Shallow Graves and Rising Tides: How Proxy Wars and Gen Z Uprisings Are Redrawing the Horn
3
0
By Thomas Araya Ethiopian Tribune columnist
In the Horn of Africa, where silence is often mistaken for stability and memory is curated like a museum exhibit, the spectre of proxy war is no longer a distant threat, it is a gathering storm. Ethiopia and Eritrea, once locked in open conflict and later bound by a brittle peace, now find themselves at the centre of a geopolitical recalibration. The terrain is familiar: water, ports, sovereignty, and silence. But the actors have changed, and the stakes have grown.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s recent declaration that Ethiopia will “correct” the historic mistake of losing access to the Red Sea has reignited tensions across the region. “Remaining a prisoner of the land is no longer sustainable,” he said. “This is not a matter of pride, it has become an existential issue.” The remarks, delivered with characteristic rhetorical flourish, were swiftly echoed by Ethiopia’s top military diplomat, General Teshome Gemechu, who described Eritrea’s Assab port as a “national objective”.
The reaction from Asmara was predictably caustic. Eritrean officials accused Addis Ababa of threatening their sovereignty, warning of a “toxic agenda of territorial claims.” President Isaias Afwerki, long accustomed to strategic ambiguity, now finds himself in a defensive posture, aligning more closely with Egypt, a nation whose own anxieties over the Nile have shaped decades of covert policy in the region.
Richard Reid’s Shallow Graves offers a lens through which to interpret this moment. The book, a memoir of the Ethiopia–Eritrea war, is less concerned with battlefield tactics than with the architecture of forgetting. Reid describes Eritrea as a state obsessed with memory, but only the kind it can control. “The Eritrean state is not interested in history,” he writes. “It is interested in memory, controlled, curated, and weaponised.” Veterans are revered but silenced; personal histories are discouraged, lest they disrupt the official narrative. The state’s legitimacy, he argues, is built on a curated past one that justifies perpetual mobilisation and strategic opacity.
This culture of controlled remembrance explains much about Eritrea’s posture today. Its involvement in the Tigray war, its silence on the GERD dispute, and its growing cooperation with Egypt are not anomalies, they are expressions of a doctrine that sees survival in secrecy and sovereignty in silence. Reid’s framing helps decode why Eritrea entered Tigray, why it stayed, and why it now retreats into diplomatic ambiguity.
Teferi Mekonen’s paper on the Nile–Eritrea nexus adds another layer to this analysis. From 1941 to 1991, Egypt and Sudan actively supported Eritrean insurgents, not out of ideological solidarity, but to sabotage Ethiopia’s upstream ambitions. “Egypt’s interest in Eritrea was never merely territorial,” Mekonen writes. “It was hydro-strategic, aimed at securing control over the Nile’s headwaters.” Ethiopia’s attempts to harness its waters, whether through the Lake Tana dam in the 1950s or the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam today, have been met with obstruction, sabotage, and diplomatic pressure. Eritrea, situated at the crossroads of these hydropolitical tensions, became both pawn and player, its insurgency subsidised by those who feared a strong, water-secure Ethiopia.
Today, the proxy war economy in East Africa is no longer confined to Cold War binaries. It is transactional, multi-polar, and increasingly opaque. The United Arab Emirates seeks control of Red Sea ports and influence through drone diplomacy. Egypt remains fixated on Nile sovereignty, backing actors that can contain Ethiopia’s rise. Turkey and Qatar jostle for position in Somalia, while Russia peddles arms and mercenaries under the guise of anti-Western solidarity. The United States and European Union, meanwhile, fund containment regimes to stem migration, often turning a blind eye to the abuses committed by their regional partners.
Ethiopia and Eritrea, though sovereign in name, are increasingly platforms for these foreign agendas. Their soil hosts military bases, their airspace is patrolled by imported drones, and their youth are conscripted into conflicts whose origins lie far beyond their borders. The resources that fuel these wars, water, minerals, ports, and even memory itself are being commodified, traded, and weaponised in a theatre where the local is always subordinate to the strategic.
