Transcript of Oral History Interview with Ali K. Galaydh

Ahmed Ismail Yusuf Interviewer

February 10, 2014 Shoreview, Minnesota

Ali Khalif Galaydh -AG Ahmed Ismail Yusuf -AY

AY: I am Ahmed Ismail Yusuf. This is an interview for the Minnesota Historical Society Somali Oral History Project. I am with Ali Khalif Galaydh. We are in Shoreview, Minnesota. It is February 10, 2014. Ali Khalif Galaydh is a talented Somali politician, educator on a professorial level, and at times even a businessman. As a professor he taught at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He was a fellow at Weatherhead Center of International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. In Somalia he had several titles, but the highest office was when he became the fourth-ever Somali prime minister in 2000. In Somali circles Ali is also known for his intellectual prowess and political versatility. Ali, welcome to the interview—third time again.

AG: Thank you very much, Ahmed.

AY: Okay, I want to start from where were you born and when were you born, even though we don’t actually acknowledge that at all.

AG: Somalis normally don’t celebrate birthdays, so there is now quite an always heated discussion about who is older than who. But in my case, my father was in the British Merchant Marine, and he therefore recorded when I was born. There was no birth certificate, but I was born October 15, 1941.

AY: Wow, so you do have the recorded date, at least.

AG: Yes, yes I do. I can’t change it. I know friends of mine, we attended school together, either elementary school or primary school, and now they keep on reducing their age. I can’t change or fiddle with mine.

AY: Well, we are suffering from that disease. All of us, anyway. How did you start school? I mean, at the earliest stage, I think, at that time we didn’t know what education was. How did that come about in your case?

AG: Because, again, my father was in the British Merchant Marine, and therefore traveled the world over and realized the importance of educating children. So he asked my mother and my grandmother—who I was staying with in his absence—he asked them to take me to elementary school in Las Anod [Laascaanood], the nearest town. So that’s where I started. And I finished elementary school there—three years—and then moved to Sheikh [Sheekh] for primary education. And, again, Sheikh was the main center of learning or education in what was Somaliland. I pursued my high school also, initially for the first year and a half in Amoud because the only school was there then. Then a bigger school and a beautiful school was built by the British in Sheikh, so I went there. My last two years and a half, I was in Sheikh, so I graduated from Sheikh.

AY: So even then, when comes to Amoud and Sheikh High School, you were the cream of the crop. What was the feeling then? Did you know that you could be a leader? Were you just exactly training yourself in that capacity? What were you thinking at the time in Somalia?

AG: I don’t think any of us strategized. We were on this sort of road that was metaphorically built by the British. So we finished elementary school, there is a competitive examination nationally, and if you passed that you moved to the primary school. Then the top students— probably twenty, twenty-five of them—moved to the secondary school. We were really not very self-conscious. All we cared about was to be in this boarding school, to hit the books, and when you finish you move to the second level. I don’t think it dawned on any of us, in the minds of us, what we are going to be. At that time where we lived was a British protectorate, and when we graduated, the best we could aim for at that time was to be in the colonial service. Yes, all of us had in mind of attending university—and the university was always in the UK—but I don’t think any of us was self-conscious about what our role will be beyond the British colonial system at that time. Only after independence could one think of being in the newly independent state of Somalia civil service, but we didn’t plan or think anything bigger than that.

AY: So once you graduated from secondary school, or what we call secondary school—and I think in the United States it’s called high school—where did you go? I got a word from the wind that somehow or other you came to the United States.

AG: I did. My graduating class of Sheikh at that time, we were fourteen. I think out of the fourteen, five or six of us came to the States, and the others went to the Soviet Union with some on a scholarship. So I came with this batch in 1962.

AY: 1962.

AG: We came here September 1962, actually very close to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and we were in Washington, DC. But I think the people who sponsored us did not apply in time for us to attend any of the universities we later went on. So we stayed six months in Washington, DC, purportedly to study English. But we had no problem with English, because the medium of instruction [in northern Somalia] was English. We were not really self-confident in speaking the language, but in written English I think we did very well when we ultimately went to college. But we spent six months from September to January in Washington, DC, and only the spring semester is when we joined the different colleges we were sent to. So I went to Boston

University. We didn’t really have a hand in where we were being sent, because we were not directly applying. I think this is State Department money, but there was an Institute of International Education based in New York, which administered the scholarships, and they are the ones who applied for us to different schools. So I went to BU [Boston University], and that’s where I graduated from.

AY: So you all went to different universities.

