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Ethiopia Prime Minister Meles Zenawi loses battle to infection
Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi at a session of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, January 26, 2012. PHOTO/Christian Hartmann/Reuters
Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s long-time ruler, died of an undisclosed illness after not being seen in public for weeks, Ethiopian authorities announced Tuesday. He was 57.
Zenawi died Monday just before midnight after contracting an infection, state TV said.
Hailemariam Desalegn, who was appointed deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs in 2010, became acting prime minister and will be sworn in as prime minister after an emergency meeting of parliament, said Bereket Simon, the communications minister.
Parliament is controlled by Zenawi’s ruling party and governing coalition, ensuring Hailemariam will be approved. No new elections will be scheduled, Bereket said.
Zenawi hadn’t been seen in public for about two months.
In mid-July, after Zenawi did not attend a meeting of heads of state of the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, speculation increased that his health problems were serious. Ethiopian officials gave no details and said the prime minister was in “very good” health and would return to office soon, but international officials said quietly it was unlikely he would recover.
Born on May 8, 1955, Zenawi became president in 1991 after helping to oust Mengistu Haile Mariam’s Communist military junta, which was responsible for hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian deaths. Zenawi became prime minister in 1995, a position that is both the head of the federal government and armed forces.
Zenawi is credited to have brought Ethiopia out of a hugely difficult period following Mengistu’s rule and introduced reforms that have spurred huge economic gains.
Zenawi was the leader of a political coalition known as the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front. He was also the longtime chairman of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front and has always identified strongly with his party.
“I cannot separate my achievements from what can be considered as the achievements of the ruling party. Whatever achievement there might have been, it does not exist independent of that party,” Zenawi once said when asked what he thought would be his legacy.
Under Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia saw strong gains in the education sector with the construction of new schools and universities. Women gained more rights. And in the mid-2000s Ethiopia saw strong economic growth, which won Meles international praise. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2008 said Ethiopia’s economy had grown faster than any non-oil exporting country in sub-Saharan Africa.
Though he won accolades for economic progress, human rights groups have long denounced Meles’ government for its use of arbitrary detention, torture, and surveillance of opposition members inside Ethiopia. The ONLF, an opposition group that mostly consists of ethnic Somalis, has openly clashed with the government, including in 2007 when Ethiopia sent troops to Somalia to fight al-Shabaab militants.
At the end of 2006, Somalia’s U.N.-backed government asked Ethiopia to send troops into Somalia to try to put down an Islamist insurgency. Ethiopian troops moved into the country and captured Mogadishu, but the Somali population rebelled against what it saw as an occupation and Ethiopian forces withdrew in 2009.
Ethiopia again sent troops to Somalia in early 2012 as part of an increased international effort to pressure al-Shabaab. Uganda, Burundi and Kenya all have thousands of troops in a coalition under the African Union, though Ethiopia’s forces are not part of the coalition.
Zenawi is survived by his wife, Azeb Mesfin, a member of parliament, with whom he had three children. -AP