I have extracted and attached below a portion from a lengthy interview conducted on May 12, 2008 in Addis Ababa, at the Office of the Prime Minster, the truly malicious �standard answer� of Meles Zenawi, to a question asked by Saleh Johar of Awate.com. 

Meles Zenawi is the very personification of the greatest betrayal of a nation and its people by a leader in all of history. Meles Zeanwi is an individual who is peacock-walking as a leader of Ethiopia, who never seems to learn anything from his past seventeen years reign of terror�a  reign full of deceptions and excuses, cover-ups and monumental errors born out of arrogance and incompetence. Meles Zenawi�s repeated statements on Ethiopia�s territorial integrity and sovereignty is full of confusion of principles with street-smarts that attempt to down play the importance of our coastal territories and territorial waters on the Red Sea. His replacing of our national vital interest, with a deceptive lexicon as �port service,� in his attempt to reduce our national integrity and sovereignty issues as some commercial or business enterprise, is not going to succeed. Our vital interest labeled by Meles as �port service� is not �service like hotel service, like tourism service like any other service; you can buy it in the market.� The ceding of Ethiopian Afar coastal territories involves fundamental human rights, and Ethiopia�s national security, national integrity and Sovereignty issues. It is infuriating to think that this clown is the leader of one of the great civilizations of the World. 

What is alarming is the fact that this traitor is running around dismantling our Ethiopia that was built over the Centuries with great courage and sacrifices of our parents and forefathers. He is arrogantly throwing his half-cooked juvenile ideas in our faces, and we are doing nothing about it. The recent secret agreement he made with the Sudanese Government ceding Ethiopian territories, which was settled and effectively controlled by Ethiopians and previous Ethiopian governments for over hundreds of years, has angered Ethiopians from all walks of life.  We need to do more than just register anger and protest against Meles Zenawi and his Government. We must excise this cancerous growth and threat to our very existence as a people and a nation, by all means at our disposal. This is one of the reasons that I support the call made to all of us by patriotic Ethiopians, Ethio-Sudan Border Affairs Committee, to a Conference and a Demonstration on July 2 and 3 against Meles Zenawi and his secret agreement ceding Ethiopian Territory to the Sudan. 

Here is the extract from that interview by Saleh Johar; judge for yourself.

Saleh Johar: There is one thing that has been coming up as far as Ethiopian policy towards Eritrea is concerned. Many Eritreans say that Ethiopia has a landlocked-country complex. Can we comfortably say that this complex is not there perhaps because Ethiopia now has several access to other ports?

Meles Zenawi: I cannot tell you that every Ethiopian shares my view, but I can comfortably tell you that my position, my view, is a majority position. And that is the position of the government. My view is this: the Ethiopian imperial system has been dismantled and replaced by the federal system that we have in place. For Ethiopians, a constitutional country established on the the basis of the right to self-determination that really expressed desire of its people was the sine-qua-non for the maintenance of the country. All those Ethiopians who do not want to be Ethiopians simply have the right not to be Ethiopia or else we could die� But the Eritreans have expressed their desire to be independent state in an internationally supervised referendum and the thirty years war ended this time.

So any attempt to incorporate Eritrea in the fold of Ethiopia will not succeed in incorporating Eritrea; it will simply succeed in dismantling Ethiopia, because it will dismantle the fundamental principle on which Ethiopia is formed: the right to self-determination. And that is, I think the majority position. I do. I am very comfortable that this is the government position. Once you agree on this fundamental principle, the issue of ports becomes an issue that is non-political.

Port service is a service like hotel service, like tourism service like any other service; you can buy it in the market. If you have the money, if we Ethiopians are rich, then we can buy this service from any provider. The most perfect provider would be Eritrea- for geographic reasons, cultural reasons, but it is not the only provider. If you are poor, the ports won�t make any difference to begin with. So the issue is an issue of economic growth in Ethiopia. The port is clearly a matter of buying and selling a service.

That is my view, that is the view of my government, that is the view of my party, and that is the view of the majority of Ethiopians. But I cannot tell you that there are no Ethiopians who do not have sort of ports hang up; but this is not a majority view and it is a dying view.