Using Your Loot Wisely: Lessons from the Final Days of a Tyrant

When I read Mr. Paul B. Henze’s “Comments on Comments”, I thought I was finally seeing some wisdom in the way the Great Leader and Chairman of the Politburo, aka PM Meles Zenawi, spends the billions he accepts from his sponsors on behalf of the Ethiopian people. By all accounts, much of what he has bought with the billions he has spent to date has been farcical.

To the uninitiated, let me recount just a couple of Meles’ investments and what he netted from them. Meles financed a two and half year war with Airtra, a war considered by all (and recently even by the Great One himself) to have been a meaningless war. By most estimates, the Great Leader and Chairman not only expended the lives of some 70,000-100,000 of our young men, he also pumped more than $1 million per day to feed and equip the fighting men. If you just count the material loss, that right there comes to well over $1 billion. Considering what he got out of the deal (of course we don’t ask what we the people get out of the deal for it is never about us, it always about him), that was a foolish way to spend money even when it is not his own money. After all, what did fighting two and half years costing the lives of well over 70,000 young men and expending $1 billion plus netted the Great Leader? The conquered territory was given back gratis. The military victory was not leveraged to extract settlement terms to our liking….whatever it is we were after at that point. Instead, out of the jaws of victory, the Great One finagled a great loss for Ethiopia via international arbitration.

Another investment outlet Mr. Meles chose for the loot was hiring a high powered international legal team to defend the good name and honor of the Great One and of his circle of friends in an alien court. That adventure turned out to be comedic. Like all good lawyers do (here is hoping that my own offspring who is in training would not be as good as them), these great legal minds took the money, initiated legal action in a Virginia court and then disclosed to the Great One that, of course to proceed, he and his associates must abandon their immunity. Not exactly a small matter for one who for 14 years has done all sorts of things behind the veil of immunity. So, he plucked a few from the newest checks he received, paid his bills and withdrew his petition from the court. In the process, he has opened himself for further action under U.S. law. The whole idea turned out to be just a few million dollars misspent.

Now comes evidence that the Great One might have wisely invested some of the funds he received from his sponsors. As everyone knows by now, anyone and everyone in the world with any conscious has been lining up to politely point to him that neither ordering the security forces to shoot into peacefully assembled crowds nor killing women and children in any circumstance is civilized behavior. It looked like old friends and allies were abandoning ship as fast they can and even people who hardly know him or Ethiopia were coming out of the woodworks to condemn his handy work. For five months now, he has been truly in need of friends.

Just like that a friend from whom we have not heard for quite some time dropped in last week to stand up and get counted. I am speaking of none other than the one and only Paul B. Henze.

My thoughts when I saw his byline on the internet was about the bundle the Great One was preparing to pay to setup a spin network. Henze was quite agitated as if something personal has happened to him – not just like a well compensated aide de camp ought to be. For a guy who spent much of his adult life in the spin business, his message was neither smooth nor effective. One gets the sense that he was either awakened in the middle of the night and ordered to send out something or was given a statement to which to affix his name and to simply transmit to the usual media outlets.

So, Henze writes “having been in close and almost continual contact with the TPLF leadership since 1990, I find it difficult to regard these men as dishonest and inclined toward fraud.” That is political speak for “I have been continuously on Meles’ payroll since 1990 and he has always paid me on time”. As if God or the Ethiopian people did not know, then came the confession that Meles and his boys “started out as student rebels infected with Marxism-Leninism… They did not find it easy to shed the illusions that Soviet propaganda among students in the 1960s had left with them”.

I did not make that up. Henze wrote that Meles and his boys have had a hell of a time shedding their Marxist-Leninist ways. I guess at some point Meles’ analyst must have ordered him to jut reconcile with his deformity and live with it, because that is how he has been ever since the rest of us became acquainted with him in 1991. I don’t think any Ethiopian had detect Meles trying to shed his commy pinko ways.

If truth be told, Ethiopians always believed that the TPLF was never a born again democratic party and that Meles had never really been baptized in the holy spirit that is free market capitalism. Well, Mr. Henze now declares that we had been right all along. Henze writes, “they did not find it easy to shed the illusions that Soviet propaganda had left with them. But the best of them--Meles, Seyoum, Berhane Gebre Christos and others--were mentally sharp and had the independence of mind, in spite of their isolation in Tigray, to realize what was happenin! in the world of the 1980s.”

By the 1980s, what Ronald Regan used to call the ‘evil empire” was collapsing and the West was decisively winning the cold war. By the late 1980s, those mentally sharp boys could see that anyone caught worshiping at the altar of Marx, Lenin, Mao or Hoxha would be condemned to eternal banditry. Like the rest of us, Henze infers that Meles and his boys did what any mentally sharp person would do in the circumstances: confess seeing the error of their ways and profess rebirth as democrats entrenched in the Jeffersonian tradition.

