Transcript of Oral History Interview with Abdiaziz Abdi

Abdiaziz Abdi Narrator Ibrahim Hirsi Interviewer August 31, 2014 Rochester, Minnesota Abdiaziz Abdi -AA Ibrahim Hirsi -IH IH: This is Ibrahim Hirsi recording for the Minnesota Historical Society Somali Oral History Project. I am interviewing Abdiaziz Abdi in Rochester. The date today is August 31, 2014. Abdiaziz, thanks for the opportunity to interview with me. My first question is, can you tell me about your early childhood years in Somalia? AA: Thank you very much, Ibrahim Hirsi. I was born in Somalia, the capital, Mogadishu, in the year 1978. Basically, my childhood, as far as I could recall, I remember myself going to dugsi [Quran school]. I don’t know what they say in English. How do you say that? IH: Yeah, dugsi is all right. Religious school. AA: Religious school to learn and memorize Quran, given that I came from a religious background. IH: And that was the first thing that families did before they even send to school, to kindergarten. AA: Exactly. We had a system within our family. IH: And that worked for you. AA: Exactly. And it went like this. You should go to that religious school—I was, I think, seven or eight at the time—and then one needed to memorize the Quran before they do anything else. So that’s the route or the path that I did take. And when I was eleven, I memorized the Quran, and then the civil war started. I was eleven, I believe. Or twelve. IH: Do you remember what were you doing that day that the civil war broke out? AA: I do remember vividly, actually. I was in that religious school, as you know. We did go after the fardambe [recess]. IH: Break. 1 AA: After the break. And it was eleven o’clock or twelve o’clock, I think. Or one o’clock, I don’t exactly know. I didn’t have a watch at the time. IH: Right. So you go to the dugsi in the morning. AA: In the morning. IH: About six o’clock. AA: Yeah, six o’clock, came back like ten to have breakfast and then went back. And then it was twelve, I believe, or one, going home and getting lunch, and then principally coming back in the afternoon. So I was going home—I was a very devious kid, I would say, when I was a child [chuckles]—so I was playing soccer in the middle, and I hear the bomb. Boom! And we were a bunch of kids. Everybody ran. Everybody went home. And that was the beginning, I believe. IH: What was the first thing that came to your mind when you heard that bomb? AA: I said, “Maybe it’s a tire,” because if you live in Mogadishu, it’s a norm, right? And then we saw people with guns, wearing robes. You know, soldiers, they’re not in a uniform. And then hiding. And pow, pow! Fire shots. And then I said, “This is not healthy.” We went home, and I think ten days after that we have to leave, because shelling started. IH: You didn’t go anywhere for ten days? AA: No, we stayed home. We did move from our house to another house because there’s some stable area. We used to live, at the time, in Howlwadaag District. So we went to Hodan District, a little bit calmer, because the war was not at that point at that place. And then after ten days, shelling was all over the place. And militia and the government soldiers had started fighting, and we have to flee from the capital. So I remember walking, first time, walking on that Maka al- Mukarram street—somebody remembers—and it’s women, children, old people, young, everybody walking like it’s doomsday. IH: Where are they going to? AA: They are going to the south, to Afgooye district. Where, I don’t know. Everybody’s walking. No cars, nothing. There are some cars, and some soldiers, but we were part of those people. I didn’t have a brother, because I’m the only child, but we lived with my uncle. IH: So who was walking at that day? You were walking with… AA: With some, many number of cousins of mine. So we went to Afgooye—not Afgooye, actually. If you know Lafoole? IH: Which is sixteen miles away from Afgoo ye. 2 AA: It’s thirty, twenty-five, twenty-eight miles, I believe, or thirty miles from Mogadishu. IH: So you walked for thirty miles, and you were only eleven years old? AA: Yep. And I remember sleeping three or four days under the trees. And that was actually the norm. Every tree has a family, some people you know from your dugsi, from the school, whatever. IH: And how many would you estimate? How many families? AA: That were walking or… IH: Thirties or… AA: About, I would say, two, three hundred, at least that are at the surrounding areas. And then we went to Afgooye. My uncle happened to have a wife who hails from Afgooye district, and then we went to live with their family or her family. We stayed there, I think, a month, and then the war stopped. Then we came back. IH: Okay, so you went back to… AA: To Mogadishu, to our house, resumed our life, went back to the dugsi. IH: And how was life different? AA: It was different, because when we were leaving, houses were intact. I remember Maka al- Mukarram, and Shaleemo or Cinema Somalia we called that, or Kilometer Four—buildings around these areas were intact. But when we came back, destruction and damage was complete. IH: Major institutions are gone. AA: Exactly. And you will see, get men roaming around, gunshots all the time. And it was a chaos when we came back, and we couldn’t feel the sense of normalcy that we used to or the stability, whatever. So we started out life back, and we went back. I went back to that religious school back. And I think it was a year later, another war started within the USC [United Somali Congress] militia. I would say it was worse than that, because some people that I knew were killed. Yeah. Before, I didn’t know anybody, but now people I know. People I did know. IH: And that was a clan killing another one. AA: Exactly. And death—I remember seeing people killed in front of me. Not one, not two, not three—and it became part of the life. “Oh, that guy, yeah, get him.” Shelling was also part of the daily life. My mother was wounded in that. I lost two of my cousins because of that. They died. So it was very, very painful. IH: And do you know the reason why they’re killed? I mean, is there specific reasons? 3 AA: One, he was older than me, one of the cousins was older than me, about two or three years, I believe. He was a guy, I would call him now—introspective—I will call him now a psychopath, because he loved war and destruction. That was his nature. And I think he was sick, because always he was in fight. And he was someone who thrives in the violence. So always his father used to tell him, “Don’t leave.” And he was, at the time, I believe, fourteen, fifteen. He used to sneak out and go with the militia guys and, you know how they… And we were told he died, but still now we don’t know. But he was in a war zone, and he never came back. IH: But also there were people who were not part of this violence, but got killed because they had money, or because they are well known in the community, or maybe because they are doing good things in the community and there are people who don’t want them to do that. AA: Actually, I don’t know. I don’t even know that. I was eleven, so my formative intelligence—if you know what I’m talking about—I don’t think gives me the opportunity to evaluate or analyze who was doing. But I remember people get killed. I didn’t know why. And I remember, yeah, they happen to belong to that tribe or that tribe, and that was basically it. I couldn’t have gone beyond and, “Oh, they were good, they were doing something for the community, they had money.” I didn’t know what was going on. IH: And you were a child then. I mean, what did you do for fun? Because everything… AA: All right! I tell you what I did for fun. I was what Somalis call fulay [coward]. Very coward. And in evolutionary terms, that’s good, that’s why I survived, I believe. [chuckles] Yeah, I was fulay. So I used to imitate having a gun, but the real gun—oooh, I was so afraid of it. [both chuckle] So I remember visualizing myself, and actually that guy who was killed, that cousin, was my role model. I couldn’t do what he did, but I idolized him. I said, “Oh, yeah, that guy must be brave. Yeah, he did go, and can fight, and fire a gun.” All that. “He’s a hero!” That’s how I conceptualized things, because if you’re young and everybody’s talking about, you know, “Yeah, I’m…” So I remember doing that.

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