Meles Zenawi

Biography

Meles Zenawi was born Legesse Zenawi in Adwa, Tigray, in 1955 to a Tigrayan father and an Eritrean mother. A gifted student, he finished secondary school at General Wingate in Addis Ababa on a scholarship and went on to Haile Selassie I University. In 1975 he abandoned his studies to join the armed struggle against the Derg military regime, taking the name Meles in memory of a fellow student executed by the junta.

Within the Tigray People's Liberation Front he joined the leadership committee in 1979 and rose to head the movement, founding the Marxist-Leninist League of Tigray along the way. From 1988 he also chaired the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, the coalition that drove Mengistu Haile Mariam from power in May 1991.

Meles then led the transitional government as president until 1995, a period in which Eritrea voted for independence and Ethiopia adopted a federal system organised along ethnic lines. In August 1995 he became prime minister, a post he held until his death. His tenure saw the 1998-2000 border war with Eritrea, rapid economic growth and expansion of schooling, but also increasingly authoritarian rule; after the disputed 2005 election, security forces killed hundreds of protesters and thousands of people were detained.

He also earned an MBA from the Open University and a master's degree from Erasmus University Rotterdam, and from 2009 chaired the African Union group of heads of state preparing a common African position on climate change. He died in Brussels on 20 August 2012 after an illness that had kept him out of public view for weeks.