From silent ports to shadow economies, to ghost towns, a look at how extended isolation and militarism dimmed Eritrea’s hopes
Independence in 1993 was supposed to be the rebirth of a people who had defied impossible odds. For three decades Eritrean fighters had clawed their way through mountain ranges and desert plains, defeating an empire first ruled by Ethiopia’s emperors and then by its Marxist generals. When the tricolor flag rose above the port of Massawa that May morning, the air was thick with exhaustion and promise. Ordinary citizens believed the long war had finally purchased a peace that would open schools, build roads, and reconnect them to the sea that had sustained their ancestors. Yet victory, once achieved, hardened into a single story, the story of survival. The new leadership, shaped entirely by conflict, found it difficult to imagine governance without discipline, secrecy, and command.
President Isaias Afwerki, now in his late seventies, became the embodiment of that continuity. The revolutionary command structure never dissolved; it merely changed uniforms. The country’s institutions were born within the logic of the trench, and over time that logic became the state itself. The national service established to defend the borders expanded into a system that absorbed nearly every able-bodied adult. Reports from the United Nations and Human Rights Watch describe indefinite assignments that blur the line between duty and servitude. For many young Eritreans, adulthood means conscription without end. What was intended as collective sacrifice for the nation’s security turned into collective immobilization. Families were split between barracks and exile, while the old fighters, convinced that eternal readiness was the price of survival, built a society permanently at attention.
The Lost Artery and the Unsettled Border
For centuries the highlands of Ethiopia looked outward through Eritrea’s ports. The camel caravans that once descended to Massawa and Assab carried coffee, hides, and salt, and they returned with textiles and spices from the Arabian coast. Geography bound the two nations together long before politics divided them. When Eritrea gained independence, the relationship could have evolved into one of partnership, land and labor linked naturally to sea and trade. Instead, mistrust and wounded pride turned interdependence into rivalry.
Between 1998 and 2000 the border war reduced that shared landscape to dust. The Eritrea Ethiopia Boundary Commission ruling of 2002 was meant to close the chapter, awarding key disputed territories to Eritrea, but demarcation on the ground never followed. Each government interpreted the decision through its own lens of justice, and a legal victory without implementation only deepened resentment. The frontier remained sealed, patrolled by wary soldiers who shared language and kinship yet faced each other as enemies.
Before the conflict, three quarters of Ethiopia’s trade passed through Eritrean ports. When the fighting began, that artery was severed overnight. Ethiopia lost its shortest route to the sea, and Eritrea lost its largest source of revenue. Assab, once a humming depot of containers and cranes, became a skeletal monument to missed opportunity. Although President Isaias later remarked in interviews that Ethiopia could use the port “under proper arrangements,” no terms were ever offered. Diplomats read the phrase as assertion rather than invitation, a reminder that the sea, like sovereignty, would never again be shared.
Context: Ethiopia’s Multi Port Strategy and Regional Reactions
Ethiopia’s geography leaves it little choice but to innovate. With more than one hundred million people and the fastest growing economy in East Africa, it cannot afford dependence on a single corridor. After the border closed, Addis Ababa embarked on what it calls the multi port strategy, an effort to diversify maritime access through Djibouti, Kenya’s Lamu corridor, Sudan’s Port Sudan, and Somaliland’s Berbera. The Addis Djibouti Railway became the flagship of this policy, shrinking a week-long truck journey to less than a day. Dry ports sprouted across the highlands, creating new logistics hubs and free trade zones.
Every Ethiopian announcement of a new maritime deal echoes differently in regional capitals. In Asmara, it stirs old anxieties about encirclement; in Cairo, it triggers warnings about shifts in the Nile’s political geometry. What Ethiopia frames as economic diversification others interpret as geopolitical assertion. Still, for Ethiopians, the alternative is unthinkable, to remain dependent on a single partner for ninety percent of their trade is to balance the entire national economy on a narrow quay.
Voices of Alarm: Egypt and Eritrea
The Horn of Africa’s geography has always intertwined rivers and seas, and nowhere is this clearer than in the triangular tension among Ethiopia, Egypt, and Eritrea. When Ethiopia announced the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in 2011, a project designed to generate more than six thousand megawatts of electricity, Cairo saw it as a potential choke on the Nile’s flow. For Egypt, the river is not merely water but sediment, soft power, influence, and domination—a lifeline that has historically extended its reach deep into the Horn of Africa. What followed was a decade of negotiations, threats, and uneasy truces, during which the dam became a symbol of African self-determination and regional suspicion alike.
Eritrea, watching from the Red Sea’s western edge, entered this conversation through absence as much as presence. Analysts at Chatham House have pointed out that Asmara’s foreign policy often mirrors Cairo’s when Ethiopian influence expands. The alignment is pragmatic rather than ideological, but it has costs. Instead of building trust with Addis Ababa, Eritrea’s guarded stance deepened isolation from regional forums such as the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, which it withdrew from for years.
Among Eritreans themselves, opinions are divided. Some see Ethiopia’s rising power as a threat to sovereignty; others view cooperation as the only path to prosperity. But discussion remains muted in public, constrained by fear of crossing invisible political lines. Egypt’s concern over the Nile and Eritrea’s caution over the Red Sea thus merge into a single pattern of apprehension, a region where the memory of dependence overshadows the possibility of partnership.
