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| Children play under a billboard celebrating Prime Minister Meles Zenawi's leadership. (Matthew D. LaPlante) |
But for more than two decades under the leadership of Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia has remained a stable and growing economic and political power. Its capital, Addis Ababa, doubles as the seat for the African Union. Its economy has grown at an average annual rate of nearly 10 percent over the past decade. And for the United States, Ethiopia has provided a base of operations for spies, commandos and drones en route Sudan, Somalia and Yemen.
How vital has Meles been to this stability? We will soon find out. Ethiopian State Television reported Tuesday what many in the land of hope and heartbreak had feared since Meles disappeared from pubic view two months ago. The prime minister is dead. And so begins the first peaceful transfer of power in half a century.
At least, that is how it appears.
Meles dropped out of sight before the African Union summit in Addis two months ago. Rumors immediately circulated that he had died. But officials from the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, which owns nearly every seat in the Ethiopian parliament, said he was fine. They shut down a newspaper that reported otherwise, thereby shutting down nearly all domestic reporting on the state of the president’s health.
And, for the most part, nothing much changed. Ethiopians went to work and school. They played soccer in the streets of Meskal Square. They ran in the rain in Awassa. They reveled, as they do every four years, in the Summer Olympic games. It’s unclear whether protests by tens of thousands of Ethiopian Muslims, who have long been denied the right to practice many versions of Islam, were enflamed by Meles’ departure, but the well-executed demonstrations were most certainly not prompted by it.
Life went on.
Imagine, for a moment, that Barack Obama disappeared and the Democratic Party simply said, for two months, that he was “sick, but recovering” and “soon to be back” but provided no proof that he was even alive until, at last, his death was announced through the party apparatus. (A more accurate political example, since Ethiopia is governed by parliamentary system, would in Britain’s David Cameron and his Conservative Party, but either way, the idea is the same — the party is flexing its muscles and the people are cowering.)
That, of course, is no way to govern. But for those whose biggest concern is for a stable Ethiopia it is, at least for now, a sign that things are indeed stable.
Reporting in Ethiopia, last month, I sat with a docent at the Red Terror Martyrs’ Memorial Museum, where the smell of decay pervades a room of glass cases filled with the skulls and bones of Mengistu Haile Mariam’s victims. “Is this why Ethiopians can tolerate Meles’ dictatorship?” I asked. “Is it because they remember when things were much worse?”
“You must understand, my friend,” he said, eyes shifting to the armed police officer who stood watch at the front door. “I spent many years in prison in those days. I have no interest in…”
He stopped, placed his hand on my shoulder and lifted himself from the bench. “What we say here is ‘never again.’ And that is all I can say to you today.”
It would be unfair to say that Meles ruled by fear alone — he was responsible for implementing policies and reforms that brought Ethiopia out from Mengistu’s shadow, through a terrible famine and into the longest sustained period of economic growth in the nation’s modern history.
But it would be unconscionable to suggest that Meles didn’t enlist his nation’s ghosts to his terrifying advantage. Under his leadership, tens of thousands of dissenters went to prison. Hundreds were killed. Journalists and teachers lived in fear.
Was it better than Mengistu? Certainly. Was it necessary? Perhaps. Many Ethiopians think so, at least.
Meles once awkwardly quipped that he “would kill” for the opportunity to hand over power peacefully. But that never would have happened. Even if Meles had lived through 2015, when he was planning to step down from leadership, there would have been no peaceful transition of power, for peace and stability are not the same thing.
Matthew D. LaPlante is an assistant professor of journalism at Utah State University. His article, “Ethiopians contemplate a nation without Prime Minister Meles Zenawi” appeared in The Washington Post on Aug. 8.