AG: Yes. People you would probably—if I give you names you would remember. Gahayr. Mohamed Hassan Aden (Gahayr), who had a very illustrious sort of career in Somalia. He was a brilliant guy, was one of us, and he was brought to Ripon College, Wisconsin. That’s where he graduated from. There was Mohamoud Ismail Samater. There was Hassan Farah. There was Aden Oomar. And then there were two other guys who actually were ahead of us, and they went to England to study. For whatever the reason, they had problems, so they came back to Somalia, and then they came with us. One of them was Hassan Adan (Hassan Huukle) and the other one was Hassan Abdullahi Ahmed-weyd. These two guys came with us and were the same batch, but we were all sent to different universities. I think Ahmed Yassin Buraale, of all places, he was sent to Fresno, California, and others were sent to somewhere in Pennsylvania—Dickinson College. So we were sent to different schools.

AY: So did you keep in touch, or was it difficult just to keep in touch—you were a batch that came from Somalia, you were somewhat connected, you were very young?

AG: The number of Somali students in the US then were very limited, so all of us knew each other. And in those days telephones were expensive, so we used to write letters to each other.

AY: [chuckles] Did you save those letters?

AG: No, none of those.

AY: None of them.

AG: None of them. But these would have been probably archival for purposes—would have told us what we felt. I remember a year or after I started college, the Beatles came to the US, and that was a sensational thing. But more importantly in August of 1963, my first year in college, Martin Luther King, and the march to Washington, and the “I Have a Dream” speech. I was here, right here.

AY: In the United States.

AG: In Boston at that time. So the whole civil rights movement, the anti-war, the anti-Vietnam, the feminist movement, women’s liberation—there were a lot of things that were happening in the ’60s and early ’70s and actually to the ’70s, middle ’70s. But initially I was in Boston and we had a very sheltered life. We lived either in dorms or close to campus, and really we were not exposed to what was going on in the country other than what we see on television.

AY: So you mean when it comes to even racial issues or civil rights movement, you could hear the commotion, but possibly you were not that informed about it, were you?

AG: We were not actually that informed. Intellectually, yes, but experientially, we really didn’t come across any of that. Here you live in campus and yes, you sense what is going on. But I remember distinctly summer of 1964, Howard Zinn—the late Howard Zinn, who is a historian, and I took classes with him in Boston University—was an advisor to SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee]. He was organizing students to go to Mississippi, and I almost went and joined that group. That’s the groups that later on were killed in Mississippi. Three students. It was SNCC that was organizing, and Howard Zinn was the professor or their advisor, and he was my professor. So we heard about that, but I was taking summer class, so I didn’t go. It’s probably where I would have been even more aware of what’s happening, because we were not in the South. We were in Boston. But if I went with that group, I would have gone to Mississippi and actually first-hand experienced what was going on. But I didn’t take advantage of that—I didn’t go.

AY: So you became very close. Even though you were not exactly conscientiously aware of the civil rights movement, you were very close to it.

AG: Yes. We were reading that in the papers, but more importantly, television. And therefore we were then at least right in the middle of one of these things that were going on. But, somehow, in terms of the depth of this, the personal level of discrimination—you know, we were not looking for jobs, we were not directly applying. It was the American government that was applying to schools for us. So, really, I didn’t come across very harsh reality of segregation or even, at the personal level, discrimination that you sort of…

AY: Feel it, and face it, and taste it.

AG: Right, right, right, right. We had some friends who were from Roxbury in Boston. African Americans. Two of them, actually, we shared apartments with. And all we really cared about at that time, we were students, we were partying. Yes, we did talk about what was going on in the civil rights movement. The guys will give us their experience later on. After I came back to America in 1982, I ran into one of my friends, and the stories that I didn’t know about, and what was happening in Roxbury and his family—I personally missed all of that, as if we were visitors…

AY: From another planet. [chuckles]

AG: Another planet. [chuckles] I rushed through undergraduate and finished in two and a half years. So I was always taking maximum load, and I never had a chance to really go beyond the confines of the campus, other than we were at that time discovering, partying.

AY: Yeah. Well, I don’t know how you got time for partying and at the same time just exactly going through the academic rigors—I mean, academics with that speed of light. I will come back to that question, but I don’t want to forget, even though you actually inadvertently just said something about it, I still wanted to ask you—when Martin Luther King, in 1963 when he had

4 that speech, famous speech, “I Have a Dream”—do you recall anything about that particular news? Was there anything that you remember about it? Was anything special? Is there any recollection of that?

AG: I think the only thing I remember of that is this massive—it’s the Mall in Washington, the monument, and there was hundreds of thousands of people. I don’t think I have ever witnessed— not directly, but at least from the television—such masses of people demonstrating and coming out in order to articulate what their demands were. And I distinctly remember the issue people were talking about were jobs, and the people were not just confined to Jim Crow or the problems of the South, but it was the problem of having a decent job so people can support their kids and their families.

