The Blind Spot: Ethiopia breaks with Eritrea, African Union fears escalation

This story concerns readers here too for a specific reason: among the causes cited for the crisis is Ethiopia’s access, as a landlocked country, to Red Sea ports — one of the most significant shipping routes for global trade, Europe included — along with the long-standing dispute over Nile water resources linked to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. A destabilization of the Horn of Africa is not, in this sense, merely a regional issue.

The facts, according to the African Union Commission and the agencies that picked up its statement: Addis Ababa has closed its embassy in Asmara and declared ten Eritrean diplomats persona non grata, after accusing Egypt, Eritrea and Sudan of supporting armed opposition groups fighting Ethiopian federal troops in the Tigray region, where clashes have resumed. Eritrea responded by severing diplomatic relations; Ethiopia and Egypt have each in turn expelled a diplomat from the other country.

The African Union Commission has published an official statement calling on Ethiopia, Eritrea and Egypt to exercise maximum restraint and avoid statements that could aggravate tensions. This is language that, in multilateral diplomacy, signals concern over an escalation deemed possible, not yet underway in the form of an open conflict between the three countries.

The tensions, according to the same sources, are intertwined with an older dispute: that between Egypt and Ethiopia over Nile water resources and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a project that has for years pitted Cairo against Addis Ababa over management of the river basin. Added to this is the issue of Ethiopian access to Red Sea ports, a matter concerning the security of trade routes in the region.

At the time of publication, none of the major Italian outlets appears to have covered the news. The check was carried out by searching, in recent hours, for references to the diplomatic rupture between Addis Ababa and Asmara, the expulsions of diplomats between Ethiopia and Egypt, and the African Union statement: none of these elements appears to have been picked up by the main Italian news websites consulted. The available sources remain, for now, the African Union statement and its coverage by international outlets such as Semafor and the Anadolu news agency.