Deciphering Meles Zenawi’s hatred of Ethiopia

Ethiopian Review
Deciphering Meles Zenawi’s hatred of Ethiopia

EthiopianReview.com |
By Messay Kebede

Meles Zenawi’s blatant hatred of Ethiopia is a puzzle that Ethiopian intellectual circles have in vain tried to decipher.While some propose the suggestion that the hatred betrays his commitment to his Eritrean side, others consider it as an expression of his ethnic racism. Still others remain baffled, unable as they are to understand how he revels in denigrating the object of his obsession, namely, state power. One thing is sure, however, they all agree on the idea that his overall policy and its day-to-day implementation make sense only from the vantage point of a project to ransack Ethiopia’s resources and leave the rest to the vultures of ethnic secessionism. Harsh dictators have ruled Ethiopia in the past, but all considered themselves as Ethiopians. What is new with Meles is his anti-Ethiopian stand and his open contempt for whatever is Ethiopian.

Yet, one important element liable to explain Meles’s hatred has been with us for quite some time. I have in mind the history of his family, which is a history marred by collaboration with the occupying Italian forces. Notably, his grandfather not only worked for the Italians, but he was also an appointee and an office holder. What this means is that Meles had to deal very early with this family shame, which according to testimonies brought scorn and isolation on his family.

Now, there are two ways of dealing with this kind of existential predicament. There is the positive way according to which the person affected by family disgrace tries to behave in such a way as to repair the fault. In the case of Meles, this would mean showing a renewed and active commitment to Ethiopia. This is the path of expiation, which requires a serious self-examination and, mostly, a great amount of courage. All the available and trustworthy testimonies about Meles agree on the fact that courage was and is not one of his virtues.

There remains the second path, which is negative and consonant with the lack of courage. It is the path of denial, that is, the denial of betrayal. In order to accomplish this metamorphosis, Meles has to demean Ethiopia and devalue all its accomplishments. The more he belittles Ethiopia, the more he weakens the gravity of the family betrayal, and the less guilty and stained he feels. There was no betrayal since what his family supposedly betrayed was just a trash.

The path of denial nurtures hatred for the simple reason that hatred is a self-defense, a counter to the feeling of being despised by others. When you feel that other people despise you, you react by developing an intense dislike for them as a way of protecting yourself. If you hate them, you get rid of all scruples and sensitivity and adopt the principle that all means are good to hurt them.

This hatred partially explains Meles’s rapid rise to the leadership of the TPLF. Who else could best express and incarnate the rage of the TPLF against the Ethiopian state and army but Meles, who in addition to sharing with other members the resentment against the marginalization of Tigray, had on him the personal scar of national betrayal. While anger motivated most members, Meles had a stronger torment: he was humiliated and could not rest until he humiliated the source of his own dishonor.

Meles’s characterization of the Ethiopian national flag as nothing but a trash, his persistence in reducing Ethiopian history to mere conquest and subordination, his delight in debunking Ethiopian heroes, his ritual of jailing pro-Ethiopian leaders and releasing them after forcing them to sign degrading letters, etc., are all part of his strategy to humiliate Ethiopia in order to feel good about himself. Add to this that his long-standing hatred has been reignited by his electoral defeat in 2005, which defeat he was quick to interpret as another attempt to humiliate him. Because the defeat revived an old wound, his crackdown on the opposition and protesters was bound to be brutal.

This is, then, an appeal to Meles urging him to psychoanalyze himself so as to become aware of the deep wound that constantly perverts his policy and contradicts his dream of becoming a great leader. As we all know, in matters of spiritual illness, awareness of the cause is an efficient cure so that the second path, the path of expiation through great deeds is still open to him. No amount of power can erase his shame so long as Meles continues to hang his rehabilitation on the trashing of Ethiopia. For the more he lowers Ethiopia, the less gratifying becomes his dominion. This contradiction is the reason why he wants more power, even though the discredit of the nation cheapens his power. In other words, the cure lies, not in the mistreatment of Ethiopia, but in its promotion, that is, in the commitment to overcome his shame through good works.

Deciphering Meles Zenawi’s hatred of Ethiopia

(Prof. Messay Kebede can be reached at mkebede1@udayton.edu)

The curse of Africa's colonial borders

The curse of Africa's colonial borders

Ghana's first President and Pan Africanist Kwame Nkrumah. Africa's artificial borders, in Nkrumah's vision, stood in the way of continental unity. FILE Posted Thursday, September 3 2009 at 17:45 Some 38 years after his death, Ghanaians have finally decided to honour the memory of their first President, Kwame Nkrumah with a national holiday on September 21 this year, which incidentally would have marked the 100th anniversary of his birthday.

