They went through hell in Mogadishu. But for 17-year-old Mohamed Abdullahi and other Somali immigrants, in Minneapolis it's still an uphill climb.

The first time he saw someone murdered, Mohamed Abdullahi was seven. It happened on a road outside Mogadishu, on New Year's Day of 1991. He was walking beside his mother, who had his little sister on her back and his younger brother clinging to her leg. A man was stopped by militiamen who asked his clan affiliation, then sent him on his way. "And as he walks away, this dude takes an AK-47 and shoots him," Mohamed recounts. "He fell down, and I just ran."

Life was simple before the civil war in Somalia, says Mohamed, who is now 17. His father was a physician who worked at the police hospital in the capital city of Mogadishu. His mother's father, also a doctor, practiced at Mogadishu's huge Digfer Hospital. The family lived in a house in the Medina district near the airport, on a street that at one time was named after his mother's grandfather, who had pioneered a method of storing precious water in the city.

At three o'clock one morning near the end of December 1990, Mohamed and his siblings awoke to the sound of gunfire. The civil war to topple the 22-year dictatorship of Somali Pres. Mohamed Siad Barre had begun in earnest. When rebel soldiers sprayed their house with bullets, the family took cover under their beds. Mohamed's father, who, like Siad Barre, was a member of the Daroud clan, fled to the hospital that morning and then went into hiding; Mohamed wouldn't see him again for six years. The next day the boy was nearly killed by mortar fire when he went out to the faucet to wash before praying.

That was enough for his mother, who packed everyone up and left so quickly that Mohamed's brother didn't have time to find his shoes. The two boys traded Mohamed's pair back and forth on their 20-mile trek to a friend's home. A couple of weeks later, shortly before Siad Barre abdicated office on January 26, 1991, the family returned home. But as the clans that had united against Siad Barre battled for control of the government, thousands of nomadic warriors converged on Mogadishu, plunging it into a state of anarchy from which it has yet to emerge completely.

While Mohamed's father is Daroud, his mother, Faisa Ali, and her extended family are Benadiri, a people who identify themselves less by tribe affiliation than locality--specifically, the coastal urban areas in and around Mogadishu. Originally non-African, the Benadiri began coming to what is now Somalia as seafarers from the Arabian Peninsula during the Seventh Century. Because of their Arabic and Persian roots, they are lighter-skinned than most Somalis, and they still speak the country's common language with a slight accent. Where the vast majority of Somalis are nomadic, agriculture-oriented people, the Benadiri have traditionally been commercial traders, fishermen, and artisans. The antithesis of nomads, they have been concentrated in and around what is now Mogadishu since the 12th Century, living and worshiping in the same stone residences and mosques.

Wealthy landowners, unarmed and unaligned with any of the warring Somali subclans--in retrospect it's easy to see how vulnerable the Benadiri were when the warlords and freelance bandits overran Mogadishu. But as Abdullahi's family hiked home in early 1991, they had little idea of what they were getting into. Faisa's father, who arose at five every morning to get a head start on treating the wounded, came home one day naked and crying. A gunman had stopped him on the street and demanded money; when he had none to hand over, the man ordered him to strip and stole his clothes. A few weeks later Mohamed's aunt was raped at home by four men. Her 100-year-old grandmother was rousted from her bed by armed men who demanded money. His younger brother went outside one day to find three corpses lying in the yard. As the war dragged on into 1992, famine struck. At one point the family went five days without water, waiting for rain.

Belatedly responding to the carnage in Somalia, the United Nations sent in troops in 1992, including a substantial U.S. contingent of soldiers and armaments. In hindsight this initial post-Cold War attempt at "nation-building" is widely viewed as disastrous. U.N. forces eventually pulled out, having failed to restore order. Mohamed himself was nearly killed while studying at a religious center four blocks from his home when the place was caught in the middle of a skirmish between Somalis and American troops. "American helicopters were up there shooting everything that moved," he remembers. "I ran into this place that was bombed up and, like, broken down, and this dude pulled me in and threw me under a rock and said, 'Get under there and you'll be safe.'"

Early in 1993, after two years of anarchy, Faisa made the decision to head for a refugee camp in Kenya. Two more years would pass before the family arrived in the United States. When Mohamed Abdullahi came to Minneapolis in April 1995, he was 12 years old.

 

Civil war, up close and personal: Out of curiosity and boredom, Somalis gather around a French soldier in Mogadishu in late 1992 AP PHOTO/JEROME DELAY

It's generally acknowledged that the Twin Cities is home to more Somali immigrants than any other place in North America, and the local population is growing every day. An actual number is hard to pin down, though; statewide estimates range from 15,000 to 75,000, depending upon whom you ask. Government agencies favor the low range, while social-service organizations guess higher.

Spokesmen for the latter offer two explanations for why Somalis are grossly undercounted. First, in accord with tradition, extended Somali families tend to live together under one roof. Fearing eviction, they underreport their numbers when census takers and social workers come calling. This also helps to obscure the phenomenon known as "secondary migration": Even by conservative estimates, roughly three out of every four Somalis in Minnesota relocated here after having been placed in one of 23 other U.S. states from the camps in Kenya and Ethiopia.

Why would so many people who were reared near the Equator voluntarily flock to the frozen prairie? Local Somalis are apt to answer with a smile and one of two pithy phrases: "To be near family," or, "More opportunities here" (or both).

"The services were here long before the Somalis came," notes Abdi Husen, a mental-health staffer at the Community University Health Care Center, which is located in the middle of a Somali enclave at the corner of Bloomington and Franklin avenues in Minneapolis. "In San Diego, where I was before, the [government] programs have been cut back, and there is less help from the nonprofits. People would go to a single doctor's office in a corner of the neighborhood for a ten-minute visit. In Minnesota it is much more comprehensive. We have a clinic that also contains mental-health and dental services. When doctors make a referral, it's a one-stop shop. It is so much better, especially for the poor."