How This Ties to GERD and the Nile Connection
The GERD is more than a dam; it is a metaphor for control, of water, destiny, and narrative. Ethiopia argues that it will lift millions out of poverty by exporting electricity across East Africa, while Egypt warns that it will threaten the livelihoods of farmers downstream. Between these two visions lies Eritrea, whose coastline once gave it leverage over Ethiopian trade and whose diplomacy once mattered to the balance of the region.
For Eritrea, the dam underscores a new hierarchy. Power in the Horn now flows not from possession of a port but from the ability to generate and distribute energy. Ethiopia’s hydropower capacity has shifted economic gravity inland. To remain relevant, Eritrea would need to reconnect through commerce, offering its ports as gateways for the same energy and goods that the dam will produce. But that would require reopening dialogue with the very neighbor it mistrusts.
Shadow Economies and Illicit Revenues
Where formal economies recede, informal ones expand. Eritrea’s strict controls on trade, foreign exchange, and movement have created an ecosystem where survival often depends on transactions outside the law. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime notes that smuggling routes across the Horn carry everything from fuel and livestock to gold and arms. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime lists Eritrea as a corridor within a wider network linking East Africa to the Arabian Peninsula.
These shadow economies blur distinctions between necessity and exploitation. Small traders transport contraband goods to survive, while criminal syndicates use the same routes for human trafficking. The U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report identifies Eritrea as both a source and transit country for forced labor. The UNHCR confirms that over eight hundred thousand refugees live in Ethiopia, about one hundred seventy nine thousand of them Eritrean. In these underground exchanges, isolation itself becomes another export—its people transformed into commodities of escape.
The Silenced Coast and the Afar
The Afar people inhabit the coastal plain once known as Dankalia. Their history stretches across modern Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, tied together by salt caravans and fishing grounds. Independence promised recognition, yet the Afar soon found themselves marginalized within the new state. Studies from SOAS University of London and Addis Ababa University record limited participation in Eritrea’s 1993 referendum and restrictions on mobility and livelihoods thereafter. The International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs and Amnesty International describe curbs on traditional fishing zones and curfews that severed ancient trading routes.
The loss of Afar access to the sea is not only cultural but economic, a severing of a community from its means of survival and a country from a living connection to its coast. Their dispossession illustrates how a revolution that sought to free a people could end up silencing one of its oldest native voices.
Eritrea’s Lost Port Revenue
When Eritrea separated from Ethiopia it inherited the ports of Assab and Massawa, two of the Horn’s best natural harbors. In the early years, Ethiopia paid millions annually for access. By 1998, those payments stopped. Since then, Ethiopia has spent roughly twenty six billion dollars on Djibouti port fees. According to the IMF and UNCTAD, Eritrea’s idle ports represent a cumulative loss of ten to twelve billion dollars. Infrastructure decays when unused, cranes corrode, channels silt, and skilled technicians emigrate. What remains is potential without productivity.
The Government That Grew Old
President Isaias Afwerki’s cabinet and generals are largely his contemporaries, men in their late seventies and eighties who fought beside him in the bush. The institutions they built remain militarized command structures dressed in bureaucratic form, often opaque. The UN Human Rights Council describes this as “a system of perpetual national service and perpetual silence.” The median Eritrean, by contrast, is under twenty years old. The result is an irrecon generational dissonance, a government that remembers only war and a youth that knows only flight.
The Red Sea’s Moral Reckoning
The Red Sea has never been a frontier; it has always been a bridge. Merchants and pilgrims once crossed its waters carrying ideas as freely as goods. In closing itself off from this history, Eritrea has turned its back on the ethos of connection that once defined its coast. Scholars at SOAS call this “the tragedy of the maritime nation that forgot the sea.”
The Habit of Isolation
Isolation began as strategy. During the liberation struggle, secrecy meant survival. Over time it became habit. The World Bank estimates that Eritrea’s economy grows by less than two percent annually, far below regional averages. The UN Security Council documents the two percent diaspora tax that sustains the government’s revenue. The same remittances that keep families alive also insulate the state from reform, transforming exile into an extension of control.
The Price of Fear
Fear costs money, talent, and time. Every student conscripted indefinitely into national service represents a lost teacher or entrepreneur. The African Development Bank calculates that even modest economic liberalization could raise GDP growth by several percentage points within five years. Yet growth requires trust, and trust requires openness, two commodities authoritarianism cannot produce.
A Culture of Silence
Censorship in Eritrea is rarely visible, it is internalized. Teachers avoid politics, artists code their dissent in metaphor, preachers measure their words. The UN Human Rights Council calls it “a pervasive climate of control that leaves no space for civil society.” Yet whispers persist. In exile, Eritrean media broadcasts from abroad. Inside the country, rumor functions as resistance. Silence can delay history, but it cannot erase it.
The Silenced Coast
No image captures Eritrea’s paradox better than its coast, a shoreline of immense promise rendered voiceless by neglect. The Afar who once fished its waters now struggle for access. The cranes at Assab stand motionless against a horizon of empty blue. And yet, geography endures. Eritrea’s ports could again serve as the lungs of the Horn, drawing trade and breathing life into the interior. The sea demands reciprocity. It gives only to those who meet it halfway.
Notes on Sources and Caveats
Economic figures derive from the IMF, World Bank, African Development Bank, and UNCTAD datasets for 1993 through 2025.
Human rights and migration information comes from the UN Human Rights Council, UNHCR, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch.
Historical and analytical references come from SOAS University of London, Addis Ababa University, Chatham House, Reuters, and The Economist.
By Selam Tesfaye
Dedicated to the citizens of Eritrea who continue to endure hardship and silence, yet hold on to hope for change.
