An Empire That Refuses to Learn — When Power Is Reduced to Drawing Lines with Assab Port
Excerpt
The delusional redrawing of maps to suggest the annexation of Assab Port is not a harmless provocation but a dangerous rehearsal for an unnecessary war—one that diplomacy can and must avert. History shows who pays when empires test fantasies with force: coerced Oromo youth sent to fight wars they did not choose. The Oromo people have learned from loss, and they reject yet another imperial gamble with their sons and daughters.
This was not a cartographic accident. It was choreography.
Exactly the kind of trial balloon PM Abiy Ahmed favors: float the idea, watch reactions, retreat rhetorically if needed, advance if silence or confusion follows. We have seen numerous such trial balloons before. Nothing commits, everything conditions.
This time, the handover of a revised map to military trainees [1] is the tell.
Narratives are not hardened in press briefings; they are hardened where uniforms, drills, and doctrine meet. Today a map, tomorrow an assumption—next week, an expectation.
This is how an empire imagines before it moves. It tests the weather of outrage. It measures the drag of law. It listens for hesitation. When it hears none, it calls that consent.
The Assab Port gambit fits a longer pathology: revisionism as governance. When institutions weaken and legitimacy thins, power retreats into symbols—maps, myths, memory. Borders are redrawn on paper because reality resists being redrawn on the ground. What cannot be built is claimed; what cannot be governed is imagined. The state does not announce annexation; it normalizes the imagination first.
This is not strategy. It is resentment weaponized:
- Resentment toward Eritrea for exiting the imperial cage.
- Resentment toward international law for insisting that borders matter.
- Resentment toward history for refusing to rewind.
Hence the fixation on redrawing lines, as if as easy to acquire the Assab Port: a cartographic empire, ruling by ink when substance fails.
But we must be clear about what this risks—and who pays. The loudest drums of war are beaten by those least likely to bleed. It is Oromo youth, in the main, who have historically been press-ganged—effectively conscripted under coercion—and consumed.
During the Derg era, a brutal war machine devoured lives in the name of empire, culminating in Eritrea’s liberation.
In the EPRDF era, the cycle mutated rather than ended, eventually producing the cruel irony of a Nobel Peace Prize—while the human ledger remained unpaid and largely unacknowledged.
Now into the PP Regime era, the Tigray war of 2020–2022, still fresh in everyone’s mind, with its unresolved aftermath and ever-present potential to reignite despite an AU-mediated lull, consumed many Oromos—not by choice, but through coercion.
These wars are launched by irresponsible politicians whose children are educated abroad with taxpayers’ money, yet fought by the children of poor families at home—families who shoulder unaffordable taxes from meager incomes and surrender their most precious children to the battlefield.
Across at least five decades, Oromo sons and daughters have paid dearly—by the tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands.
We refuse a repeat.
Our opposition is not to peace with neighbors; it is to spite masquerading as destiny. We reject wars of memory, wars of maps, wars waged to soothe imperial wounded pride. The Horn does not need another manufactured crisis exported from an internal legitimacy deficit. The Red Sea is not a therapy session for an empire in denial.
The tragedy is that the empire appears determined not to learn [2].
Yet the Oromo people have learned—through grief, through loss, through the empty chairs at family tables. They have learned that empires draw lines easily and bury the consequences elsewhere. They have learned that silence today becomes blood tomorrow.
That is why this provocation must be named early, clearly, and without euphemism. Not because we seek confrontation—but because naming the danger is how needless wars are avoided.
When power is reduced to drawing lines, the only responsible response is to redraw the moral boundary: no more sacrificial wars, no more coerced youth, men and women, no more imperial fantasies paid for with Oromo lives.
The empire may refuse to learn.
The Oromo people will not forget.
Oromo Lives Matter!
References
- ENDF Displays Map Showing Assab as Part of Ethiopia, Raising Regional Concerns, 4 January 2026, The Horn Frequency Publication.
- Elemoo Qilxuu, Kumaa Daadhii and Olii Boran, The Politics of Spite—How Oromia’s Foundations Expose the Empty Ambitions of a Troubled Region, 12 November 2025, OROMIA TODAY.
