The Weaponization of Victimhood: How Ethiopia’s Prosperity Party Trapped itself in Its Own Regional Expansionist Ploys

The recent coordinated diplomatic and media assaults launched by the Prosperity Party (PP) against Eritrea represent the height of geopolitical irony. Platforms like the Ethiopian News Agency, the Institute of Foreign Affairs, and the Horn Review are now orchestrating a narrative that falsely portrays Eritrea as an aggressor while frantically urging the international community “to intervene”.

This reprehensible duplicity and calculated performance of victimhood is akin to the Tigrigna proverb that says: “Chiguarafs baala harima teawi” (ጭጉራፍስ ባዕላ ሃሪማ ተእዊ ) – “the whip emits a shrill sound as it hits its prey”.

For the past three years, the PP has been openly threatening the sovereignty and territorial integrity of its neighbors; questioned the very existence of sovereign states; and, through its collusion with disruptive external actors, systematically contributed to the destabilization of the Horn of Africa. Yet today, it cries foul, manufacturing a narrative of “encirclement and external conspiracy” to conceal its own crippling domestic shortcomings and regional failures.

A comprehensive and evidence-based deconstruction of these hypocritical state narratives exposes the reality behind the PP’s dual-track propaganda strategy, as well as the destabilizing character of its regional posture.

First, to understand the current media frenzy, it is necessary to examine the PP’s dual-track communication strategy, which has been operationalized since late 2023:

• The Domestic Track (Aggressive Revisionism): Intentionally designed to radicalize domestic audiences, senior PP officials – including the Prime Minister, the Chief of Staff of the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF), Members of Parliament, and co-opted academics – have indulged in relentless agitation campaigns that are predicated on questioning the very legitimacy of Eritrea’s statehood. They framed Eritrea’s hard-won independence achieved after a long and costly armed struggle to regain its inalienable rights of decolonization as a “historical mistake” that must be corrected “by all means necessary,” effectively maintaining an unprovoked and unilateral declaration of political hostility and warfare for nearly three years.

• The International Track (Sanitized Coercion): For foreign diplomats residing or visiting the country and international audiences, the messaging assumes a completely different tone and character. Territorial ambitions are repackaged in the sanitized language of “regional integration,” “economic cooperation,” and “demographic entitlement.” The argument is presented as though Ethiopia’s status as a large and populous landlocked country creates a natural, historical, or even legal entitlement to the sovereign waters of other nations, specifically the Eritrean port of Assab. What is presented internationally as an economic necessity conceals a dangerous expansionist proposition that population size can somehow confer a right to annex sovereign foreign territory.

Additionally, the latest state-media hysteria accuses Eritrea of forging a perpetual and hostile alliance against it. Despite the PP’s attempt to project its own destabilizing conduct onto others, the historical and contemporary record tells a fundamentally different story. Throughout three years of intense saber-rattling and explicit threats of territorial occupation by the PP, the Government of Eritrea has maintained a consistent posture of strategic restraint. That strategic restraint has thus far mitigated regional volatility and averted a catastrophic interstate war – a stabilizing posture that required prompt, public acknowledgement from international actors, which failed to materialize and inadvertently emboldened the PP. Had the global community decisively rebuked and openly checked the Prosperity Party’s coercive ambitions for a maritime outlet, the current escalation could have been contained. Instead, the PP was left, and in some cases encouraged, to interpret international passivity as a blank check for territorial expansion, directly triggering the systemic crisis that now threatens to destabilize the Horn of Africa.

The truth is it is the PP, not Eritrea that has systematically undermined the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity and peaceful coexistence that underpin international law and the foundational frameworks of the African Union. In pursuit of an old imperial ambition to establish Ethiopia as a regional hegemon, the PP has generated considerable regional destabilization across the Horn of Africa by:

• Directly threatening Eritrea’s territorial integrity, questioning its very statehood, and going so far as to claim the entirety of Eritrea as part of Ethiopia;
• Violating the sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Somalia through its unlawful Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Somaliland; and
• Aggravating the conflict in Sudan through its support for and hosting elements associated with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

While simultaneously accusing Eritrea of operating through proxies, the PP has been actively and publicly hosting, training, and financing subversive, sectarian groups pursuing an explicit “regime-change” agenda against Eritrea, including the so-called Red Sea Afar Democratic Organization (RSADO), as well as various fringe and copycat “colour-revolution” groups.

Perhaps the most glaring contradiction in the PP’s current posture is its attempt to rewrite the very territorial and political settlement that made the historic Eritrea – Ethiopia rapprochement of 2018 possible. The 2018 peace became possible because Ethiopia, under the leadership of new Prime Minister, ultimately accepted the legal and political framework established by the Algiers Agreement of 2000 and, critically, the final and binding decision rendered by the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC) in 2002.

The decision established the legal basis for settling the putative “territorial dispute” on the border town of “Badme and its environs”. In effect, Ethiopia’s belated acceptance, in 2018, of the EEBC Award of 12 April 2002, opened the door for ending the state of war and restore normal friendship and cooperation between the two neighbouring countries.

