London – Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi is dead at 57. He died August 20, 2012 in a Brussels, Belgium hospital. Zenawi's death in a foreign hospital is typical of the African petty bourgeoisie's scramble abroad for medical treatment when illness befalls them.
They put the people's money they have appropriated for themselves into off-shore bank accounts and multi-million dollar villas they own on virtually every continent.
Specifically, this has been the way of the neocolonialist, so-called presidents of the different African territories since flag independence in the early 1960s.
Once in power they don't invest resources in healthcare, hospitals or medical research. If they become ill, they get on their private jets and go somewhere in the white world for medical treatment.
This fact is more embarrassing when we examine the case of President Zenawi.
He in fact dropped out of medical school in 1974 to join the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF), a guerrilla force used by Western imperialism to overthrow the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam, whose government was closely allied with the then Soviet Union.
He was a part of the self-proclaimed Marxist group who made up the TPLF and other various organizations fighting the pro-Soviet Union regime of Ethiopia, led by Mengistu.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the TPLF and its allies emerged as strong supporters of U.S. imperialism in the region and dropped all claims of Marxism.
Meles Zenawi came to power as part of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), an alliance dominated by the Zenawi-led TPLF that overthrew the so-called “Derg regime” of Mengistu in 1991.
In 1993, Zenawi helped organize the referendum that paved the way for Eritrea to secede from Ethiopia.
Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) dominated Ethiopia political landscape, not by political and ideological persuasion, but by force of arms and intimidation.
Zenawi, alongside Uganda's Museveni and Rwanda's Kagame, were presented to the African world as the new breed of African leaders. They supposedly were progressives that were to take Africa to a new stage of economic development and political freedom.
Zenawi’s borders and proxy wars are just the opposite of economic development and political freedom.
In the last elections in May 2010, the EPRDF and its allies won 545 out of 547 seats, extending the long rule of Zenawi for another five years.
Even its closest ally, the United States had to rate its friend as a brutal dictatorship and a purveyor of violence. In 2011, the US State Department said the regime was guilty of:
“unlawful killings, torture, beating, and abuse and mistreatment of detainees and opposition supporters by security forces, especially special police and local militias, which took aggressive or violent action with evident impunity in numerous instances; poor prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention, particularly of suspected sympathizers or members of opposition or insurgent groups; detention without charge and lengthy pre-trial detention…”
Many African leaders will hypocritically praise the accomplishments and significance of the now deceased Meles Zenawi.
For the vast majority of African workers and peasants outside of Ethiopia, his passing will go unnoticed. This is because Zenawi served imperialism.
He never had any African plan to address African people all over the world. That is why representatives of all the white imperialist nations were at his funeral.
Tool of the U.S. proxy war in Somali
Zenawi came to power claiming he was fighting Amharic domination, but he died leaving Ethiopia without achieving a genuine unity within Ethiopia.
More importantly, he died without ever fighting imperialism, without laying a glove on it.
The African people who make up the population of the imperialist’s-defined borders of Ethiopia include the Oromo, Somali, Amharic, the people of Southern Ethiopia and the Tigrinya speaking groups, who are still fighting against one another and imperialism still rules.
Meles Zenawi was more significant to the U.S. than to Africa, as he was a U.S. tool in the proxy wars against Somali.
The alliance between Zenawi and George Bush resulted in two wars against Somali between 2006 and 2009. The alliance between Zenawi and Barack Hussein Obama resulted in war from the year 2011 until the present.
The New York Times states: “Ethiopia is widely considered one of Africa’s most repressive governments, though it continues to receive more than $800 million in American aid each year. American officials have said that the Ethiopian military and security services are among the Central Intelligence Agency’s favorite partners in fighting Muslim extremism in Africa.”
Zenawi was also a key player in the policy to split up Sudan with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that paved the way for the creation of South Sudan, another U.S. neo colony on the African Continent.
The future of Ethiopia is in One Africa! One Nation!
The liberation and unification of all of Africa under the leadership of the African working class is Africa’s only future. This is the only guarantee to an end to opportunist rule that pits one group over another for the purpose of imperialist profits and exploitation.
Meles Zenawi carried the flag of neocolonialism, which has no future in Africa.
It is the flag of the past. It must go!
Every African leader must be judged on the question of self-determination and the total liberation of Africa and African people.
Down with neocolonialism!
Up with the African Socialist International!
