A Response to Ambassador Sophia Tesfamariam
Ambassador Tesfamariam, you begin The Wrong Question: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Ethiopia? with a childhood memory of The Sound of Music, borrowing the film’s question about Maria to suggest that the world has spent too long trying to solve Ethiopia. It is a clever opening, but it leaves another question hanging over your essay: where did Sophia Tesfamariam watch The Sound of Music?
Your own biography passes through Ethiopia. Your father worked for Ethiopian Airlines, and Addis Ababa formed part of the world in which you grew up before eventually moving to the United States. Ethiopia was therefore not simply the neighbouring country you would later scrutinize from a diplomatic podium; it belonged to your formative world. That makes your metaphor unusually revealing. You reach back into a childhood partly formed in Ethiopia to retrieve a film about conscience, courage and resistance to authority, yet apply its moral lesson almost entirely to the country of your childhood rather than to the political system you now represent.
That political system has had more than three decades to establish its own record. Eritrea has held no national election since independence. Isaias Afwerki remains the only president independent Eritrea has known. The constitution remains unimplemented, the legislature has not met since 2010, independent political competition does not exist, and national service that is legally supposed to last eighteen months can consume years or even decades of an Eritrean’s working life. Human Rights Watch’s 2026 Eritrea report describes an unelected political system in which arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance and indefinite military and national service remain central features. Freedom House’s 2025 assessment gave Eritrea only 3 points out of 100 for political rights and civil liberties. (Human Rights Watch)
Before asking how the world should solve Ethiopia, Ambassador, it is worth asking what happened to the lesson about questioning authority when the authority moved to Asmara.
Ethiopia Is Not Eritrea’s Permanent Alibi
Your essay repeatedly redirects questions about Eritrean conduct toward Ethiopia’s internal problems. But Ethiopia’s internal politics cannot answer a much simpler historical question: has Asmara repeatedly cultivated relationships with armed organizations operating against the Ethiopian state?
The record predates Abiy Ahmed. The 2015 United Nations Monitoring Group report examined Eritrean support for Ethiopian armed opposition, including the Tigray People’s Democratic Movement and Ginbot Sebat. Earlier monitoring examined the wider pattern. These relationships crossed Ethiopian governments and political periods, which is precisely why they cannot be reduced to the present quarrel between Addis Ababa and Asmara.
Then there is Fano. In the circulated recording, Professor Hassan’s statement says that “this Fano was launched by Shabia,” distinguishing the contemporary formation from Ethiopia’s historic Fano tradition. That distinction matters. Historic Fano belongs to Ethiopian patriotic history and long predates both Shabia and independent Eritrea. Hassan’s statement therefore raises a much narrower contemporary question about Shabia’s relationship with an armed formation operating under that historic Ethiopian name, and it sits beside rather than substitutes for the established United Nations record concerning Eritrean relationships with Ethiopian armed opposition.
The pattern reaches beyond Ethiopia. The SIPRI Yearbook 2009 recorded Sri Lankan claims that a Chinese supplied weapons consignment originally destined for Eritrea was reportedly resold by Eritrean officers to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and it cited a United States Senate report saying that the Eritrean government reportedly provided military aid to the LTTE. Sri Lanka was not Ethiopia and the Tamil Tigers were not an Ethiopian opposition movement.
This broader history gives context to the unusually sharp judgment of French historian Gérard Prunier, a longtime scholar of the Horn and former director of the French Centre for Ethiopian Studies, who described Eritrea as a strange country whose biggest export was “subversive activities” and characterized the regime as surviving as a conduit of instability for those willing to pay. Prunier’s words are his assessment, but the point deserves an answer rather than dismissal: why has such a small state appeared so repeatedly in investigations and reporting concerning armed actors far beyond its borders?