Egypt’s recent deployment of troops to Somalia under the African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission (AUSSOM) has further complicated the picture. Ethiopian officials view the move with suspicion, tying it to Cairo’s long-running dispute over the GERD. Ethiopia’s ambassador in Mogadishu warned that Egyptian forces could pose “a political and strategic challenge” to Ethiopia’s 4,000 soldiers already stationed in Somalia. Cairo, for its part, insists the deployment is at Mogadishu’s invitation and fully endorsed by the African Union Peace and Security Council.
Somali officials have welcomed Egypt’s involvement, with Defence Minister Abdulkadir Nur declaring that Somalia would no longer wait for others to dictate its security partnerships. Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty reaffirmed that Cairo’s support is rooted in strengthening Somalia’s unity and territorial integrity. Yet the timing and scale of Egypt’s military expansion suggest a broader agenda one that includes containing Ethiopia’s regional ambitions and perhaps even influencing its internal cohesion.
This brings us to a more symbolic, but no less potent, dimension of the proxy war narrative: the flag of Oromia. Its resemblance to Egypt’s national colours has not gone unnoticed. In diaspora circles and among Ethiopian federalists, the flag has become a cipher a symbol of water politics, identity fragmentation, and external manipulation. Some interpret its prominence as evidence of Egyptian influence within Ethiopia’s federal architecture, pointing to figures like Professor Berhanu Nega, whose role in the government is seen by critics as emblematic of a broader ideological shift.
Berhanu, once a firebrand opposition figure, now serves as Minister of Education. His transformation from dissident to cabinet member has raised eyebrows, particularly among those who view the current federal arrangement as a Trojan horse for disintegration. “Egypt, unable to confront Ethiopia directly, has opted for a subtler strategy,” one diaspora analyst noted. “Support federal actors who favour decentralisation, weaken the centre, and ensure that no unified Ethiopian state can challenge its Nile hegemony.”
Whether this theory holds water is debatable. What is clear, however, is that Ethiopia’s internal divisions are being exploited by external powers. The Tigray war, the Oromo protests, the Amhara insurgency all have been framed as domestic crises. But in a region where foreign embassies double as intelligence hubs and humanitarian aid often masks strategic interests, the line between internal and external is increasingly blurred.
Yet even as these proxy dynamics unfold, a new force is beginning to stir one that neither Egypt nor Eritrea, nor the Ethiopian federal elite, seem prepared for. In Morocco, Gen Z protesters have taken to the streets, demanding dignity, transparency, and a future not mortgaged to corruption. Their slogans are not ideological they are existential. Their mobilisation is not partisan it is generational. And their fury is not confined to Rabat.
Egyptian cities, long subdued by surveillance and repression, are beginning to echo with the same discontent. The youth, born into economic stagnation and political theatre, are no longer content to inherit silence. Their digital fluency, their disdain for state propaganda, and their hunger for justice make them unpredictable and potent.
Ethiopia and Eritrea will not be immune. The new generation, raised on broken promises and buried truths, is beginning to ask questions that cannot be answered with slogans or arrests. They see through the proxy choreography. They understand the cost of curated memory. And they are beginning to speak.
“The old men are still talking about sovereignty,” one young Ethiopian activist posted online. “We’re talking about survival.”
The danger now is not merely that proxy wars will erupt, but that they will be met with uprisings leaderless, borderless, and unforgiving. The Horn of Africa, long governed by secrecy and strategic ambiguity, may soon be redrawn not by generals or diplomats, but by teenagers with smartphones and nothing left to lose.
For the diaspora, the imperative is clear. To understand the present, one must excavate the past not the official histories, but the buried truths, the shallow graves of memory and meaning. Only then can the region’s future be reclaimed from the hands that seek to shape it in their own image.
