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The Australian December 18, 2009 BARACK Obama and the best-known leaders in the world will gather in Copenhagen today but it is a slight, gently-spoken Ethiopian who has injected at least a faint ray of hope into the climate change summit by opening the way for a breakthrough on climate funding. Meles Zenawi, a former Marxist guerilla who has spent 18 years ruling Ethiopia, Africa's second most populous country after Nigeria, surprised delegates from most countries and displeased some of the 52 African nations that he is representing in Copenhagen by offering a US$300 billion-a-year compromise on the issue of climate finance. The average Australian would never have heard of him but if the search for a real climate deal makes any progress over the next few months then Mr Meles might just be remembered as the man who helped to protect Australia as well as his own continent from the worst effects of climate change. Acting on his own initiative, Mr Meles delighted organizers of the summit by putting back into motion one of the key deadlocked issues. Some African politicians were quick to accuse him of selling out his continent. "If Prime Minister Meles wants to sell out the lives and hopes of Africans for a pittance he is welcome to, but that is not Africa's position," said Cameroon MP Awudu Mbaya Cyrpian, the president of the Pan-African Parliamentarians Network on Climate Change. The problem for Meles's critics was that the 54-year-old Ethiopian had laid the groundwork for his proposal so skilfully and quietly that he had left his opponents with little time and few options to thwart him. The same strategic 'nous' has allowed him to become one of Africa's longest serving leaders and to make his government a favoured recipient of US military and financial aid despite his poor human rights record, which includes jailing political opponents and allowing his security forces to shoot dead 200 civilians who dared to protest against rigged elections in 2005. Just two weeks ago the G77 group of 130 developing nations, which is heavy with African states, was warning that there could be no climate change deal unless industrialised nations handed over at least 1 percent of their annual economic output, or $US400bn a year, to help poorer countries cope with climate change. China vowed last week to help Mr Meles adopt that hardline approach, making the financing issue the latest battlefield in the growing contest between China and the West for influence in Africa. The G77 is chaired by China's staunch ally Sudan and last Monday's walk-out from negotiations by African officials was led by another hardliner, Algeria, which was chairing the African Union for the bureaucrat-level talks. But Mr Meles was appointed some months ago as the African Union's spokesman for leader-level climate talks, and he decided in recent days that the union's huge demands could never succeed. Instead he offered to accept the sort of numbers that European leaders have already said they could live with, as long as the money came from reliable sources and was backed by a guarantee that the Africans would have a strong say in the administration of any money they receive. By the time he rose in the main conference hall in Copenhagen to unveil his proposal he had discussed it in a 48-hour blitz of talks with western leaders including Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown and Kevin Rudd, and explained it at the last moment to his fellow African leaders. Mr Meles, who has sent his eldest daughter to study at Oxford and his two other children to his country's most elite English-speaking school, essentially accepted figures that had been put forward by the British PM Mr Brown by demanding $US10bn a year in climate funding from next year, rising to $50bn by 2015 and $100bn by 2020. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yeswterday signed up to the $100bn figure, putting it on the way to becoming a new consensus figure. The Ethiopian insisted that Africa would have to have an equal say with donors in overseeing such funds but European leaders were so grateful to see any sign at all of compromise at Copenhagen that they quickly accepted his conditions, making it likely that the funding issue can be settled if other sticking points can also be budged. Wary of the West's poor record of keeping its aid promises, Mr Meles demanded that a panel of experts should be given just six months to examine more reliable and "innovative" funding methods such as new fuel taxes on shipping and aviation, the sale of carbon credits, a new "Tobin tax" on financial transactions, or the use of IMF assets. "I know my proposal today will disappoint those Africans who... have asked for full compensation ... for damage done to our development prospects," he told the summit. "My proposal dramatically scales back our expectation of the level of funding in return for more reliable funding and a seat at the table in the management of such a fund." "We are not here to preach or grandstand. We are here to negotiate, to give and take, and seal a fair deal however messy such a deal might be." Conceding that a failure to reach a deal would hurt vulnerable poor countries more than wealthy nations, he said that "because we stand to lose more than others we have to be flexible." "Such flexibility should not be confused with desperation," he added, warning that if his conditions were not met he would use Africa's clout to ensure that no deal of any kind could be signed a deal at Copenhagen. Ethiopian journalist Simegnish Yekoye said later that even though Mr Meles looks and sounds like an academic rather than a revolutionary fighter nobody in his home country had any doubts that he was tough enough to carry out his threat. At the age of 19, Mr Meles dropped out after two years of medical school in the capital Addis Ababa to join guerillas fighting the Mengistu communist military junta. By the time the rebels took power in 1991 36-year-old Mr Meles was in control. He established a one-party state until the collapse of the USSR led him to improve ties with the United States and adopt more liberal economic policies, a bond that strengthened when the Bush Administration was looking for allies in its "war on terror". He has since found time to complete an MBA by correspondence through Britain's Open University and a master's degree in economics from a Dutch university, while becoming something of an expert on the climate disasters that have inflicted droughts, floods and more widespread malaria on the 80 million people of Ethiopia.