The privileges and burdens of statesmanship

A consideration of Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Haile Selassie

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A few years ago, King Philippe of the Belgians and Queen Mathilde were fulfilling an official function at a retirement home of their realm. Their Majesties were kindly bidden to append a note of their visit in the guest book, for which an expensive fountain pen had been purchased, specially for the occasion. At the moment of signature, alas, the pen had grown legs and walked.

It had cost 1,500 euros, and that’s enough for a pen to cost. I wonder to what use it had been planned putting the pen, once the royal visit had been completed. Hang it by a string to mark days off on the holiday calendar? Leave it at reception for desk clerks to sign receipts? Place it in a glass case as evidence of the institution’s royal patronage? Give it to Phil for his many other visitor-book-signing duties? Perhaps no pen for a single use should cost 1,500 euros. People would still nick them, but at least they wouldn’t have cost 1,500 euros.

I don’t know if they ever caught the purloiner of the royal fountain pen that day. They maybe took it because it looked nice. Pretty colour. Or perhaps because they knew it’d cost fifteen hundred euros and they thought they could maybe fence it for a thou. Seven-fifty at least. Even a meagre ton. A hundred’s better than nothing, innit? Or perhaps, just perhaps, it got half-inched because the purloiner knew exactly where the pen would end up, and it was not destined to be his desk. It’ll have been tax-deductible, we can be sure of that.

Whilst its value may have had something to do with this pen’s disappearance, value doesn’t have to do with every pen’s disappearance. These days, the mere fact that it writes at all can presage the disappearance of a writing implement. If we can rule out anyone as possible culprit, it must surely be the King, mustn’t it? If he’d asked for it, he’d have been given it, willingly, and with thanks, even. One does that with kings, no?

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Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia was by all accounts a clinical kleptomaniac. He would venture forth on state visits and, after returning home, his equerries would return miscellaneous bejewelled bagatelles, ashtrays (a time-honoured souvenir since the days of Raleigh), anything that happened to be lying around his quarters, with a note: His Imperial Majesty would appear inadvertently to have packed the enclosed items when hastening to vacate his accommodations.

Would you have trusted Emperor Haile Selassie? Would you trust King Philippe of the Belgians? Would you trust President Volodymyr Zelenskiy? In large part, trust in public figures is based on the maxim that one confers trust until one has grounds not to; in personal relations, the opposite is generally true: led by the newspapers and commentators, we give collective trust more readily than our own, personal trust. So, any individual enters an interesting zone of potential conflict when they transition from being an unknown in the personal sphere to being a public figure. Effectively, the question Why should I trust them? is answered with Because they were elected, because of who they are.

It’s the default position of trust in public figures that augments the public’s rights to know of their misdemeanours. They are not, to that extent, just like anyone else. They don’t earn respect and deference, nor do they command it. But they are generously showered with it, pretty much because they’ve been on telly.

But there is a flip side to this analysis. When those who receive trust because of who they are then go on to abuse that trust, and are well-advertised as having abused that trust, then they do more than simply get away with it, when they get away with it. They set patterns. It becomes okay to misbehave. It becomes the done thing to commit criminal acts in their behalf if not on their direct orders and, by their example, in behalf of others if not on their direct orders. Honour of character transmutes into the omertà of the mafia, the way things are done, as don’t do it becomes don’t mention it. If breached, an NDA can turn out to be less a ground for legal action than a warning of worse to come than anything a court could have dished out.

When you see images of Ku Klux Klan all dressed in white robes and hoods, it’s impossible to tell which one of them has a streak of benevolence in him. With images of clean-faced, besuited executives embracing regulation and obedience to the law, it’s likewise impossible: to tell who the cheating scoundrels are. It is, isn’t it?

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Emperor Haile Selassie was more than just a kleptomaniac. He was a ruler with astonishing parallels in our modern world. Close inspection of his long reign as Ethiopia’s emperor (1930 to 1974, interrupted by the Italian occupation) offers lessons for us today, especially if we are Ukrainians.

Descended from a tribe of Israel, and one of the earliest nations to convert to Christianity (the Ethiopian imperial standard was emblazoned with five stars of David), Ethiopia’s emperors had great regard for Jerusalem, for their African heritage and for the greater international community. It is of significance that Ethiopia was a founding charter signatory of the United Nations in 1948. The Emperor had personally led his armies against the Italian invasion in 1936 and, with his army routed after the Battle of Maychew, he travelled on his own, at no inconsiderable personal risk, to Lalibela, famed for its cathedrals hewn out of living rock, where he prayed and fasted. He was obliged to flee (not without some dissent among his retinue) to conduct the anti-fascist campaign against Italy from Bath, in England. But not before going first to Jerusalem, which at the time was in British Mandate Palestine.

