Decade of Fear. Michelle Shephard
death. Somehow, Tortoise’s death seems like an apt metaphor for Somalia itself.
THE YEAR AFTER Ali died, a young Somali girl named Asho Duhu-low went missing from a refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya. No one remembers the exact date in August 2008 that Asho disappeared. Her disappearance was barely noticed outside her immediate family, which is not surprising since Dadaab is one of the world’s oldest and largest refugee camps, where stories of loss are more plentiful than bread. Alive, young Asho was just one of 230,000 refugees, about 90 per cent Somali, who lived in the United Nations camp in the desert-like northern Kenya region near the border of Somalia. Dead, she would become an international story about Shabab’s brutality.
While the details of her disappearance remained murky, the details of her death were not. She died in the Somali port town of Kismayo on October 27, around 4 PM, after she had one last tearful conversation with her father and after her captors buried her legs so she could not escape. A small group of men stoned her to death with large rocks.
Al Shabab had killed Asho as punishment for the crime of “adultery.” It was a public execution before hundreds, and local reports said some onlookers tried to intervene, running forward in protest until Shabab’s militia fired into the crowd. A young boy was reportedly killed. Rock after rock struck Asho’s head and chest. A break only came when someone, reportedly a nurse, stepped forward to see if she was dead. Asho had a pulse; the stoning resumed. Pictures surreptitiously taken with a cellphone recorded the gruesome aftermath. One blurry shot shows the bloodied face of a girl wearing a soiled pink sweater. On Somalia’s Radio Shabelle, a Shabab spokesperson later said that Asho had pleaded guilty and “was happy with the punishment under Islamic law.”
I read about Asho in an Amnesty International report and was eager to go to Dadaab to see how other Somali refugees were faring. I had been there before, with Pete Power. The camp was reportedly growing by the day, resources were thin, tension was mounting and Shabab was recruiting amid the disorder.
Around the time I heard about Asho, I also became aware of an Ottawa-based program called World University Service of Canada. Each year, the organization selected refugees living in camps around the world to study in Canadian universities. WUSC had awarded its thousandth scholarship that fall. Of the eighteen students who had been hand-picked from Dadaab, some had come to Toronto, and Muno Osman was one of them. I went to meet Muno in her apartment at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus, still only thinking of telling Asho’s story, wondering if she had known her in Dadaab. When I met Muno, I knew she was a story herself.
With our luggage full of gifts Muno wanted us to give to her sisters and parents at the camp, I went back to Dadaab. This time I worked with Lucas Oleniuk, a Star photographer favoured by editors and reporters alike. Over years of working together, we had developed a sibling-like relationship.
A Prairie high school football star and son of a Saskatchewan prison warden, Lucas was as tough as he was hard-working. In New Orleans, in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, police ripped Lucas’s camera off his neck and threw him to the ground after he photographed them beating a handcuffed suspect. He handed over a second camera and then walked the block to cool off before confronting them and demanding back his equipment. They returned the cameras, minus the memory cards. He would continue to find himself in police crosshairs throughout the years, dodging bullets in Bahrain, or following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, where he captured a wrenching photo of fifteen-year-old Fabienne Cherisma as she lay dead, clutching three ornamental mirrors. The teenager in the pink skirt, T-shirt and sandals had been running with other looters when police shot at random, striking her in the head.
At Dadaab we tracked down Asho’s family, and over the course of a week discovered the sad life of a little girl who had suffered from epilepsy and struggled in school. Her father still carried her prescription for epilepsy medication, folded hard into a little block of paper about the size of a matchbook. He pushed it at us like it was a clue to her disappearance. The story of how she left that camp was impossible to verify, even after interviewing many who saw her on that last day. She may have left willingly for Kismayo, trying to find the Somali town that existed only in her imagination and her grandmother’s stories. Or she may have been kidnapped as a bride. One report said she had been gang raped when she got to Somalia and reported the crime, only to be charged with a crime herself.
Jihadi websites justified her killing, purporting that Asho was in fact “over twenty years old, married and practising adultery” and thereby rightfully killed under Sharia law. But we talked to Asho’s teacher at the camp’s primary school and spent more than an hour in a sweltering, fly-ridden classroom poring over school records to find proof of her age and see her report card. We tracked down someone who was at the Dadaab hospital the day Asho was born. Asho was only thirteen, not that her killing would have been justified had she been any age, but I took delight in debunking the jihadi websites.
A short walk (but what seemed like a world away) from Asho’s distraught parents lived Muno’s proud mother and father. The whole family had sacrificed to get Muno that coveted scholarship, her sisters taking up chores, her father having to defend his daughter’s pursuit of education among some of the traditional Somali elders at the camp who wondered how, at twenty, she could not yet be married. We had brought photos Lucas had taken of Muno on campus, which I’m sure looked to her family like they were taken on Mars. Her sisters handled the photos carefully with expressions that oscillated between pride and fear as we squatted on the ground over plates of cookies and xalwo, a sugary homemade jelly. Mohamed Osman, Muno’s father, said he always fought for education for his three girls. “Seeing is believing,” he said. “I was always supporting her. Girls are equal beings.” Muno’s beautiful mother, Safiyo Abdikadir, added quietly, “I just wanted her to be something. I’m illiterate and I know how horrible it is.”
They laughed tenderly when describing the day their middle child left. Muno was sobbing. It may have been the happiest day of her life, but that didn’t mean leaving was easy. Her parents had to carry their daughter onto the bus, helping her leave the camp the same way they had brought her here as a two-year-old refugee, eighteen years earlier.
Muno took planes—which she had only seen before in the sky—to London and then Toronto. Under the folds of cloth that covered her, she wore new winter boots, jeans and a leather jacket. She almost passed out when she finally arrived at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. Everyone had told her Canada was cold. No one told her, though, that it didn’t snow in August. Muno hoped to sponsor her family in Canada one day. Her parents longed for her to return to Somalia and prayed for peace.
In 2006, Dadaab’s population was at its limit, staff said. By 2008, it had grown by 30,000 and definitely could take no more. By 2011, more than 300,000 displaced Somalis lived in Dadaab.
Dadaab continues to grow.
ONLY THREE YEARS had passed since Sheikh Sharif met me in Mogadishu and talked about that light at the end of the tunnel; about how he would bring peace so that refugees like those in Dadaab could finally come home. Only three years ago, he was the leader of an Islamic insurgency that some in Washington cited as the next great threat to the West. Only three years ago, he was one of President Bush’s evildoers.
I replayed that last meeting as I rode the elevator to his suite at New York’s Waldorf Astoria. I made it past the cordon of dozens of NYPD agents standing guard outside, only to be met by a muscular and unsmiling U.S. Secret Service agent. “I have an appointment with President Sharif.” President Sharif. It was October 2009, and Sharif had just addressed the United Nations. A month earlier, in Nairobi, he made headlines around the world after shaking hands with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She called him the “best hope” in a long time for Somalia. Some feted Sharif as a visionary. New York was his coming-out party.
President Sharif entered the room wearing a blue suit, a white shirt, a delicately embroidered prayer cap and a pin of Somalia’s flag on his lapel. His hand was outstretched. Three years ago, we had not shaken hands, and had I tried the gesture would have likely been met with disapproving clucks from his advisors.
The hotel room smelled of roses; large unopened glass bottles of Evian sat nearby. The fruit tray and exotic flower arrangement,