Where is meles zenawi

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who has died at the age of 57, was rightly described as an important Western ally in the Horn of Africa. Yet, he is an unlikely partner for Western democracies. A hardline Marxist-Leninist, who once believed the Soviet Union and China had sold out and looked instead to Albania, Mr Meles believed in running a tightly controlled country. Although Washington was reported to have attempted to dissuade Ethiopia from a full-scale invasion of Somalia in , the US backed Prime Minister Meles's determination to prevent al-Shabab, then a part of the ruling Union of Islamic Courts, from establishing an al-Qaeda stronghold in Somalia.

Al-Shabab, an al-Qaeda-aligned militant group, still controls swathes of land in rural Somalia, but is on the back foot militarily, having lost several key bases in the past year - some to Ethiopian forces.

Mr Meles was a towering intellect who took an MBA from the UK's Open University with glowing compliments from his tutors, while also running the country.

The commission was set up to find solutions to poverty in Africa, but perhaps its greatest achievement was to enshrine development aid in UK foreign policy. When the British Conservative government won power in , newly elected Prime Minister David Cameron also pledged to increase aid spending until it reached 0.

The topography of the site alternates between contemplative gathering points and vistas over the city and the surrounding landscape. The campus comprises five buildings that exhibit striking, individual architectural concepts — an outlook and reception area; a guest house; offices; a research centre; and a library.

Varnero PLC joined the project as contractor, Quartet Art Studio was responsible for stone work, Transsolar for the energetic concept, Brook Teklehaimanot acted as advising partner between Addis Ababa and Berlin, and Vogt Landscape Architects joined the project for the landscape design of the park and the gardens surrounding each building. In Vogt Landscape Architecture joined the project to create curated gardens along the campus path and individual concepts for the landscape surrounding each building.

The path follows the topography of the site and boasts flowers, trees, and stones gathered from all regions of the country, achieving a co-existence of naturally and regionally distinctive traits. Stretching along seven commemorative stations on the western side of the park, a memorial trail traces the childhood, education and services of Meles Zenawi, aiming at representing the upbringing and political circumstances of his generation and what it must have meant to grow up in Ethiopia during this period.

Reviewing his writings on the developmental state, this essay shows the unity of his theory and practice. Meles had the quiet certitude of someone who had been tested — and seen his people tested — to the limit.

Along with his comrades in arms in the leadership of the Tigray People's Liberation Front TPLF , he had looked into the abyss of collective destruction, and his career was coloured by the knowledge that Ethiopia could still go over that precipice.

Many times during sixteen years of armed struggle in the mountains of northern Ethiopia against the then-military regime led by Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, Meles had close personal brushes with death. In , he and other central committee members avoided a likely-fatal aerial bombing by just twenty minutes after their hideout was betrayed by a spy and Ethiopian fighter-bombers targeted it.

Later that year, he was taken gravely ill with malaria and was evacuated to hospital in Khartoum — one of the very few times he left the field during the entire armed struggle. As Meles crossed the border back into Ethiopia, I met him for the first time, and we began the first of our seminars on political economy.

As dusk fell, still recuperating in his pyjamas, Comrade Meles climbed aboard a creaky Soviet Zil truck, captured from the Ethiopian army. All travel was at night, to avoid the MiGs, and we bumped our way along rocky tracks, first through the forested lowlands, camping out during daylight hours under trees next to a dry riverbed.

Such was the itinerant life of the TPLF leadership. The next night our truck rumbled up a road cut through the mountainside by the guerrillas, with hairpins so tight that our truck had to make three-point turns. We spent the next day in caves at the TPLF's temporary headquarters in a mountain called Dejena, and the next nightfall I watched as an apparently uninhabited hillside gave forth a battalion of men, a dozen trucks and a tank, all of them completely obscured by camouflage until that moment.

The TPLF had turned concealment into science. The discomfort of the journey was less memorable than the travelling discussion group of Comrade Meles, Comrade Seyoum head of TPLF foreign relations and later Ethiopia's longest-serving Foreign Minister , a dozen fighters, a representative from a European agricultural assistance agency, and myself.

I learned quickly that the most necessary attribute of a guerrilla fighter is functioning without sleep. Meles was a voracious consumer of information and analysis, and a tireless questioner.

We discussed perestroika in the USSR, theories of people's liberation warfare, the imperfections of grain markets, and, above all, peasant survival strategies during drought.

At one point we met a hunter on the track and Meles spent an hour discussing with him the importance of conserving endangered species.

Meles was a convinced Marxist-Leninist, pragmatic but certain that the way of life of the Ethiopian peasants had to change or die. Having just completed my doctoral dissertation on famine survival strategies in Sudan, I tried to convince him that rural people were best served by diversified livelihoods, and that pastoral nomadism was an effective adaptation to the vagaries of life in a drought-prone ecosystem. He did his best to convince me that traditional livelihoods were doomed to stagnation and that Ethiopian peasants had to specialize in farming, trade, or livestock rearing.

The abiding impression left by Meles and the TPLF leadership was that their theory and practice were deeply rooted in the realities of Ethiopia, and that they would succeed or fail on their terms and no others. The TPLF had convinced the people, and that was all that mattered. They did not measure their record or their policies against external standards; on the contrary, they evaluated outside precepts against their own experience and logic.