I think what I distinctly also remember was at that time and looking back now, there was a very strong alliance among the African Americans—the black Americans and African Americans— and the Jewish community. There were Jewish students with us, and they were the ones really always at the forefront in terms of not only the civil rights. In some ways they are the ones who whenever we were together were more informed and giving whatever was happening some kind of context for us. So for them this very strong alliance was there, was alive.

AY: So you recall that.

AG: I recall that very well. And most of these students who we really associated with at that time were mostly Jewish students. Our classmates and in terms of socializing, it was always them. And I remember distinctly that coming from Somalia, one white person for us was no different than another. But even the different white communities—and especially, yes, we did hear of Israel and the Jewish community—but in terms of in America, the relationship among the different groups was something we were not aware of. And I must say, it was a very positive experience for us, because, amazingly, looking back most of our favorite professors who were very much involved and were aware of what was happening outside the US, especially in Africa and the Middle East, were mostly Jewish professors. The students who were very friendly and actually who always we were together were from that community.

Ironically Boston is supposed to be, itself—I mean these are issues I got a sense of later on—but the Brahmins, the Protestants, and the Irish Catholics. In fact later on there were busing problems and demonstrations. It’s only then that you see all of these different communities, not one black block and one white block. There are enormous differences in the whole civil rights movement, in terms of communities. But individuals, also, whether they were Protestant whites, or Greek background, or whatever background—it’s individual choices people make. I really didn’t get the full understanding of these differences until I came back for graduate school. And then after I left the Somali service and I came back to the States to teach, it’s only then that the situation at least I was able to differentiate in terms of public opinions and what make different communities supposedly tick, what are social scientists saying about this community or that community. And again, the one thing I remember distinctly was the role of the labor movement during the civil rights. The labor movement was really at the vanguard of what was going on, and clearly present in the march to Washington. So I remember that clearly.

AY: Good. What I’m struck with is just that you started in 1963 and you graduated…

AG: Sixty-five.

AY: Nineteen sixty-five. You mentioned that the people who were making the arrangements, or registering you school, actually assumed that you did not know English.

AG: Yes.

AY: Well, as a matter of fact, if you didn’t know English, this is just quite surprising that actually you marched through the academic rigors, academic affairs within that short period of time.

AG: We knew English. And I’m not bragging, but our English, especially written English, was much stronger than the average American student. Of course there were students who were really top notch, but the average student, in terms of writing essays, writing papers—for us, that’s the only thing we knew. We never heard of multiple choice, true and false, these kinds of exams, and I personally struggled with that. But when it came to writing an essay—in our syllabus in terms of English literature, I remember we read Shakespeare Twelfth Night, and we read Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

AY: Wow. In—

AG: At Sheikh.

AY: At Sheikh High School?

AG: Yes. And I remember distinctly reading, there was a magazine published, came out of London called the Illustrated London News, and there was somebody who was a columnist—I still remember his name, Arthur Bryant—who was wonderful in terms of his essay and how beautifully written and organized that it was. But I remember also Alistair Cooke. We used to get in our library the Guardian, what was then the Manchester Guardian. And he used to write a letter from America. But we read those things. Our English to the level at least in writing and in comprehension—and we were definitely reading the poetry. I remember distinctly reading Shakespeare and some of the sonnets. Some of his poetry was dense and fairly inaccessible. But there was this Burns, a poet from Scotland, and his poetry was about Scottish clans fighting—the MacDonalds and the different clans, I mean, Scottish clans—those in the hills or mountains and those in the valleys. And that was very accessible. It really made a lot of sense.

AY: You related to it just because of the Somali poetry.

AG: Exactly, yes. It related to Somali oral poetry, clans fighting, somebody robbing, I mean, camel rustling.

AY: [chuckles] Camel rustling.

AG: So we were definitely highly, I must say, trained in terms of our English and command of English. Probably if we had a weakness in Sheikh, it was in the sciences, where really you need laboratories in terms of chemistry or biology. We did not have the full complement of laboratories. But in the social sciences, those of us who studied social science, economics, or political science, or history, we had no problem, either here or in the UK.

AY: So later on you went on, in 1967 to 1969, you also got your master’s degree from Syracuse University.

AG: I went back [to Somalia], worked for two years, and came back [to the United States]. Again I was given a scholarship by USAID [United States Agency for International Development] to study for my master’s. There were three of us. Again, there was a time limit. It’s two years, and I knew I won’t have a chance, probably, to get another scholarship, so I thought, “Why not take advantage of this?” So I took all the course work for my PhD, and took the comprehensive examination and went back to Somalia to collect research material for my PhD.