Even Yemen entered this history. The same 2015 United Nations Monitoring Group recorded claims from Eritrean sources that approximately 400 Eritrean soldiers had been embedded with the United Arab Emirates contingent fighting in Yemen, while explicitly describing that information at the time as unconfirmed. What the record securely demonstrates is that Asmara learned to turn its strategic position, military apparatus and Red Sea geography into bargaining power in other states’ regional calculations. (Digital Library)
International Law Has a Memory
Your essay invokes sovereignty and territorial integrity forcefully when discussing Ethiopia. Those principles matter, but they do not belong exclusively to Eritrea.
The Eritrea Ethiopia Claims Commission’s 2005 jus ad bellum award found Eritrea responsible for violating Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter when it resorted to armed force in May 1998 against Badme, then under peaceful Ethiopian administration, and other specified areas. Whatever dispute existed over the boundary, the Commission concluded that a territorial claim did not authorize Eritrea to resolve it through force.
That history makes selective legalism impossible. International law cannot function as Eritrea’s shield and Ethiopia’s leash. Eritrean sovereignty deserves protection, and Ethiopian sovereignty deserves precisely the same protection.
The point did not disappear with the border war. Human Rights Watch’s current reporting says Eritrean forces have remained in parts of Ethiopia’s Tigray region, while a British government country information report recorded reports concerning Eritrean presence around Zalambessa and parts of Irob. Amnesty International’s investigation of the November 2020 killings in Axum attributed the systematic killing of hundreds of civilians to Eritrean troops and concluded that the acts might amount to crimes against humanity. Amnesty’s Axum investigation.
That is why “restraint” cannot simply mean restrained language in an Eritrean communiqué. Restraint is conduct.
You Cannot Declare Ethiopia’s Red Sea History Closed
Your treatment of the Red Sea assumes that Ethiopia’s landlocked condition emerged from an ordinary, permanent and democratically settled national process whose legitimacy Ethiopians may no longer examine.
That is not how Ethiopia became landlocked.
The decisive arrangements emerged during the collapse of the Derg and the military victory of the EPLF and EPRDF in 1991, when Ethiopia was governed through a transitional political structure. Contemporary reporting from July 1991 described a proposed settlement in which an Eritrean independence referendum appeared alongside Ethiopian access to Assab, while the political forces in Addis Ababa were simultaneously constructing a temporary charter and transitional government.
The United Nations subsequently observed the 1993 referendum, Eritreans overwhelmingly voted for independence, and Eritrea became internationally sovereign. That international reality does not require Ethiopians to erase the circumstances in which their own country became landlocked.
Ethiopians are entitled to ask what democratic mandate a transitional political order possessed when making decisions with consequences extending generations into the future. They are entitled to ask what happened to the understandings surrounding Assab. They are entitled to ask why Ethiopia’s relationship with a coastline to which its history and economy had been connected should become a forbidden subject merely because an Eritrean diplomat declares the discussion closed.
Sovereignty protects borders; it does not police historical memory.
Assab and Massawa Are the Uncomfortable Exhibit
Eritrea emerged from independence possessing Assab and Massawa, two Red Sea ports beside one of Africa’s largest landlocked economies and near one of the most valuable maritime corridors on earth. Geography handed independent Eritrea an extraordinary strategic asset.
What happened to it?
When Ethiopia and Eritrea reconciled in 2018, the International Institute for Strategic Studies described Eritrea’s ports as “in disrepair” and said Ethiopia would gain access to Massawa and Assab as part of the rapprochement. More than a quarter century after independence, the discussion was still about rehabilitation and reconnecting those ports with the enormous economy immediately to their west.
The ruins here are therefore also ruins of opportunity. Eritrea obtained sovereignty over an exceptionally valuable coastline, yet decades of militarization, isolation and recurring confrontation left the regional potential of Assab and Massawa largely unrealized.
And 2018 creates a contradiction your essay cannot easily escape. When Isaias and Abiy embraced, Ethiopian engagement with Assab and Massawa was described in the language of reconciliation and economic reconnection. The geography did not subsequently change. Ethiopia did not become landlocked yesterday. Assab did not move. What changed was the political relationship.
If Ethiopian engagement with those ports could represent peace when Isaias approved it, how does Ethiopian discussion of the same strategic reality become proof of imperial ambition when relations sour? What was regional integration in 2018 cannot become expansionism merely because the political weather in Asmara changed.