It was a refreshing, even inspiring, dose of intellectual self-reliance. Meles was unflinchingly optimistic about the prospects for the armed struggle and assured me that the Tigrayan guerrillas, until a few months previously confined to the hills and the borderlands with Sudan, would penetrate as far south as Shewa, the Amhara heartland just a hundred miles from the capital Addis Ababa, within a year.

I did not take his promise seriously neither did any other non-Ethiopian. On 31 May, government salaries and pensions were due. They were paid on time. Police were back on the street within days. During the next 21 years, Meles often looked as though he was camping out in the palace. He moved into his predecessor's semi-subterranean bunker home in the sprawling grounds of the old palace of the Emperor Menelik, and took over Mengistu's spacious but damp modernist executive office.

The artwork scarcely changed over the next two decades, the carpets just once. Meles was not interested in the trappings of power, only in what could be done with it.

From the outset, what needed to be done was to conquer poverty. From his early days in the field through to his last years as an international statesman, Meles was absolutely consistent in this aim. Ethiopia's overriding national challenge was to end poverty, and in turn this needed a comprehensive, theoretically rigorous practice of development. Marxism-Leninism was, for him, not a dogma but a rigorous method for assembling evidence and argument, to be bent to the realities of armed struggle and development.

The Front responded by adjusting its policies to encourage the local petit bourgeoisie in the villages and small towns it controlled. When the great famine of —5 struck, the TPLF took the strategic decision to make feeding the peasantry its priority, even at the expense of losing ground to the enemy.

In an episode made famous by Joseph Stiglitz, 1 Meles objected to the IMF position that international assistance was too unpredictable to be incorporated into national budget planning purposes, with the absurd consequence that national spending on infrastructure, health, and education could not be increased in line with foreign aid flows.

Meles produced arguments and data and forced the Bretton Woods Institutions to rethink. Meles inverted Kissinger's dictum that holding office consumes intellectual capital rather than creating it. He was always learning, reading, debating, and writing, and while he never abandoned the fundamental principles forged in the field, his views evolved greatly.

After , he studied for a degree in Business Administration at the Open University graduating first in his class and subsequently a Masters in Economics at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, under the supervision of the former Minister of Development Cooperation, Jan Pronk. The views expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Government.

Meles was accused of having been soft on Eritrea and blind to Eritrean preparations for war, and subsequently for stopping the war once Ethiopia had expelled the invader from occupied territory. Meles clearly stated that there should be no confusion that the EPRDF's mission was to build a capitalist state.

He further stated that rent seeking and patronage within the ruling party posed the key dangers to this objective, and they needed to be thoroughly stamped out. Meles' adversaries accused him of selling his revolutionary soul to imperialism and serving Eritrea at the expense of Ethiopia. His rivals then walked out and Meles seized the moment to consolidate his power.

One may disagree with Meles' thesis or argue that he failed to implement it properly. But without question it represents a serious attempt to develop, and apply, an authentically African philosophy of the goals and strategies of development.

He explained the background to me. The New World Order was very visible and especially so in this part of the world.

The prospect of an independent line appeared very bleak. So we fought a rearguard action not to privatize too much. The neo-liberal paradigm does not allow for technological capacity accumulation, which lies at the heart of development.

For that, an activist state is needed, that will allocate state rents in a productive manner. South Korea and Taiwan were Meles' favourite examples of developmental states that succeeded by subverting neo-liberal dogma. China's rise provided something else: by challenging American dominance it made space for alternatives.

Meles' starting point was that Ethiopia and indeed Africa as a whole lacked comparative advantage in any productive field. He laid out his case in one discussion we held. So the private sector will be rent-seeking not value creating, it will go for the easy way and make money through rent.

So the state needs autonomy. Meles clearly identified the challenge of development as primarily a political one: it is necessary to master the technicalities of economics, but essential not to let them become a dogma that masters you.

It is the politics of the state that unlocks development. If Ethiopia could sustain its growth levels — which have been running at close to 10 percent per annum for most of the last decade — it could achieve middle-income status and escape from its trap.

To succeed in this, a third element was needed, namely the hegemony of developmental discourse, in the Gramscian sense that it is an internalized set of assumptions, not an imposed order. Meles liked to give the example of corrupt customs officials in Taiwan, who exacted bribes worth 12 percent of the value of imports of consumer goods, while not demanding bribes on imported capital goods, illustrating how value creation had been internalized in this way — so that even the thieves followed the norm.

We need value creation to be dominant for there to be a foundation of democracy, for politics to be more than a zero sum game, a competition to control state rents. Thus far, I found Meles' case compelling, though I questioned if it were possible to create a common mindset of value creation in a country as vast and diverse as Ethiopia, in such a short period. Meles' response was that the EPRDF had indeed neglected political education and party organization for years, which explained the —1 internal crisis and the poor performance in the elections, including being wiped out in the major cities.

But, he argued, a new generation of leaders was emerging, he was renewing the party at all levels, and, above all, his policies were delivering results. Ethiopians had never, ever, experienced anything like the recent economic growth and the spectacular expansion in infrastructure and services — and this, he said, would transform the country in the next fifteen years.

Included in Meles' paradigm was a theory of democracy. It would have to stamp out patronage and rent seeking. Developmental states could come in several forms, Meles argued, provided that they maintained the hegemony of value creation, were autonomous from the private sector, stamped out rent seeking and patronage, and maintained policy continuity for sufficiently long to succeed.

A developmental state could be authoritarian, but in Africa's ethnically diverse societies, democratic legitimacy was a sine qua non. Ethiopia's ethnic federalism and decentralization reflected this.