From Time

Like an increasing number of other African leaders Meles defied simplistic attempts to pigeonhole him as bad or good. Meles was a believer in assertive African self-determination, rejected the idea that the West had a superior claim over how the world should work, and refused to be judged by standards, ideologies or people other than his own. There was an inherent contradiction in the hectoring “holier than thou” ways of Western governments and rights groups, he argued. How could “foreign advocates of human rights ensure there is respect for human rights” by acting like “a big brother out there watching everyone?” he asked. “Rights have to come from inside. If people need a big brother, then by that very fact there is no democracy.”

Studiously beholden to no one, Meles picked and chose foreign allies as it suited Ethiopia best. On security, he was close to the U.S., letting the Pentagon set up Special Forces bases and drone airstrips inside Ethiopia – though he was not, as many alleged, under Washington’s thumb. His 2006 invasion of Somalia to topple an Islamist government, for instance, went ahead against strenuous U.S. advice, rather than at its suggestion. He also supported the African Union, whom he gave an impressive shiny new home in Addis Ababa, and courted China, who built it, and whose state capitalism served as something of a model for Ethiopia’s government-dominated economy. Ethiopia’s biggest natural resource, its farmland, Meles opened up to anyone: commercial farmers from China, India, Europe and the Middle East were all granted huge concessions on which to grow flowers and more vegetables.

Much of Ethiopia’s ability to demand and receive treatment as an equal was down to its social and economic success. Some of it was down to the sheer force of Meles’ personality. As someone who dropped out of medical school to help found the rebel Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) as a 20-year-old in northern Ethiopia in 1975, then rose to lead it, then, in 1991, marched into Addis Ababa and overthrow the chilling dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam, Meles had steel. Asked about allegations of repression of ethnic Somali secessionists in the east of the country, he replied: “We know how insurgencies succeed and how they fail. We may not have been the most evangelical of human rights advocates in the world, but we are not stupid either.” Aggression was, he conceded, an occasional personal failing. “I probably fail to beat about the bush,” he told TIME. “I have never been discourteous or nasty to anybody. [But] I may have stood my ground a bit too directly, a bit too firmly. Sometimes, when we disagree, we say so with perhaps a little extra force in it. That might be misunderstood.”

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