Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who led the Horn of Africa country for more than two decades, died of an infection while being treated abroad for an undisclosed illness, state-run TV said yesterday.
Speculation that Meles, 57, was seriously ill grew after he failed to attend an African Union summit in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, last month.
“Prime Minister Zenawi suddenly passed away last night. Meles was recovering in a hospital overseas for the past two months, but died of a sudden infection at 11:40 [on Monday night],” state TV said.
Photo: AFP
Meles seized power in 1991 from former Ethiopian leader Mengistu Haile Mariam’s military junta. As president and then prime minister, he turned Ethiopia into a key player in regional security affairs.
His forces, widely regarded as among the strongest on the continent, have entered Somalia twice to battle Islamist militants, winning him accolades from the West for supporting its fight against al-Qaeda-linked groups.
State media said Ethiopian Deputy Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn would be the acting prime minister. TV broadcast footage of Meles against a backdrop of solemn, instrumental music.
Ethiopia’s government said last month that Meles was taking a break to recover from an unspecified condition. Diplomats in Addis Ababa had said Meles was being treated in Brussels for an undisclosed illness, while others said he was in Germany.
During his time in office, Meles was credited with steering Ethiopia toward economic growth and also helped mediate in several regional disputes, including rifts between Sudan and South Sudan.
“I believe that any successor to Meles will focus first on domestic issues and for the most part leave the regional and international engagement to other countries, at least until the new leader is firmly established in office,” former US ambassador to Ethiopia David Shinn said recently.
“For internal security reasons, there will be a continuing focus on Somalia and I do not foresee any significant change towards Eritrea,” he said, referring to Ethiopia’s archfoe, with whom it fought a decade-long border war.
However, Ethiopia would be less willing to devote a lot of time and resources to problems further afield, Shinn said.
International rights groups say Meles was intolerant of dissent. Several opposition figures and journalists have been arrested under a 2009 anti-terrorism law. State TV said details of his funeral would be announced soon, the Horn of Africa country’s first state burial in modern times.
Emperor Haile Selassie was laid to rest in 2000, 26 years after he was deposed. His body was found decades later beneath a palace lavatory in what forensic experts said were signs he had been murdered.
Mengistu lives in exile in Zimbabwe.
Born on May 8, 1955, Meles abandoned his medical studies before he turned 20 to join the rebel Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) to fight Mengistu.
After taking over the TPLF’s leadership he forged a broader coalition with other regional movements to make up the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), now the country’s ruling party.
With US backing, the rebellion toppled Mengistu’s bloody dictatorship in 1991, a year after Meles abandoned Marxism.
The diminutive Meles, with his characteristic goatee and arched eyebrows, was one of the most recognizable figures on the African scene.
In the final decade of his life, Meles challenged the world’s powerful and spearheaded an African push for more fairness in key climate change talks.
While he was regularly singled out by rights groups as one of the continent’s worst human rights predators, some Western observers took the pragmatic view that Ethiopia and the region needed Meles where he was.
Former US president Bill Clinton once called him a “renaissance leader,” while a leaked 2009 US diplomatic cable described him as “quiet, deliberative and certainly not a ‘man about town,’” adding he was a “voracious reader and very introspective.”
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
DELA ROSA CASE: The whereabouts of the senator, who is wanted by the ICC, was unclear, while President Marcos faces a political test over the senate situation Philippine authorities yesterday were seeking confirmation of reports that a top politician wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) had fled, a day after gunfire rang out at the Philippine Senate where he had taken refuge fearing his arrest. Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the former national police chief and top enforcer of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs,” has been under Senate protection and is wanted for crimes against humanity, the same charges Duterte is accused of. “Several sources confirmed that the senator, Senator Bato, is no longer in the Senate premises, but we are still getting confirmation,” Presidential
RSS