The day has been declared a public holiday and aptly named Founder's Day. A larger than life figure, Nkrumah is credited with leading Ghana to independence from the British and championing a United States of Africa besides being a founder president of the Organisation of African Unity, now African Union. The Africa Nkrumah envisaged is far from being a reality as the experience of writer Nuruddin Farah shows. Below we run, in his own words, an account of his frustration with Africa's artificial borders which, in Nkrumah's vision, stood in the way of continental unity. Nuruddin Farah writes: "In 2007, I telephoned the Consulate of Botswana in Cape Town on a Wednesday to inquire about a weekend visa to Gaborone as I meant to attend the wedding of a close friend's daughter there. In reply to his question about my status and place of residence, I said that I was a permanent resident of South Africa and that I held three African passports and named these and the governments, which issued them.

He asked why I had not applied for a visa earlier, and I responded that I had just got back from a book promotion tour that had taken me to the USA, Canada, and Europe. He said I would have to wait for four to six weeks to get a visa issued on any of the three passports I held. I was tempted to stress my disappointment by asking why his consulate was giving me a hard time about a weekend visa, while the British, the French, the US, the Swiss and Canadian embassies would not hesitate to issue me with five-to-ten-year duration visas within a few hours and while I waited. However, I thought better of it, maybe because I doubted he was the kind of reader that might enjoy my writings. I got in touch with my friend whose daughter was getting married and a professor friend of mine who was expecting me to give a lecture at the University of Botswana to let them know that I was cancelling my trip. The professor suggested that his department apply on my behalf and recruit someone higher up in the government to intervene. That way, the consulate would issue the visa and I would attend the wedding and later in the week speak to the students and staff of the English Department. I said that the idea of going that route did not appeal to my sense of self-honour, and insisted that I would cancel my visit. Six months or so later, I was a guest of the Federal President of Germany together with several African Heads of State among them the President of Botswana.

On the second day, during coffee break, the President of Botswana asked if I had ever been to his country, given that I lived so close to it, in South Africa. I replied that I had not; he wondered why not. I related to him what happened when I applied for a visa several months earlier whereupon he called his assistant, a lady, whom he instructed to take down my details and to make sure that I received a visa and a letter of invitation. He wanted me to promise that I would call on him once I got to Gaborone. I declined to offer my details to the assistant. After all, my intentions were lofty, not personal, and I wanted him to see the absurdity of his government's visa policies and to consider changing them, as it affected other Africans.

In effect, I was pointing to him the set of circumstances that had led to my needing his facilitation, when Europeans, Americans, and many other nationalities from outside Africa could enter Botswana without requiring visas. Given the opportunity, I might have referred to the to the arbitrary carving up of the continent at a meeting in Berlin, in which European colonial powers established borders within it, dividing our peoples into entities bearing hyphenated identities – British Somaliland, Italian Somaliland, Ethiopian-held Somaliland, Kenyan Somaliland and French Somaliland – and creating never-ending conflicts. Perhaps implicit in my refusal to accept the President's offer was this unspoken assertion: that the borders in Africa are stakes driven through our peoples' hearts. In the Horn of Africa alone, border disputes have caused so much havoc, accounting for several all-out wars as well as the continued war of attrition between Ethiopia and Eritrea. When I think back on my encounters over the years with sundry consular and immigration officials from various African countries, I cannot help wondering what might have become of Africa if Europeans had not imposed on our continent the maps we have today. It follows, too, that Africa would occupy a more honourable place in the world if millions of our able-bodied men and women had not been removed to other continents as slaves, and if the savageries of Euro-greed in the insatiable shape of, to give an infamous example, King Leopold of Belgium had not been visited on the Congo. It has always been my contention that had Europe not interfered with our history and had we pursued its natural course, then we too would have developed in the same way as other continents. Colonial subjugation and the mapping of the continent did contribute to the deceleration of our organic development as people. The mapping of Africa at the turn of the nineteenth century tethers us to a history littered with impediments.

The borders are but one of the numerous obstacle courses standing in the way of our economic and social well-being.
Indeed, the ephemeral nature of borders inspires me with guarded cynicism; their impermanence animates a caginess of the kind that produces optimism within me. Those of us who have known the two sides of Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, for instance, will remember two of the most absurd borders between the two German entities - the one, a line of yellow buoys the height of a human above the water to mark the border in the sea between the then GDR and West Germany. The other was a road bridge at Domitz, built halfway across the River Elbe and, because uncompleted, left suspended in midair. With the fall of The Wall and the reunification of the two Germanys, the borders no longer existing point to their status of impermanence. Sadly, this is not so in Africa.

Because in 1963, our continent's Heads of State endorsed the borders bequeathed to us by the colonial powers at the inaugural meeting of the Organization of African Unity, one felt profound sorrow at the decision, wrongfully catapulting us into everlasting political and economical disaffection, something the recent formations of regional groupings, dividing the continent into four main trading blocs, will not be able to eradicate as long we continue to endorse the border regime established in 1884 at the Berlin summit. Borders are an anathema, which we must discard if we wish our continent to develop culturally, scientifically and economically as a single unit – and organically at that." Additional reporting by Francis Kokutse in Accra