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Pragmatic beyond his 36 years, Meles responds to trying circumstances is untried approaches. Take his tactic for dealing with tribal violence. Over the past few months, hostilities have raged between the Afars and Tigreans, the Gurages and Wolaytas, the Anuaks and Nuers, and the Oromos and Tigreans. Meles could try to pacify them all by force. Instead, he has approached tribal elders to find less drastic compromises. In the case of the Afars, for instance, he has asked the elders to designate which tribesmen should be armed. "To disarm them all is unacceptable to the Afars," Meles explains. "So the choice is to disarm the irrational elements and arm the rational elements." By this risky equation, he is calculating that if only the most cool-headed are armed, perhaps they will choose not to use their weapons.
Meles is also throwing out the textbooks on capitalism to fashion distinctly Ethiopian economic policies. In August his government unveiled a draft program that elicited skeptical grimaces in the West. While the plan opens up road transport and retail trade to private capital, it also maintains government control of the petroleum, mining and chemical industries. Even less encouraging to potential aid donors, who want to see evidence that capitalist inclinations have buried socialist leanings for good, private ownership of land is still forbidden. Meles regards this as critical to protecting the interests of the poor peasant farmers who constitute almost 90% of the population.
Meles sees this solution as practical, not polemical. "If the economic policy doesn't address the peasant's concerns, if the cities are bleeding the peasants as in most of Africa, then you cannot have democracy," he says. But such approaches have kept the foreign aid dollars from flowing. Some Ethiopians are resentful that the foreign aid spigot is still dry. "You said you would help those countries that formed democracies," says Tekola Hagos, Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs. "Where's the beef? Please send cash." But Meles appears more tolerant. "For us there is a commitment to democracy even without aid," he says, "so whatever funding the U.S. gives us is a plus."
Other crises press on the government, giving rise to the phrase most commonly heard around the capital city of Addis Ababa: "We're still working on that." One troubling issue is the detention of nearly half of Mengistu's 400,000-strong army in two dozen camps around Ethiopia and over the border in the Sudan. Meles is worried that if the troops are released en masse, they will return home to find no food and no jobs. With half the population unemployed or underemployed, freedom for the soldiers is not likely to come soon. "You'd have people trained to kill with nothing else to do," says Meles. "That's a recipe for political disaster."
There are also thousands of civilian detainees, former sympathizers of Mengistu, who are being held without trial in Addis Ababa. The conditions are better than tolerable, and there have been no charges of torture. But few are being released. "We can't deal with them without a new judicial system," Meles explains. He believes that the establishment of courts must take a backseat to political and economic agendas, and offers no apology for the delay.