A political succession after a death of the head of government in Ethiopia, certainly does not have the same resonance in the Caribbean today, that it would have had either when Haile Selassie was removed (some claim smothered to death) in 1974, or even when his successor Haile Mariam Mengistu was overthrown in 1987, after a civil war led by forces effectively under the command of Meles Zenawi who assumed power as Prime Minister in 1991, and died in the course of medical attention in Brussels last week.
Selassie’s departure brought to a virtual end the hero-worship of one who, particularly for the Rastafarian forces and sympathisers in Jamaica, but elsewhere in the Caribbean too, was seen as a living God; and who had an identity in Africa and in the Caribbean as a symbol of African opposition to the Fascist forces of the Second World War, when he stood up against Mussolini’s attempt to make his country a colonizing presence on the continent.
But at home, the Ethiopian monarchy had a reputation as an autocracy, doing little for the development of the country, while standing with the West in the era of the Cold War, and therefore to be left to rule unhindered by Western support against those who opposed him.
Mengistu brought that era to an end, and simultaneously changed the political and ideological complexion of the country, installing a communist system of rule after 1974, and becoming President of what was now called the Peoples Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. But the Ethiopian people soon found that, in addition to being an ineffectual leader in terms development of the economy as the country went through famine with hundreds of thousands of deaths, he was bent on installing a system of communist totalitarianism.
It was developing, and persistent opposition to this that led to a prolonged civil war against his regime, and his defeat and forced departure for exile in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe by a military formulation led by a coalition of groups, the Ethiopian Peoples‘ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF),under the de facto command of Meles Zenawi, a civilian political activist whose own increasingly autocratic rule ended with his early death (aged 57), and at the height of his powers both domestically and in the regional environment.
There were, of course, two substantial differences of circumstances between the periods of rule of Mengistu (1974-1991) and Meles Zenawi, in spite of the obvious similarity of an inclination to autocratic, or virtually dictatorial rule. First, Meles’s transition from de facto ruler, to formal President of Ethiopia, was marked by the collapse of Gorbachev’s tenure of office, the end of the Cold War, and therefore the end of the stark, required, differentiation in allegiances of countries between the then Soviet Union and the NATO bloc led by the United States. In that context, as time went on, Meles, already previously disturbed by Soviet assistance to Mengistu during the civil war, had little cause to continue a close relationship with the new Russia, even in the post-Cold War circumstances.
For him, the challenge of ruling was twofold. The first was to put an end to the continuing severe deprivation of the Ethiopian people, and the second was to find new sources of assistance for economic development. And in that context, he turned to a Western world, and a United States which whose priorities were changing from those of the Cold War, to the post-9/11 battle against Muslimist al Qaeda forces wherever they were, or were imagined to be. Among those forces were those emerging in the continuing civil war in neighbouring Somalia, which Meles wished not to have entangled with the multifaceted ethnic composition of Ethiopia, for the new ruling party, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), led by his own Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), reflected this complexity.
As the American forces intervened in Somalia, Meles gave support – a support which he used to justify, or limit Western criticism of his own interventions in Eritrea, anxious to establish its own autonomy. But as he fought his own civil wars, he inevitably tightened the reins of power at home; or as one observer has put it, he succeeded in continually “closing the political space” to the extent that in the parliamentary elections of 2010, the opposition gained a mere single seat.
To the West, however, he remained, to the end, a valuable gendarme, helping to stabilise relations, by his particular means, in the area encompassing the small states of Eritrea and Djibouti, and of Somalia, in the Horn of Africa, deemed strategic in the context of US-Nato surveillance of the Indian Ocean, as well in the developing fractiousness between the Sudan and newly independent South Sudan.
Meles obtained a certain Western tolerance also, because he made a quite decisive impact on the ravaged economy which Mengistu had led. For some aid-disbursing countries, his approach became something of a possible role model for other developing states, where a substantial effort is required to be made in the face of widespread poverty and limited mineral presences.
Speculation will inevitably now arise as to the extent to which the coalition EPRDF can remain a stabilising force under the leadership of the TPDF. No doubt the United States will be anxious to determine whether, with Meles’ heavy hand gone, the essentially ethnic coalition of the ruling party will survive, as other groups undoubtedly seek, under the new rulers, more autonomy than Meles dared to permit.
