Published: June 11, 2006
NAIROBI, Kenya, June 10 — Mahamud Hassan Ali is like the proverbial air-conditioner salesman in the Arctic. His job, in fact, may be even harder: he is the mayor of Mogadishu. Imagine that.
Mr. Ali has no redevelopment plans or draft ordinances on his plate. All he really worries about is stopping the killing. That means he spends his days shuttling from one side of Mogadishu, the anarchic Somali capital, to the other, trying to get people to talk instead of shoot.
Mogadishu, already the epitome of lawlessness, has over the past few months had its fiercest fighting in more than 15 years. More than 300 people have been killed and nearly 2,000 wounded, the worst toll since the government collapsed in 1991 and the country slipped into its current state.
Mr. Ali, who became mayor in April, has seen the latest horrors up close. At night, combatants have been shelling the city, meaning every last resident goes to bed a potential victim. It is a crapshoot as to where the shells will come back to earth.
“Nobody knew if they’d get up in the morning,” he said while sitting in a cafe in Nairobi, where he was briefing diplomats on the latest conditions in his capital. Mr. Ali sipped milk through a straw to ease his ulcer. He said he did not blame Mogadishu for the ailment.
What may help Mr. Ali more than anything else in his new job is his memory of what the city used to be.
The younger generation of Mogadishu residents knows only a city and country in decay. For them, it is normal to see every man with a gun slung over his shoulder. Retiring in the afternoon to chew khat, the highly addictive plant that is a must for militia fighters, is a normal pastime. The landscape they grew up with is one of rubble, and little else.
But Mr. Ali, who comes from the Abgal clan that dominates Mogadishu, recalls a city in its heyday in the 1960’s and 70’s, a seaside paradise.
It appeared in surveys as one of Africa’s safest and most livable cities. As waves crashed ashore, Somalis sipped coffee in outdoor cafes. “My dream is to bring back the Mogadishu of my youth,” said Mr. Ali, who is 52 and wears a neatly trimmed, jet-black goatee with just a few gray hairs. “I want a peaceful Mogadishu, and then I can retire, have my own golf course and raise chickens.”
His dream has another part, as well. He wants those in the Somali diaspora, which has spread from Europe to America to Australia, to come home again, just as he did.
Until a fateful job offer, Mr. Ali, who fled with his family after the government fell and moved to the United States in 2000, was living comfortably in Minneapolis with his wife and seven children, running a janitorial business.
Somalia’s transitional prime minister, Ali Mohamed Gedi, a childhood friend, had other plans — and had an aide call to try to lure Mr. Ali back. The aide, Abdurahman Osman, remembers putting it this way in his recruiting pitch: “Would you prefer to clean up there or clean up Mogadishu?”
Even after Mr. Ali mulled the offer a while, decided to take the post, told his wife (who was furious) and boarded a plane for Africa, he did not actually have the job in hand. He was appointed to be part of the transitional government, for now based in the provincial town of Baidoa and not yet in control of Mogadishu. Mr. Ali went to the capital, but fighting broke out over his appointment.
The warlords who controlled the city, the ones who were recently forced out by Islamic militias, wanted someone else for the job. The Islamists, leaders of the Shariah court system that has grown in Mogadishu over the last 15 years, backed Mr. Ali.
He plays down fears that extremism will come to Somalia now that Islamists have taken over the city.
Mr. Ali also said he opposed a public execution in April that reminded some of the way the Taliban operated in Afghanistan. Huge crowds gathered as the 17-year-old son of a murder victim was ordered to stab the man who had killed his father.
The guiding principle behind the public execution is no different from the death penalty in the United States, Mr. Ali said, speaking through an interpreter in Somali. But he said the boy was too young to carry out such an act. “It was totally a mistake,” he said. “We regret it.”
Mr. Ali, a naturalized United States citizen, is soft-spoken but criticizes the United States government for financing the warlords who were behind so much of the destruction in Mogadishu.
He also called in one of the warlords, Muse Sudi Yalahow, who is also from the Abgal clan, and beseeched him to stop fighting. But Mr. Yalahow refused, and now Mr. Ali says dismissively, “Send him to The Hague.” Wishful thinking, perhaps, because no international tribunal is known to be investigating war crimes in Somalia.
Mr. Ali, who graduated from Lafole College of Education and speaks Arabic, Italian and a smattering of English in addition to his native Somali, was a high school teacher before he fled Mogadishu in the early 1990’s.
He took his family on a trek around the world in search of opportunity, with stops in Ethiopia, Djibouti, Germany and Italy. From Rome, they went to Minnesota, where he became a leading member of the large Somali community.
When he got the job as Mogadishu’s mayor, which also makes him governor of the Banaadir region, it was front-page news in Minneapolis. “If not me, who else will do it?” he told The Pioneer Press.
Mr. Ali entered the job already well known. He was a member of the Somalia Olympic Committee in the days when Somalia excelled in sports. His younger brother, a former member of the Somali soccer team, remains chairman of the Somali national soccer team. Mr. Ali is also following in the footsteps of an uncle, who was mayor of Mogadishu from 1959 to 1963.
As he goes about his role as peacemaker in a very different era, Mr. Ali declines the armed bodyguards that other politicians employ. “All I have is this,” he says with glee, raising a wooden cane.
He complains that he has no vehicle to help him traverse the city. “I do this,” he said, sticking his thumb in the air.
On top of that, he has no civil servants to order around and no budget to divvy up.
What really irritates him, however, is not how little he has but how little the residents he represents have.
“They are bleeding right now, and all they have is a rag to put on the wound,” he said. “We need food. We need wheelchairs. Instead of ambulances, we use wheelbarrows.”
Source: New York Times, June 11, 2006