I found this to be interesting reading. I could only imagine how Henze’s paymaster must be thinking when he reads this piece. Meles must be asking whether Henze too was not trying to distance himself from the train wreck that is the Meles regime. Aren’t good buddies supposed to go down with the captain of the ship? I was contemplating these thoughts as I read the initial paragraphs. Then came the mea culpa. Henze actually writes that Meles’ policy on “ethnic structuralism”, “his reliance on peoples democratic organizations” as his vehicle for dividing and weakening the population and his “dogma on land ownership” were bad decisions.

Wow!! Is that a split or what?!

Then in an angry outburst that seems to be screaming “we did not do everything wrong!!”, Henze brags about the great things his employers did over the years. As evidence of the highlights of the mentally sharp Meles’ 14 years in office, Henze tells us that Meles and his boys
“(1) opened the society to creation of free institutions--political parties and other kinds of organizations; (2) they encouraged exiles to return and be active politically; (3) they removed restrictions on internal movement of citizens and granted passports freely; (4) they adopted a completely neutral, but not hostile, stance toward religion; (5) they permitted an independent press; (6) they committed themselves to establishing a system of rule of law and set in motion a process for drafting a new constitution; (7) they restored relations with the outside world.”

Like something uttered in a fit of rage very little of this comes even close to being right. Let me just point to the absurdities of some of these claims.

So, Meles opened the society to free political parties and other organizations? Let us see. First there were those exile organizations, including COEDF, who were invited to discuss potential participation in the transitional process. The U.S. government certified the sincerity of the offer, and so opposition organizations sent delegations to Addis to participate in what was to have been a conference of reconciliation. There was one little problem however. As each of the delegates arrived at the Addis airport, they were picked not by officials riding limousines but by the TPLF security forces riding military trucks and were taken to prison. One by one, all of those who did not get word about what was waiting for them and did not abandon their flights in Cairo or Frankfurt, were put in jail without trial and without charge. After many months, many managed to get out but one brave delegate, Ato Abera Yemaneab, still remains in prison some 12 years later. Of course, there was also the expulsion of OLF as well as the never ending persecution of AAPO and its leaders. I do not know what Mr. Henze had in mind when he speaks of the opening to establish free political parties. Perhaps he means the OPDO, APDO, AAPDO, SPDO or some other PDO. Until this last election cycle, there was NOTHING which even resembles free political activity in Ethiopia.

They encouraged exiles to return and be active in political activity. Which exiles might they be? Is he speaking of Ato Abera Yemaneab here again?

Mr. Henze credits Meles with the distinction of “removing restrictions on the internal movement of citizens” – the very same Meles who granted every Ethiopian with his/her very own Bantustan to belong to. I can only conclude one of two things is going on here. Either Mr. Henze is swallowing hard and paying back his paymaster or perhaps Meles is really that good…so good that he can keep even his closest allies in the dark.

Ethiopians, Mr. Henze tells the reader, are blessed with an independent press. Well, there is Walta, there is Iftin and of course there is Addis Zemen and the Herald. I don’t know why he stopped there. He should have also reminded us of the free electronic media law authorizing privatly owned and independently operated radio and television companies such as ETV, Radio Fana, etc..

According to this witness, Meles and his mentally sharp boys “committed themselves to establishing a system of rule of law”. He is quite right there. They did establish a system of rule of law. That fills the bill unless you are so picky that you point to the small matter that under this system, the law is malleable and may be altered at the whim and discretion of these boys. If they want to charge someone with corruption as a convenient way to remove him out of sight, they cook such a law overnight. If the judge orders bail for those charged under the law, the boys just cook another law making the offense not bail-able. Even better, they make the law such that the executive could disobey with impunity any decisions of the court. Heck for a small mater as disobeying the court, they don’t even have to write up a whole law. The judge commands no army so they just tell the judge “make me release him if you can”. If the executive wants to arrest the entire leadership and membership of the largest opposition party including elected parliamentarians, just cook a law to withdraw the constitutionally guaranteed immunity from the parliamentarians and charge them with treason. That is the system of law Mr. Henze is crediting Meles and his brainy boys.

I am not sure how Mr. Henze finds the government’s position towards the Ethiopian Orthodox church neutral when Mr. Meles removed the head of the (independent) Ethiopian Orthodox Church and appointed a political hack as its patriarch? It just so happens that church doctrine forbids the deposing of a patriarch and grants the power to elect a patriarch only to a duly constituted synod, not to the infidels of the politburo.

Oh, yes Mr. Meles and the boys have friends – powerful and influential friends allover the world. They have all kinds of relationships with all kinds of people – politicians, rock stars, ex-presidents, renowned academics and fertilizer merchants. Recently, though, these friends are getting less cozy with the mentally sharp boys and increasingly less happy with them as some of the blood in Mr. Meles’ hands splatters on to them.

Although the attempt turned out to be ineffective, quite unlike Meles’ other friends, Mr. Henze made a valiant (and may be even an earnest) effort to earn the retainer the Great One has been paying him of the years. Too bad he looked so feeble in the process. I guess, the deeds of some individuals are just indefensible.