Back From the Suburbs to Run a Patch of Somalia - NYTimes.com

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By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

ADADO, Somalia

ABOVE the shimmering horizon, in the middle of a deserted highway, stands an oversize figure wearing a golf cap, huge sunglasses, baggy jeans, and an iPhone on his hip, not your typical outfit in war-torn Somalia. But then again, Mohamed Aden, the man waiting in the road, is not your typical Somali. The instant his guests arrive, he spreads his arms wide, ready for a bear hug.

“Welcome to Adado,” he says, beaming. “Now, let’s bounce.”

Mr. Aden, 37, is part militia commander, part schoolteacher, part lawmaker, part engineer, part environmentalist, part king — a mind-boggling combination of roles for anyone to play, let alone for a guy who dresses (and talks) like a rapper and recently moved from Minnesota to Somalia in an effort to build a local government.

Think of him as the accidental warlord. And a shard of hope. In less than a year, Mr. Aden, who was born in Somalia and emigrated to the United States at age 22, has essentially built a state within a state.

With money channeled from fellow clansmen living in the United States and Europe, he has transformed Adado and its surroundings in central Somalia, which used to be haunted by bandits and warring Islamic factions, into an enclave of peace, with a functioning police force, scores of new businesses, new schools and new rules.

Somalia is one of the most violent countries on the planet, and at times Mr. Aden has had to speak with the business end of a machine gun. His patch — which encompasses around 5,000 square miles and a few hundred thousand people, most of them desperately poor nomads and members of his own Saleban clan — is now one of the safest parts of this broken nation.

Even outsiders are noticing.

“When I landed here, I was taken aback, in a good way,” said Denise Brown, a United Nations World Food Program official who visited Adado in March. “I didn’t see what I usually see in Somalia: destitution, chaos, needy people.”

Mr. Aden does not get much help from the United Nations or the internationally supported transitional government of Somalia, which is led by moderate Islamists and preoccupied with beating back an intense insurgency in the capital, Mogadishu.

Most of what Mr. Aden has accomplished he has accomplished on his own, in distinctly Somali fashion. His police officers carry rocket-propelled grenades. Parked in front of the police station are two enormous tanks.

“My Cadillacs,” Mr. Aden calls them.

But however playful or flamboyant he may come across, Mr. Aden seems to have hit upon a deeper truth. People want government, he says, even in Somalia. “They’re begging for it,” he said.

His experiment of building a small local government from the bottom up, relying on that one feature of Somali society that has bedeviled just about all national governance efforts to date — the clan — may have wider implications for the rest of the country, which seems to export trouble continuously, most recently in the form of pirates. Many pirates are actually from Mr. Aden’s area, and one pirate whose nom de guerre is Son of a Liar is building a huge house in Adado — right behind the police station.

“I’d take these guys on, but I can’t right now because I don’t have the resources,” Mr. Aden said. “Besides, you can’t just wipe out a whole line of work for thousands of young men. If you take something away, you must replace it with something else. Otherwise, more problems.”

WHAT drove him to give up a comfy life with his wife, Shamso, and their five boys in Burnsville, Minn., a Minneapolis suburb? How was he able to make the transition from running a small health care business to being “president,” which is what his constituents in Adado call him?

“When I first arrived, I was afraid,” he recalled. “I didn’t know how the people would react to me, if they would trust me. That first year I was focusing on muscle. Without muscle, you can’t do anything.”

Of course, there’s much about America he misses.

“SportsCenter, Subway, AC, even winter,” he says.

But in a way he didn’t have a choice. He came to Adado last year for what he thought would be a few weeks, to help out with a killer drought. He organized water trucking and emergency food deliveries and channeled tens of thousands of dollars from middle class Somalis in the United States to nomads dying of hunger and thirst.

Afterward, Adado’s elders, impressed by how fast he could work, turned to Mr. Aden and asked: want to be our leader?

“We needed a man of peace and he is from a peaceful place, Minnesota,” said one elder, Mohamed Ali Farah.

It did not hurt that Mr. Aden had a pipeline to overseas cash and a college degree from Minnesota State in management information systems. With the elders firmly behind him, he was able to form a well-armed police force of several hundred fellow clansmen who are fiercely protective of him — essentially his own private army, which has made it difficult for the extremist Islamists wreaking havoc in other parts of Somalia to establish a beachhead here.

People who have challenged his authority have paid the price. Last summer, his police officers shot to death four men who violently refused to vacate a piece of property that Mr. Aden’s administration ruled belonged to someone else.

“I knew there were outliers, people with their own rules,” he said. “I knew I had to challenge them, sooner or later.”

Nowadays, from Adado’s dusty town square, he hands down new laws, like a recent one saying that anyone who cuts down a live tree has to pay a fine of 100 camels.

The orderly refuge he has carved out has become a magnet for displaced families fleeing the relentless bloodletting in Mogadishu, and at noon each day, the metal roofs of thousands of new homes sparkle like mirrors scattered across the desert.

Mr. Aden grew up in Mogadishu, the son of a military mechanic, the firstborn of 10. He fled Somalia with an uncle in 1992, a year after the central government collapsed and his friends split into rival militias. “I didn’t see myself in this war,” he said.

But the war saw him. He was shot in the ankle by a stray bullet. Soon he packed up for Kenya and then on to Miami, where he lived in a homeless shelter. He eventually took a Greyhound bus to Minneapolis, the promised land for Somali immigrants and home to the largest Somali community in the United States. There he put himself through college parking cars and working in a factory, always keeping abreast of politics back home, hoping to jump in one day. Yet when finally presented with the opportunity, he turned down the Adado elders twice before relenting.

“It was hard for my wife and kids,” he said. “But I’m doing something big here, and they know that.”

HE spends his days in a large house in the center of town, where he has rigged up a small command center with a laptop, his iPhone and an Internet connection. As chairman of Himan and Heeb Administration, the province where Adado is located, he often meets with elders on his living room carpet, and he has had to straddle a delicate religious line, respecting the conservative Muslim culture here without coming across as phony. This spring, central Somalia was hit again by a devastating drought, and the elders asked him to lead a rain prayer. “I ain’t no imam,” he grumbled at first, though he eventually agreed to do it.

Mr. Aden seems to be a naturally upbeat person, but the one thing that drags him down is the drought. During a drive across the skinned landscape of his area a few months ago, he came upon a young man lying under a lean-to of sticks and blankets. The man was in bad shape, very thin, sweaty and empty-eyed. People said he had typhoid. And tuberculosis. And malaria.

Mr. Aden looked down at him and said he would pray. “There’s really nothing else I can do,” he said. “There’s no 911 out here.”