The 2018 rapprochement was entirely premised on, and re-iterated, the normative and immutable principle on the sovereignty and territorial integrity/distinctness of the two countries, whose borders could not be altered through political convenience, historical revisionism, or military pressure. Ethiopia’s unequivocal acceptance of Eritrea’s sovereignty and territorial integrity signaled a departure from the politics of confrontation and an acknowledgement that good-faith territorial disputes can only be settled on the basis of international law and established international norms and mechanisms.

It was precisely this recognition that allowed the two countries to move, however briefly, from confrontation to reconciliation. Diplomatic relations were restored, borders were opened, transport links resumed, and a new political vocabulary of peace, friendship, and regional cooperation was introduced. The international community welcomed the development as a historic breakthrough in one of Africa’s most protracted interstate conflicts.

Against this background, the current posture of the same political establishment is not merely contradictory, it is deeply disturbing.

A ruling party that once presented the 2018 rapprochement as its crowning achievement – for which Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed exclusively received the Noble Peace Prize for a peace that belonged to two nations – now presides over a war machine that questions the very statehood of Eritrea, challenges its territorial integrity, and advances preposterous claims over “sovereign access” to territory and ports that fall squarely within Eritrea’s sovereign domain.

To now question Eritrea’s statehood or territorial integrity is therefore not merely another episode of political rhetoric. It represents a repudiation of international law and the very principles that made reconciliation possible.

For a political movement that came to power claiming to have ended the cycle of conflict, such a reversal constitutes a betrayal of the highest order, not only of Eritrea, but of the global will generated by the 2018 peace process itself.

Moreover, in their desperate attempt to frame Eritrea as an opportunistic actor thriving in Ethiopia’s weakness, Ethiopia’s government trolls are trying to scapegoat the Eritrean Defense Forces (EDF) for alleged “war crimes” in Tigray. However, the facts on the ground contradict this narrative:

• First, the PP has previously contrived with foreign political actors, including certain US politicians under the Biden Administration and international organizations, in a coordinated effort to implicate the EDF.
• Second, unlike the fractured nature of the ENDF, the EDF operates within a strict command-and-control structure that emphasizes uncompromising discipline and the humane treatment of civilians and prisoners of war. This institutional culture is rooted in a decades-long military tradition inherited from Eritrea’s liberation struggle for human dignity and national liberation. As it will be recalled, the EPLF released and safely repatriated more than 130,000 Ethiopian troops, including several Generals and senior military officers in May/June 1991 at the end of Eritrea’s three-decade long armed struggle for national liberation.

Eritrea’s contemporary actions align perfectly with its long-held, principled position on Ethiopia’s territorial unity and stability. Eritrea’s political doctrine has consistently rejected the fragmentation of its southern neighbor, recognizing that an unstable, balkanized Ethiopia represents a permanent security liability for the entire Horn of Africa.

This principle stretches back to the days of the liberation struggle. In the 1970s and 1980s, while the EPLF pursued a legally distinct case for decolonization based on internationally recognized Italian colonial boundaries, it opposed ethnic secessionist tendencies of internal Ethiopian armed groups advocating for a pan-Ethiopian coordinated political stance and strategy to overthrow the Derg and build an inclusive, unified state.

In the event, the aggressive foreign policy of the PP is a standard political maneuver from its compounding domestic crises, including active, unresolved civil conflicts in the Amhara, Oromia, and Tigray regions.

To fuel its war machine and justify its expansionist claims, the PP projects an image of Ethiopia as a surging regional economic powerhouse. However, the hard economic data completely shatters this myth.

A sober analysis of Ethiopia’s macroeconomic reality – recently highlighted by financial experts such as the former World Bank President, David Robert Malpass – reveals an economy on the brink of structural collapse:

• Ethiopia has officially defaulted on its international debt obligations, including its failure to make scheduled interest payments on its $1 billion Eurobond.
• The country remains burdened by tens of billions of dollars in external debt, forcing it to plead for IMF bailouts and painful debt restructuring, while skyrocketing inflation and severe currency depreciation decimate the livelihoods of its citizens.

The contradiction is therefore difficult to ignore. A state that cannot feed its own population without massive foreign aid, and service its sovereign debt, cannot claim the mantle of an economic powerhouse. In this respect, the PP’s obsession with securing “sovereign coastline…and projection of naval power in the Red Sea”, particularly through claims directed at Eritrean territory, is not simply an economic strategy; it is a political instrument for redirecting domestic frustration outward.

In conclusion, the Prosperity Party’s campaign against Eritrea is a naked attempt to externalize a deep-seated domestic crisis and can neither hoodwink its domestic constituency nor the international community.

The irony is profound: a government that has repeatedly violated the sanctity and fundamental principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity of neighbouring states cannot simultaneously present itself as the ultimate defender of the regional order. Nor can raw territorial ambition be repackaged as “economic necessity” and presented to the international community as a “legitimate grievance”.

Eritrea’s sovereignty is not a bargaining chip, nor is it a historical inconvenience to be corrected according to the miscalculations of reckless neighbor. It is an immutable fact of international law and African political history. Duplicitous attempts of manufacturing a narrative of encirclement by hostile alliances, and portrayal of the primary initiator of regional tensions as the “the innocent victim” cannot alter that reality.

The Whip cannot strike its prey and concurrently plead for “redress as the aggrieved party!”.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Research and Documentation Division

18 August 2026