An exposé broadcast on BBC World Service reports about how aid money earmarked to help the famine victims of 1984/85 in northern Ethiopia, Tigray, was diverted to purchase weapons by TPLF rebels while hundreds and thousands were in need of food.

Using eyewitness accounts of Mr. Aregawi Berhe and Mr. Gebremedhin Araya, and recently declassified CIA documents, among other evidences, Martin Plaut, the Africa Editor at BBC World Service News, narrates how the political leadership of TPLF, led by Mr. Meles Zenawi, had duped millions of dollars from relief workers and had spent huge sums of money on weapons while hundreds and thousands of Tigreans were starving to death in rebel-held territories.

Fast forward to now – 25 years later since the biblical famine, Mr. Meles Zenawi is the world’s aid-collector-in-chief and is the ruler of Ethiopia. He has perfected his “aid gamesmanship” so well that he now represents Africa in meetings convened to ask aid for Africa – be it in the form of a financial rescue package or a climate compensation package.

As it’s well known in Ethiopia, he’s the best “beg-iologist” in the world; “beg-iologist” is the art (or science, as absurd as it may sound) of begging for aid that Zenawi and his colleagues have perfected over the years. Even with the best “beg-iologists” in charge in Ethiopia, the same percentage of Ethiopians live in chronic starvation and malnutrition as in the 1980’s (according to UN-OCHA); one should wonder what’s happening to the aid money that still flows into Ethiopia in billions.

Over the last year alone, he has appeared at the London G-20 meeting to “demand” billions of dollars as a financial rescue package for Africa. Then, Zenawi showed up in Copenhagen for the UN Climate Change Conference to once again “demand” billions of dollars as a compensation for the climate calamities brought on Africa by the industrialization of the West. In February 2010, Mr. Zenawi was appointed by the UN’s Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to co-chair the UN’s Climate Change Financing Advisory Group with Mr. Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the UK.

According to the UN:

The leaders of the United Kingdom (UK) and Ethiopia will head up a new high-level group launched by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today, intended to mobilize financing swiftly to help developing countries combat climate change.

The Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing, chaired by Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, will be tasked with creating practical proposals to boost both short- and long-term financing for mitigation and adaptation strategies in developing countries.

In light of the BBC exposé about Mr. Zenawi’s questionable past, some are now asking for his resignation from the UN’s Climate Change Advisory Group. The serious allegations brought forward by Zenawi’s former colleagues and supported by other independent accounts make Mr. Meles Zenawi unfit to be associated with the United Nations at any capacity, let alone in co-chairing a group tasked with collecting climate “aid money.”

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