Dogs of War: Meles Zinawi’s Wild Hegemonic Ambitions
By Heikal Kenneded
December 28, 2006
The heavy fighting that is simmering throughout the Southern region of Somalia sheds a light on the true color of the Ethiopian Premier, Meles Zenawi – a wicked tyrant.
Meles is as cunning as they come in the despotic and dictatorial politics of Africa. According to the World Bank, Ethiopia is one of the world’s poorest countries, a poverty which has been exacerbated by natural disasters and internal political tensions. Since the early 1990s, when Meles Zinawi’s rugged Tigrinya militia forces toppled the Derg regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam with great success and some cunning rhetoric, he has duped the Western aid donor countries. He convinced these donor countries that he was the democratically elected Premier of Ethiopia and that he supported sustainable development and was firmly committed to eradicating poverty and disease from his country. However, as soon as aid from donor countries poured in Ethiopia, Meles was quick to build his military might, while the majority of the masses in his country starved to death. When Ethiopia was supposedly on the road to recovery from decades’ long of protracted war and poverty, Meles perpetrated a border dispute with Eritrea, which eventually thrust the two-sister countries into a long catastrophic war that resulted in high number of deaths, as well as destruction, in both countries.
Meles Zinawi demonstrated his callous and brazen autocratic tactics once again, in last year's Ethiopian parliamentary elections. According to human rights monitors, hundreds of civilian and student demonstrators were ruthlessly shot in the middle of the city, while thousands of other dissident intellectuals were sent to jail en masse for their political believes, during non-violent political demonstrations in Addis Ababa. The opposition parties who were forecasted to win the parliamentarian elections by a landslide did not gain a majority, except few seats in several major cities. International election monitors, as a result, accused Zinawi’s government of rigging the elections.
The cobwebs of lies were finally catching up with Meles as he constantly found himself having to explain his actions. Meles, thus, immediately knew that he was running out cards and he was unable to disentangle himself from the convoluted web of lies and charade he has cleverly concocted to the rest of the world. Most donor countries began withdrawing their generous aid from Meles’s oppressive government. However, he boldly dared to play his last card of invading the vulnerable neighboring country Somalia, which had no effective government for the last 16 years, in the name of terrorism. Meles was quick to seize this opportunity as he prepared to challenge the rising Islamic Union Courts (IUC) authority in the region.
The Union of Islamic Courts (IUC) who six months ago gained control most of the Southern region of Somalia, have brought an unprecedented stability and of peace to the country, and naturally became “enemy” number one of Meles’s authoritarian regime, simply because they were incorruptible. Despite the IUC’s success in getting rid of Somalia the warlords that “sucked the blood” of their society in rebuilding the country from scratch, the rest of the world, especially the West became wary of their covert actions. Instead of supporting their progressive actions, Western governments, especially the Bush administration extended its unfettered support to Meles Zinawi’s campaign to root out the supposed Islamic “terrorists” from the Horn of Africa.
Meles’s government in Addis Ababa is well known throughout the Horn of African region as a repressive Tigrinya regime that long lost its public support and was soon to lose the international one. In an effort to distract both domestic and international attentions from his autocratic rule and draw out his regime, on late last November, following the modus operandi of his Western allies, Meles convened his spurious parliament to sanction a “declaration of war” on Somalia. In an overtly provocative way, Meles was quick to denounce Somali’s Union of Islamic Courts (IUC) and immediately declared war against Somalia in effort to defend the Ethiopian “sovereignty,” as he boasted to “crash them” in a matter of weeks.
In other words, Meles Zinawi’s recent aggression against Somalia by sending his forces in support of the TFG's fledgling interim government, he single handedly escalated the stakes of chaos, poverty, and death in the Horn of Africa. As the first “phase” of the war comes to an end, the whole region of Horn of Africa is bracing for a full blown-out war that will only compound the suffering of the people in the region. However, military hubris has never proved to be an effective approach to winning a war – maybe few skirmishes. In fact, Ethiopia by recapturing several stronghold cities from the IUC by deploying copious weapons and warplanes, with the reckless backing of both the African Union (AU) and Western countries, in order to thwart “Taliban-like” regime that is taking root in the Horn of Africa, does not prove that it is winning the war. Israeli comes to mind, for instance, when last summer its military forces deployed its army “first-class” forces into Lebanon, in order to destroy the relatively weak army of the Hezbollah militia. Israel found otherwise when Hezbollah militia inflicted enormous casualties on the highly trained and well equipped Israeli forces. This war has put to rest the “old” theory that military might based on sophisticated technology is the only means to win wars. Another example is the American involvement in Iraq. Both conflicts have demonstrated that public support is the means to military success in guerrilla wars, not conventional military muscle alone.
While there might have been some misgivings among the Somali people in the country and in the Diasporas, with regards to the future plans of the UIC, as most people have feared about the Islamic Courts’ public executions as an omen of ruling the country in a Taliban-style. Nevertheless, in general, in all of the regions in Somalia under their control, people were consensus that the UICs have restored the basic rule of law and brought back order and civility for the people since the Siad Barre era. In the contrary, neither Meles’s “Dogs of War” nor the feeble government of President Yusuf have enough public support to restore peace and security in the country. The UIC, on the other hand, still retains enough support from the grassroots to support their struggle against what they regard of a puppet government Meles Zinawi and his wild hegemonic ambitions in the region. Finally, the interim Somali government led by President Abdullahi Yusuf and his Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Ghedi will be committing a historical blunder if they believe that they will rule, let alone unite the country through the barrel of the gun, while relying the aid of foreign forces, instead of creating a consensus among the various groups who have a stake in the country.
Heikal I. Kenneded
Washington, D.C.
heikalk@yahoo.com
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