In the mental-health area alone, the center has an active client base of more than 100 Somalis, many of whom are being treated for depression and/or posttraumatic stress. The diagnosis and treatment of such disorders often conflicts with cultural and religious resistance: Nearly all the Somalis here are Muslims, and many of them believe that God's will must be accepted. There's also a general belief that a person is either crazy or normal, with no gradations of sanity. To counter this, Husen says, the center's staff has worked through elders in the community, whose endorsement--be it explicit or tacit--of mental-health therapy carries significant weight.

That kind of cultural astuteness is not uncommon among Minnesota's social-service providers. It's largely a product of their dealings with the influx of Hmong immigrants during the 1980s and is especially evident within the Minneapolis Public Schools, whose English Language Learners program allows students to learn English while doing coursework in their native language and also provides liaisons to families to bridge cultural differences. By the end of last year, ELL served nearly 2,000 Somalis--as well as more than 3,500 Hmong, 2,500 native Spanish speakers, and six other groups of at least 40 students who spoke something other than English.

"The bilingual program in Minneapolis is the best of any city throughout the United States. I can tell you that many Somalis come here from other states just to get this kind of educational support," says Mohamed Osman, a teacher at Roosevelt High. Somalis make up one-third of Roosevelt's student body. Announcements are printed and read over the PA system in Somali and English, and administrators have set aside an area to accommodate Muslim prayer. Osman proudly notes that during the past five years, more Somali students have gone on to college from Roosevelt than from any other school in the world. (Still, fewer than half of the Somali seniors who were enrolled in the ELL program last year graduated.) "The students are very lucky to be here. I was a Somali teacher and I was in the civil war, and remembering back home and seeing what it is like here, I don't need to say anything bad about this country," Osman asserts. "America and the people of Minnesota have been very kind, and I say that wholeheartedly."

Still, says Abdi Husen, "We're just touching the corners of this. I'm not sure most of the real needs are being addressed. We serve a number of Somalis, but if there are 50,000 of them here, how much service is enough?" Adds Husen's supervisor, David Schuchman: "We got our first Somali staff member three years ago, a second one a year ago, and two more about a month ago. And all of them are already too busy. There is still more out there than we can deal with, and one of the biggest gaps is for Somali children."

Most Somalis don't expect social services to address their problems; when they refer to "opportunity," they generally mean employment. And after what they have endured at home, almost any job looks like a good one. "The first Somalis who came to Minnesota from the camps came to Willmar to work in the turkey-processing factory," says Mohamed Hassan, the crime-prevention coordinator for the Minneapolis-based Somali Community of Minnesota. "After that, the word spread out that there was a place called Minnesota where there were jobs that could bring better conditions of life. And people said, 'That's where we will move.'"

Over the past five years, Somali immigrants have eagerly taken jobs as taxi drivers, parking attendants, and hotel housekeepers. Entrepreneurs have established Somali restaurants and coffee shops, as well as grocery stores and other retailers. And both here and outstate, they have provided a steady source of factory labor. "People talk about the services they use, but you don't hear as much about what they contribute, like the 300 Somalis working in the meat factory in Faribault," notes Abdi Husen. "They want the work. They obviously aren't moving from San Diego because of the climate or the culture."

One positive aspect of the booming employment situation has been a relative lack of tension between transplanted clan members. Although a transitional government was finally established in Somalia last August, it has yet to impose order or effectively quell the bloodshed. In its latest (1999) annual report on Somalia, Amnesty International left little doubt that violence continued to grip the nation: "Human-rights abuses by faction militias were committed with impunity. There were hundreds of killings of unarmed civilians."

Within the past decade, the civil war and a manmade famine have killed nearly half a million people and displaced hundreds of thousands of others. To some degree, every Somali immigrant has had his life shattered and his memories permanently stained by the actions of his countrymen. Yet in Minnesota, and elsewhere in America, Somalis have done an admirable job of reducing interclan conflict. Police blotters across the nation contain almost no reports of clan-based violence.

"There's not much clan friction because the American way of life doesn't allow that," Husen says. "People have to go to work, and the time they have is very little. Many are pressured by the desire to send money and help out family members who are still in the camps or living with the results of the war back home. A lot of the clan things happen because the economy is tough. When you have no money, you have to depend on your clan. But here you can support yourself. Here you go to work with people from other clans."

Last month the Star Tribune published a front-page story about an ongoing federal probe into whether a portion of the money local Somalis are sending back home is funding warlords rather than feeding families. Not surprisingly, the story struck a nerve. Many Twin Cities Somalis felt the piece sensationalized the situation, and that at most a minuscule fraction of the many millions that are being sent back might be used to fund continued warfare. But the harsh reaction was an indirect acknowledgment that dormant hard feelings within the community cannot be taken for granted.

Efforts to reconcile Somali clans in Minnesota were begun as far back as 1994, when the first wave of immigrants arrived. A group of people from some of the more established professions--teachers, doctors, lawyers--discussed forming an umbrella organization that would comprise a cross-section of clan members. In consultation with clan elders, they founded the Confederation of Somali Community in Minnesota. Funded by a variety of nonprofit and government entities, the organization, based at the Brian Coyle Community Center in Minneapolis's Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, has created a variety of advocacy programs for housing, employment, mental health, and youth mentorship.

But what really distinguishes the confederation is its effectiveness in promoting a spirit of interclan cooperation. "The civil war is fresh in the minds of people here. Clan differences were declared, and it takes time for that to go away," sums up the group's executive director, Saeed Fahia. To heal these wounds, Somali immigrants must negotiate a perilous course between denial and bitterness.

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