ADDIS ABABA: Eritrea on Saturday accused Ethiopia of destabilising the region, in the latest war of words between the two fractious Horn of Africa neighbors.

Eritrea won independence in 1993 after decades of armed unrest. A two-year war between 1998 and 2000 then left tens of thousands dead and sent diplomatic relations into a deep freeze.

The neighbors normalized ties when Abiy Ahmed took office in Ethiopia in 2018, pushing a rapprochement which earned him a Nobel Peace Prize the following year.

Eritrean forces backed the Ethiopian federal army during the conflict in the Tigray region. But since that war ended in late 2022, relations have dived anew, with Eritrea claiming that landlocked Ethiopia has designs on its port of Assab.

An Eritrean foreign ministry statement accused Ahmed’s Prosperity Party of “actively destabilising the Horn of Africa.

“While Eritrea has maintained strict strategic patience, Addis Ababa has been immersed in incessant escalation of its war rhetoric for more than three years now; challenged international treaties; and actively hosted, trained, and financed subversive, sectarian proxy groups with an explicit ‘regime-change’ agenda against Eritrea,” the statement said.

Contacted by AFP, the Ethiopian premier’s spokesman did not immediately comment on the allegations.

Eritrea, a country ruled with an iron fist by Isaias Afwerki since independence, also accused Addis Ababa of “harboring, supporting and actively encouraging” the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan, a paramilitary group that has been locked in a devastating civil war with the regular army since 2023.