The Red Sea question is therefore not yours to close.
Independence Was Supposed to Produce a Country, Not Permanent Mobilization
There is an even more difficult question beneath all of this, and it should be asked carefully: not whether Eritrea has a right to exist today, because its sovereignty is an established international fact, but what the movement that won independence actually built with that sovereignty.
At independence, Eritrea faced a devastated economy, destroyed infrastructure, drought, demobilization and the enormous task of reconstruction. The early IMF assessments did not describe an economy condemned to inevitable failure; they described formidable reconstruction challenges alongside attempts to move toward a market based economy. That distinction matters because the catastrophe that followed cannot simply be attributed to some economic law proving Eritrea should never have existed. It directs attention instead toward political choices made after independence. (IMF eLibrary)
And those choices produced an extraordinary system. National service is legally eighteen months; in reality, Human Rights Watch says Eritreans can serve for years or decades, and earlier HRW research found that some had effectively spent their entire working lives at the service of the state. Students are channelled through Sawa, military training intrudes into secondary education, draft evaders and sometimes their families face punishment, and release from service can be arbitrary. Calling this merely “conscription” understates the problem. For many Eritreans, national service has become the architecture around which an entire adult life can be controlled. (Human Rights Watch)
The political space surrounding that system is scarcely more open. Freedom House’s 2025 assessment gave Eritrea 3 out of 100, including 1 out of 40 for political rights and 2 out of 60 for civil liberties. There is no national electoral competition, no independent media system capable of scrutinizing national power, no functioning multiparty political order and no meaningful institutional mechanism through which Eritreans can replace the national leadership. (ecoi.net)
The G 15 demonstrated what happened when members of the liberation generation themselves demanded reform. Eleven senior officials were detained in 2001; Human Rights Watch reports that their fate or whereabouts remain unknown. The state that justified itself through liberation imprisoned some of the very people who participated in achieving it. (Human Rights Watch)
Then there is the diaspora tax. United Nations reporting has examined Eritrea’s two percent levy on citizens abroad, the relationship between payment and consular services, and the so called regret form. The contradiction is difficult to miss: Eritreans abroad remain sufficiently Eritrean for the state to impose obligations upon them, but Eritreans everywhere remain unable to decide through a national election whether the same leadership should continue governing.
The Exodus Is Part of the Verdict
The human consequence is visible far beyond Eritrea’s borders. Close to 1 million Eritreans live in exile, many having fled the burdens of compulsory service and political control, while the World Bank estimates Eritrea’s resident population at roughly 3.6 million.
And the road out has often been lethal. Eritreans have become one of the most recognizable refugee populations moving through Sudan, Libya and across the Mediterranean toward Europe, precisely because young people have repeatedly judged the dangers of desert routes, trafficking, detention and sea crossings preferable to the indefinite political and military obligations awaiting them at home. Human Rights Watch has documented this connection for years, describing indefinite service as a major driver of flight and noting that thousands, including unaccompanied children, have undertaken perilous journeys toward Europe. (Human Rights Watch)
That is the devastating question for the liberation generation now governing Eritrea. What does independence mean when so many of the young people born after independence experience freedom primarily by leaving?
The Mediterranean graves associated with Eritrean migration are not evidence that Eritrea lacks a legal right to exist. They are evidence of something politically more immediate: sovereignty did not automatically produce liberty for the people in whose name sovereignty was won.
Eritreans have to Own Its Record
There comes a point when Ethiopia cannot remain the explanation for everything.
Italy cannot explain why Eritrea has never held a national election. Haile Selassie cannot explain why the constitution remains unimplemented. The Derg cannot explain why young Eritreans born decades after independence can still spend years or decades in national service. The TPLF cannot explain why the G 15 disappeared into detention. Abiy Ahmed cannot explain why independent media vanished or why Eritreans continue to flee.
After more than three decades, these are choices made under Eritrean sovereignty.
