In June 2019 Borkena reported that Addis Ababa University legal scholar Dereje Zeleke argued there was no legal ground to make Eritrea’s Assab port part of Ethiopia, and that mobilizing the public around Assab claims looked like a political plot.
Assab talk revived after the 2018 Ethiopia–Eritrea rapprochement, because landlocked Ethiopia still depended on Djibouti while nationalists debated Red Sea access.
Kept as Horn geopolitics archive, the scholar’s warning dates early pushback against port-irredentist rhetoric.
Sources: Borkena