http://www.forbes.com/sites/thorhalvorssen/2012/08/22/requiem-for-a-reprobate-ethiopian-tyrant-should-not-be-lionized/
Requiem for a Reprobate: Ethiopian Tyrant Should Not Be Lionized
By Thor Halvorssen and Alex Gladstein
With the dust beginning to settle on yesterday’s death of Meles
Zenawi—ruler of Ethiopia since 1991—Western leaders have been quick to
lavish praise on his legacy. A darling of the national security and
international development industries, Zenawi was applauded for cooperating
with the U.S. government on counter-terrorism and for spurring economic
growth in Ethiopia—an impoverished, land-locked African nation of 85
million people. In truth, democratic leaders who praise Zenawi do a huge
injustice to the struggle for human rights and individual dignity in
Ethiopia.
U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice said Zenawi “leaves behind an indelible legacy
of major contributions to Ethiopia, Africa, and the world.” Gordon Brown
called Zenawi’s demise “a tragedy for the Ethiopian people,” while David
Cameronremembered him as an “inspirational spokesman for Africa.” Bill
Gatestweeted that he “was a visionary leader who brought real benefits to
Ethiopia’s poor.” Abdul Mohammed and Alex de Waal took to the New York
Times op-ed pages today in perhaps the most unspeakably sycophantic eulogy
of Zenawi, declaring that the dictator’s death “deprives Ethiopia — and
Africa as a whole — of an exceptional leader.”
For years, the diminutive Zenawi had been a fixture on the Davos circuit,
charming Western leaders with statistics of human development and business
expansion. Under his control, Ethiopia’s average annual GDP growth rate
more than doubled to a gaudy 8.8 percent over the past decade, and trade
and investment with the West boomed. He worked with the U.S. to capture
terrorists—even invading Somalia to help oust an Islamist government—in
return netting roughly a billion dollars a year in American aid. Ethiopia
had been to hell and back in the 1970s and 1980s with famine, war, and
genocide. For someone who came to power as a freedom fighter and liberator,
who gave one of the poorest countries on earth China-esque economic growth,
and who became a key ally of the U.S., what was not to like?
First off, many of the rosy development statistics given out by the
Ethiopian government are simply fraudulent; independent sources still rank
Ethiopia at the very bottom of poverty indexes. Second, what genuine
economic and public health transformations Zenawi did bring to Ethiopia
were achieved with a top-down model that mirrored the statist command he
implemented over all other aspects of Ethiopian life.
Zenawi built a totalitarian state, guided by Marxist-Leninism, complete
with acult of personality and zero tolerance for dissent. Like Saddam
Hussein or Bashar al-Assad, he filled the country’s top political and
economic positions with men from his own Tigaray ethnicity. When elections
did occur, he won them with Saddam-like numbers, most recently, 99 percent
of the vote. Civil society organizations were harassed into submission or
banned. Hisgovernment only allowed one television station, one radio
station, oneinternet-service provider, one telecom, one national daily, and
one English daily—all churning out government propaganda. Zenawi used this
information hegemony to heavily censor news available to Ethiopians, taking
special delight in preventing them from hearing news from exile groups
outside the country.
Zenawi’s critics were jailed, killed or chased out of the country: in fact,
more journalists were exiled from Ethiopia in the last decade than any
other country on earth. Let’s restate that: Zenawi kicked out more
journalists than any other tyrant on the planet, thereby monopolizing
control over information. His favorite tactic was labeling dissidents as
terrorists. Journalists risked up to 20 years in prison if they even
reported about opposition groups classified by the government as
terrorists. The most emblematic case is that of Eskinder Nega, a
PEN-award-winning author sentenced to 18 years in prison this July for
questioning the government’s new anti-terrorism laws.
Many in the West like to credit Zenawi with “keeping Ethiopia together”
despite ethnic differences, war, famine and regional instability.
Dissidents, however, maintain that Zenawi was always at war with his own
people. When towns and villages rose up against Zenawi’s military regime,
they were put down brutally. There was, and still is, a climate of fear.