The liberation generation that still dominates the political system is now old enough to have governed an entire generation born after the war that gave it legitimacy. The central question is no longer whether those leaders sacrificed for independence. They plainly did. The question is whether sacrifice in one historical period gives a leadership permanent political ownership over generations that followed.
It does not.
So Who Appointed Asmara the Examiner of Ethiopia?
This brings us back to The Sound of Music and to the Ethiopia of your childhood, Ambassador.
Ethiopia did not begin with Abiy Ahmed, the EPRDF, the Derg or Haile Selassie. Its civilizational record stretches through ancient states, kingdoms, religious traditions, manuscripts, architecture, languages, trade networks and political institutions extending across millennia. Governments have risen and fallen within that history, and Ethiopia has survived them.
While Ethiopia and Eritrea are both legally sovereignl, it makes the posture of your essay remarkable. You represent a state that has existed independently for little more than three decades, governed throughout that entire period by the same president, without a national election, with an unimplemented constitution, indefinite national service, vanished liberation veterans, an enormous exile population and two extraordinarily positioned ports whose potential remains strikingly unrealized. Yet your essay places Asmara on an elevated bench from which Ethiopia must answer for its history, its alliances, its sovereignty and even the questions Ethiopians may ask about the Red Sea.
Who appointed Asmara to that bench?
Not international law, because international law establishes sovereign equality and the Claims Commission itself found Eritrea responsible for an unlawful resort to force against Ethiopia. Not democratic legitimacy, because independent Eritrea has never held a national election. Not the Eritrean electorate, because it has never been permitted to deliver such a verdict. And certainly not geography, because Assab and Massawa themselves stand as reminders of how much strategic possibility three decades of sovereignty failed to realize.
That is why your opening metaphor eventually turns back toward you. You reached into a childhood partly formed in Ethiopia and retrieved a film about courage and conscience to ask what the world should do about Ethiopia. But the harder question lies closer to home.
If courage means questioning authority, when will Eritreans be permitted to question their own leadership through an election? If independence meant freedom, why can national service consume decades of a citizen’s life? If sovereignty meant dignity, why have 25% of its small population chosen exile? If international law is the standard, why does your argument pass so lightly over the Claims Commission?
If Eritrean involvement with armed movements is merely an Ethiopian narrative, what are we supposed to do with United Nations monitoring, Professor Hassan’s statement, the LTTE record and Gérard Prunier’s description of Eritrea’s export of “subversive activities”?
And if Ethiopian engagement with Assab and Massawa is imperialism today, why was it integration when Isaias embraced it in 2018? Eritrea’s sovereignty is not the question. What its rulers have done with that sovereignty is.
Ethiopia does not require Asmara’s permission to examine how it became landlocked, what transitional authorities decided in the early 1990s, what became of the understandings surrounding Assab, why Massawa and Assab failed to fulfil their extraordinary regional potential, or what the Red Sea means to future generations of Ethiopians. Nor does Ethiopia require a certificate of civilization from a government that has never submitted itself to the national electorate it claims to represent.
So before asking the world how to solve what you deem to be a problem outside of your borders, perhaps Asmara should finally answer the question its own history has postponed for more than three decades: when will Eritreans be allowed to choose who governs Eritrea, and when will independence finally mean political freedom for the generation born after independence?
Until then, Sophia Tesfamariam and the old guard in Asmara can keep playing the same hand: deal Ethiopia the blame, keep the cards of accountability close to their chest, and appoint themselves Ethiopia’s political guardians and moral examiners while young Eritreans increasingly choose to leave.
No diplomatic essay, however elegantly decorated with memories borrowed from an Ethiopian childhood, can reshuffle that record into an authority that history, international law, democratic legitimacy and the Eritrean ballot box never dealt Asmara.
You wanted to call a spade a spade, Ambassador. Then let us keep the cards on the table. Whether the suit is spades, hearts, diamonds or clubs, changing the suit does not change the hand. After more than three decades, Asmara cannot keep dealing Ethiopia the blame for the cards it dealt its own people.
