Meles Zenawi

Meles Zenawi

(adopted from Wikpedia)

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi
Legesse ("Meles") Zenawi (born May 8, 1955) is Prime Minister of Ethiopia. A native of Adowa in Tigray province, he was appointed to the office of Prime Minister on August 22, 1995, after his governing party swept parliamentary elections that were boycotted by the opposition. He had previously been transitional president of Ethiopia, from May 28, 1991 until August 22 1995. Meles Zenawi is married to Azeb Mesfin, who is now a member of parliament and chair of it's powerful Social Affairs Committee. She also controls Mega Enterprises, a multi-million dollar conglomerate that came into being shortly after Meles Zenawi assumed power from the fallen Derg regime in 1991.
Meles Zenawi came to power after leading the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) in a 17-year guerrilla war against the government of Mengistu Haile Mariam that ended in May, 1991 with an EPRDF victory. Meles Zenawi led the Tigrean Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF), which was the core party that formed the EPRDF, and which had itself broken off from the old Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Party (EPRP) in the mid 1970's. The core of the TPLF was the Marxist Leninist League of Tigray, a hard core Stalinist group which upheld Communist Albania as the ideal society which to emulate. On the eve of the EPRDF's march into Addis Ababa however, the EPRDF quickly shed it's Stalinist ideology and quickly adopted pro-western economic policies under the quick thinking leadership of Meles Zenawi.