With 85 million Ethiopians suffering under his thrall, Meles Zenawi
constructed one of history’s most depraved states in terms of numerical
human suffering.
So why is this monster being celebrated? Some, like Bill Gates and
Ambassador Rice, choose to remain blind to Zenawi’s systemic human rights
abuses. He was, undoubtedly, charming. Others, perhaps more worryingly,
excuse his tyranny for his development and economic acumen. ForeignPolicy’s
managing editor illustrated this point of view while tweeting that “Meles
Zenawi was a dictator but was better for his country than many
democratically elected leaders.”
This kind of mentality is a dangerous one. There is no such thing as a
benign dictator. Only those with a fascist mindset—who want to cut corners,
who complain how messy and inefficient democracy can be, and who overlook
two thousand years of political history—can believe in this chimera. From
Cuba toKazakhstan, the story is the same.
For instance, Pinochet took Chile from being a run-of-the-mill right-wing
statist dictatorship to an economic success story with the same
liberalization principles that the Chinese tyranny has employed to
transform itself into a world power. Is the Pinochet-Beijing model of a
police state with economic freedom, attempted by Zenawi for Ethiopia, an
acceptable one in this day and age? The New York Review of Books reminds us
that this sort of ideology brought Ethiopia “appalling cruelty in the name
of social progress.” Anyone stating that they “like” the economic results
from the Pinochet-Beijing model must accept thousands of tortured and
disappeared in Chile and tens ofmillions dead in China (and 8 million
political prisoners languishing in the Laogai as of today). Perhaps those
admiring a strongman can accept such a condition with a John Rawls-type
veil of ignorance without knowing what it is like to live under a
dictatorship. It is easy to tolerate torture and disappearances if it isn’t
happening to your daughter, your brother, your mother, or you.
Those in the West heaping praise on Zenawi—all living in societies that
suffered so much to achieve individual liberty—are engaging in dramatic
hypocrisy by praising this thug. Would Bill Gates live in a country that
denies people basic political freedoms? Whose government arrests and kills
its critics en masse? Would he trade places with an Ethiopian university
student who believes in free expression and whose stance will lead to
certain prison and possible execution?
Any arguments that Zenawi was mellowing (after 21 years in power!) are
false. The past few years saw new sweeping “anti-terrorism” laws and
stronger Internet censorship. In 2005, Ethiopia even saw its own Tiananmen
Square. That year, Zenawi decided to hold freer elections, but the
opposition won a record number of parliamentary seats, including all those
in the capital, Addis Ababa. Throngs took to the streets to celebrate. In
response, Zenawi lashed out brutally, arresting the opposition’s entire
leadership and sentencing them to life in prison for treason; shuttering
five newspapers and imprisoning their editors; murdering 193 protestors,
injuring 800, and arbitrarily jailing 40,000 other men, women, and
teenagers in a show of raw tyranny. According to The Telegraph’s David
Blair, who was reporting from the scene, “a crackdown on this scale has not
been seen in Africa for 20 years and the repression exceeds anything by
President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe for the past decade at least.
Apartheid-era South Africa’s onslaught against the black townships in the
1980s provides the only recent comparison.”
It is startling that so many consider Zenawi an “intellectual” leader, when
he needed such bloody policy to enforce his rule. When Western leaders
consider this dictator—who rapaciously treated Africa’s second-largest
nation as his personal property—worthy of not just condolences, but pure
adulation, something is very wrong with their value systems.
One politician, the Norwegian foreign minister, made a slight nod toward
individual rights in his obligatory comments about Zenawi’s passing:
“Norway and Ethiopia have an open and frank dialogue on political and
social issues, including areas, such as human rights, where we have
diverging views.”
Amen!
_at_ThorHalvorssen is the founder and president of the New York–based Human
Rights Foundation. Alex _at_Gladstein is HRF’s Director of Institutional
Affairs.
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Received on Thu Aug 23 2012 - 23:00:15 EDT
