle, the Tigrayan capital, as rebel leaders announced they had “temporarily moved out” of the city. New names, old roads, the same mountains drinking the violence.
Four neighbours, one answer
The neighbours have heard Addis Ababa talk about the sea before, and they do not care for the sound. According to the Associated Press, Egypt, Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia have all replied with the same formula: responsibility for the Red Sea belongs to the states that stand on its coast. Four of their leaders had only just met in New Alamein City to urge peaceful solutions in Ethiopia and an end to Sudan’s civil war. Calendars in this region are famously unkind to peaceful solutions.
A port, to a landlocked ruler, is never only a port; it is proof that will can revise a map. But the Red Sea is among the most guarded corridors of world trade, and the men dying this month in Tigray’s mountains are not dying for a harbour. The prime minister asked for the sea from a podium in the highlands. For now the sea belongs to others, and they say as much, in unison, from four capitals at once.