His edict to his people at the time of the Italian onslaught sounds highfalutin, and yet is tinged with love and concern, which Haile Selassie not only asked of his countrymen, but that he himself was likewise ready to show:

If you withhold from your country Ethiopia death from a cough or head-cold of which you would otherwise die, refusing to resist (in your district, in your patrimony, and in your home) our enemy who is coming from a distant country to attack us, and if you persist in not shedding your blood, you will be rebuked for it by your Creator and will be cursed by your offspring. Hence, without cooling your heart of accustomed valour, there emerges your decision to fight fiercely, mindful of your history that will last far into the future… If on your march you touch any property inside houses or cattle and crops outside, not even grass, straw, and dung excluded, it is like killing your brother who is dying with you… You, countryman, living at the various access routes, set up a market for the army at the places where it is camping and on the day your district-governor will indicate to you, lest the soldiers campaigning for Ethiopia’s liberty should experience difficulty. You will not be charged excise duty, until the end of the campaign, for anything you are marketing at the military camps: I have granted you remission… After you have been ordered to go to war, but are then idly missing from the campaign, and when you are seized by the local chief or by an accuser, you will have punishment inflicted upon your inherited land, your property, and your body; to the accuser I shall grant a third of your property…

This is not merely high-sounding sentiment, but it is backed with practical ordinances for the protection of the people for whom his troops fight. It’s hard to conceive, but the kleptomaniac king of kings harboured an honour that abhorred pillage and ravage by the soldiers fighting in his cause and offered real advice and counsel, just as Zelenskiy organised the sowing of grain seed with one hand, as he repelled invaders with the other. The Emperor said that which his moral standing impelled him to say. That is what leaders need to say. I can similarly hear these words from Volodymyr Zelenskiy; whether he ever said the like, he certainly would have agreed with the sentiment, after he’d viewed Bucha and Izium.

The pilgrimage to Lalibela can be seen as Haile Selassie’s own take on, “I don’t need a lift, I need guns.” When Zelenskiy was offered a helicopter out of Kyiv, he declined to save himself and asked instead for help to save his country. And that is exactly what Haile Selassie did in 1936. What’s more, from Bath, he was far more able to whip up support against Italy than from being slain on a battlefield.

The failure by the League of Nations to properly address the Italian expansionist problem spelled the downfall of the organisation. At that moment, it was dead in the water. It was that bitter disappointment among many things that impelled the Emperor to be among the first to endorse the new international charter of the United Nations. Zelenskiy has voiced his disappointment at the impasses into which today’s UN have driven themselves, unable as they are to take measures against Security Council members that advocate warfare over negotiation, be they in the form of the Russian Federation or the United States of America. If the UN survive their ineffectualities in matters security, then it’ll surely be by but a hair’s breadth.

No analogy is perfect and one doesn’t like to force square pegs into round holes, but Ukraine and Ethiopia do offer one other strange but true parallel: both Zelenskiy and Haile Selassie stem from the Jewish faith, but have led Christian countries. Zelenskiy was The Jerusalem Post’s Jew of the Year 2022; and Haile Selassie was Time’s Man of the Year 1930.

Haile Selassie was a practical man who offered cogent advice to inexperienced troops being attacked from the air: how to shoot planes down, how not to reveal position, terrain to be avoided, and terrain to be hugged: “If everyone shoots who possesses a gun, there is no advantage in this except to waste bullets and to disclose the men’s whereabouts.”

Like Zelenskiy’s Ukraine today, not only was Haile Selassie’s country invaded without justification, but suffered the outrages of an adversary heedless of the conventions of warfare:

It was at the time when the operations for the encircling of Makale were taking place that the Italian command, fearing a rout, followed the procedure that it is now my duty to denounce to the world. Special sprayers were installed on board aircraft so that they could vaporise, over vast areas of territory, a fine, death-dealing rain. Groups of nine, fifteen, eighteen aircraft followed one another so that the fog issuing from them formed a continuous sheet. It was thus that, as from the end of January 1936, soldiers, women, children, cattle, rivers, lakes, and pastures were drenched continually with this deadly rain. In order to kill off systematically all living creatures, in order to more surely poison waters and pastures, the Italian command made its aircraft pass over and over again. That was its chief method of warfare.

