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The Red Sea Is Not Ethiopia’s Imperial Inheritance. Eritrea’s independence is not an unfinished Ethiopian question. It is a settled historical and international legal reality, affirmed by the Eritrean people in the 1993 referendum. Aksumite history does not confer modern territorial ownership. Geography does not create sovereignty, and a landlocked status does not grant entitlement to another nation’s coastline. Ethiopia has legitimate interests in maritime access, but access is negotiated not seized. Assab and Massawa are Eritrean sovereign territory, not instruments of imperial nostalgia or strategic coercion. The distinction is fundamental: Geography creates interests; international law defines rights; sovereignty establishes boundaries. The Red Sea is not Ethiopia’s lost inheritance. Eritrea is not an unfinished imperial project. Respect Eritrea’s sovereignty. Respect international law. ReadMore facebook.com/share/p/1CEyWNX…

Imperial Nostalgia and Refusal to Swallow Eritrean Sovereignty November 7, 2026 By Ghidewon Abay Asmerom @RedSeaBeacon I recently came across two articles on X (formerly Twitter) that left me wondering whether the author was deliberately rewriting history or had become so entangled in his own contradictions that he could no longer distinguish between international law, imperial nostalgia, and wishful thinking. The author is Alemayehu G. Mariam, a former professor of political science at California State University, San Bernardino, who prefers to go by the Americanized name Al Mariam. The first, published on October 30 under the grandiose title “What Is Good for the Nile Is Good for the Red Sea!”, attempts to enlist Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi in Ethiopia’s campaign for sovereign access to the Red Sea. It proposes an extraordinary diplomatic bargain: if Egypt expects Ethiopia to respect its interests in Nile waters, Egypt should reciprocate by supporting Ethiopia’s maritime ambitions. The argument conveniently overlooks an elementary fact: Egypt does not own Eritrea’s coastline and has no jurisdiction over Assab. It is an exercise in false equivalence that confuses the management of an international river with sovereignty over another country’s territory. The second, “Remembering the Massacre of Ethiopia’s Northern Command of November 3, 2020,” uses the remembrance of fallen Ethiopian soldiers of the Northern Command to recycle a distorted account of Eritrea–Ethiopia relations while disparaging Eritrean soldiers as “hordes.” One would expect an author honoring the dead to exercise greater care in describing the living, particularly when Ethiopian military officers have publicly acknowledged the assistance Eritrean soldiers and civilians provided to surviving members of that same Northern Command. My initial intention was simply to examine and react to these two articles. But the deeper one ventures into Al Mariam’s extensive writings, the more extraordinary the contradictions became. His public commentary stretches back to his contributions to the Ethiopian Review in 1991 and continues through decades of political essays, blog posts, and social media pronouncements. Following that trail is rather like watching a man repeatedly change political costumes while insisting that he has remained perfectly consistent throughout the performance. At one moment, Al Mariam celebrates peace with Eritrea and describes standing alongside President Isaias Afwerki during the historic reconciliation ceremonies of 2018 as a “supreme honor and privilege.” ReadMore @RedSeaBeacon @hawelti @AmbStesfamariam #RespectEritreasSovereignty #Enough2PPsWarmongering#UAEBloodInYourHands #AfricanUnion @ERiTV_Official @shabait @EmbassyEritrea @Eritrea_UN @AmbStesfamariam @hadnetkeleta @SirakBahlbi @EliasAmare @Tedllam @GhideonMusa @Ternafi @DahlaKib @FarahMaalimM @Landofcandoppl @ETMissionUN @PMEthiopia @MFAEthiopia @MofaSudan @MfaEGYPT @_AfricanUnion @StateDept @AJEnglish @BBCWorld @AFP @TheEconomist @PressTV @Telegraph @nytimes @UN @Sec_Council @TheReporterET @gulf_news redseabeacon.com/imperial-no…