Ethiopia’s quest for an access to a sea has been the talk of the Horn of Africa States over the past year. This has caused relations between the coastal countries and Ethiopia to worsen and particularly between Somalia and Ethiopia whereas the latter has blatantly assaulted Somalia through an MoU which it has forced on one of the northern regions of Somalia. Somalia has not taken the story lightly as this assault adversely affects not only its territorial integrity but also its sovereignty. It is the subject of this paper wherein we explore the possibilities of Ethiopia accessing a sea.
Ethiopia is a country that was officially created in 1932 by Ex-Emperor Haile Selassie I. Before then, the country was called the Abyssinian Empire which was constituted by force and through the support of the European colonial countries of Great Britain and France, by a little King of Shoa, who later on, towards the end of the nineteenth century, crowned himself as Emperor Menelik II. This historical perspective is important for understanding the reasons behind the proposal, hereinafter, for Ethiopia to have access to a sea.
We must note that there were other countries in the region before the colonial countries appeared in the region, when the Suez Canal was opened in 1869. There was the Axumite kingdom which had broken down into Abyssinian provinces Tigray and Amhara) and fighting princes and Eritrea which was then an Ottoman vassal state under Egyptian rule. The access of Axum to the sea was long gone at least some centuries before the Europeans showed up in the region, and more particularly Italy which took over Eritrea from the Egyptians.
Abyssinia was then engulfed in its own princely wars much like........