Zelenskiy has been hailed for his oratorial skills; they are no less than Haile Selassie’s before him, who was probably as great a speech-giver as Winston Churchill himself was.

The Italians would be driven back out of Ethiopia with aid from Britain, Free French and Free Belgians before even occupied France and occupied Belgium had themselves been liberated: in 1941. Exactly five years after Italy had proclaimed Addis Ababa the chief city of its East Africa colony, Emperor Haile Selassie proclaimed to his people sentiments that Volodymyr Zelenskiy has, as yet, had no opportunity to utter. His time will come. And he would do well to heed the admonition in the Emperor’s speech:

Today is the day on which we defeated our enemy. Therefore, when we say let us rejoice with our hearts, let not our rejoicing be in any other way but in the spirit of Christ. Do not return evil for evil. Do not indulge in the atrocities the enemy has been practising in his usual way, even to the last.

Take care not to spoil the good name of Ethiopia by acts that are worthy of the enemy. We shall see that our enemies are disarmed and sent out the same way they came. As Saint George who killed the dragon is the Patron Saint of our army as well as of our allies, let us unite with our allies in everlasting friendship and amity in order to be able to stand against the godless and cruel dragon that has newly risen and that is oppressing humankind.

Haile Selassie was a tax reformer, who sought to diminish the tax-exemptions enjoyed by the nobility, not vastly unlike Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s crusade against the Ukrainian oligarchs. Haile Selassie was instrumental in establishing the precursor organisation to the African Union: his international outlook (he was the only African head of state to attend Kennedy’s funeral) came in no way at the cost of his commitment to his own continent’s progress out of colonisation and into the post-independence era. Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s commitment to European unity is nowhere better demonstrated than in his country’s commitment to repelling the Russian invader to secure his nation’s survival as well as that of his continent.

Haile Selassie was unique in the world, and above all in Africa: his country’s status as a colony of a European power was but a five-year blip in its history. The emperor who fled was the emperor who was restored. In all other cases, African colonies became African republics, and statesmen can have a tendency to race for the winnings: the cycle of corruption and coups starts when the evil of colonisation relinquishes its stranglehold over its possessions. In some ways, Ethiopia’s succumbing to that cycle got deferred, but only deferred, until the Emperor was in advanced years. But it wasn’t to be forsaken.

When kings and emperors handle with humanity and benevolence and enlightenment in all that they decree, then they nip in the bud the evils that they must otherwise one day rise up to conquer. There is a way out of the ever-decreasing spiral of self-interest.

But, to Volodymyr Zelenskiy comes also a warning. As Mahatma Gandhi was felled in India in 1948, as Haile Selassie would be strangled in his bed in 1975, a year after being deposed, and as John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, there can be no guarantees for a man who saves his nation from outrage and oppression but who treads on the toes of his countrymen in the doing.

If I’m to judge the Emperor’s human rights record for his people as people, it was sadly lacking;

if I’m to judge his constancy and devotion to his people as a people, it was unwavering;

if I’m to judge his commitment to the global community of nations, it matched rhetoric with action, and sentiment with practicality;

if I’m to judge him as Rudyard Kipling judged men, he was a man, and much of the Earth and all that was in it was his.

If I am to judge him as a failure, his was a failure that nevertheless endured for 83 years, that reigned for 53 of them, regent and emperor;

and, if I am to judge the glory of Ethiopia, and set against it the glory claimed for Ukraine, I must conclude that, since the Emperor’s demise, his nation’s great extent has never again bathed in a light so glorious, nor has it been beheld with such respect by the eyes of the world’s leaders.

When you plan to strangle an 83-year-old man in his bed who represents an 800-year-old dynasty, you should really stop and ask yourself what you hope to achieve, beyond your own enrichment, that is.

To the Emperor, the final words:

Although the toils of wise people may earn them respect, it is a fact of life that the spirit of the wicked continues to cast its shadow on this world. The arrogant are seen visibly leading their people into crime and destruction. The laws of the League of Nations are constantly violated and wars and acts of aggression repeatedly take place… So that the spirit of the cursed will not gain predominance over the human race whom Christ redeemed with his blood, all peace-loving people should cooperate to stand firm in order to preserve and promote lawfulness and peace.

Amen.