AY: [chuckles] So, actually, you cheated in a way…

AG: Yes. I did.

AY: They gave you a scholarship for master’s degree, and on top of that you earned your credits.

AG: Yes. All my credits for my PhD. And you take comprehensive exams. Three or four days— each of them eight hours. Exams were eight hours.

AY: Within the two years.

AG: Within the two years. So I finished that, went back, and was away for a year and came back and wrote my dissertation and finished.

AY: In a year. 1971 to 1972.

AG: Yes.

AY: Wow.

AG: I was in a rush.

AY: [chuckles] Apparently. So you went back to Somalia, though. I mean, you could have stayed here and actually made millions, or made ton of money and made yourself a name.

AG: No, actually I had a problem. I actually wanted to teach for two years, and I got an offer from Bowdoin College, which is in Maine. But I had a visa problem. The visa I was on was a J2, and I wasn’t able to stay in the country. I really didn’t want to stay and live here, but I wanted at

7 least to teach for two years and get that under my belt. I got that offer, but the immigration people said, “No, you can’t do this.” So I went back [to Somalia].

AY: Why did you want to limit yourself to two years?

AG: I honestly was committed to go back, although there was—and I witnessed a bit of it. The day initially in 1969 when I was on my way back to Somalia, I made a stopover in Khartoum, because there were friends of mine, classmates of mine who were teaching at Khartoum University. Then I intended to stop in Addis Ababa. The day I arrived in Addis Ababa was the day—my birthday, 15 October—and that is the day Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke was assassinated in Las Anod of all places.

AY: That was the second president of Somalia ever.

AG: Of Somalia, right. And Alitalia used to come from Rome, Khartoum, Addis Ababa, Mogadishu, and it was a weekly flight. I was waiting for the weekly flight, but the military took over October twenty-first. So I was stuck in Addis Ababa for a few days. I arrived in Addis Ababa on the twenty-sixth. I remember when we were talking that I knew Siad Barre [Siyaad Barre] before he became the president or chairman of the junta. So he took over October twenty- first. I knew the guy, and there was a friend of mine, Abdirahman Aidid, who had studied in Moscow and was already a prominent leftist. I ran into him when I got to Mogadishu, and he said, “Look, Siad Barre was asking about you.” I said, “Siad Barre is asking about me?” And he said, “I’ll take you to him.” So I think after three days I saw Siad Barre, after I arrived on the twenty-sixth. I saw him on the twenty-ninth, and we talked. I’m going really into some…

AY: Yes, go ahead.

AG: But anyway, I saw him and he said, “What happened to you? You were out of the country for the last two years, so what happened to you?” I told him I was studying and that I’m planning to go back after a year. “Why isn’t this enough, what you studied?”

AY: So in other words…

AG: Stay.

AY: The head of the junta, the dictator who became the president of Somalia did not even have the idea of what a PhD or—

AG: All of these things were.

AY: All of those things—school meant or university education.

AG: Yeah. But I alerted him I had to go back, and he was actually helpful, because the end of ’70, beginning of ’71, when I wanted to leave, you need an exit visa. You can’t just travel. The immigration people wouldn’t give me the exit visa, so I went to him and asked him, “Look, I told you I need to go back.” And we talked for a while, and then he allowed me. He gave me the

8 permission to leave. So one of the reasons I wanted to just work for two years and go back is, one, to get experience, because there was no full-fledged national university then.

AY: In Somalia.

AG: In Somalia. But the Italians were helping in building something or other. I didn’t speak any Italian, so I wanted to work for two years, probably get experience of teaching and doing research work and then go back and be part of that national university. That didn’t happen. I got into other kind of stuff.

AY: So you wanted to have your foot in the academic arena. You didn’t want to have anything to do with the politics.

AG: No, no.

AY: How did that happen? Then you immediately were appointed to—was it a mayoral stage or…

AG: No. I used to teach and do research in what was SIPA [Somali Institute of Public Administration], which is a school, an institute for training civil servants.

AY: How do you spell SIPA, by the way?

AG: S-I-P-A, SIPA. Later on it became SIDAM [Somali Institute of Development Administration and Management]. Actually, I changed the name when I became head of the institute. But it’s the Somali Institute of Public Administration.

AY: Oh. Okay.

AG: And normally that is what most countries have. You go to Kenya and it’s the Kenya Institute of Administration. You go to Nigeria, you go to… These institutes were established to help in enhancing the capacity of the civil service of these newly independent countries. So I worked for the Ministry of Interior, and then joined this institute, and immediately got the scholarship. So I went back there and taught there, and was appointed as head of that institute by Siad Barre. The institute really was short programs, and mostly clerical training and short programs—seminars, workshops. So I introduced diploma courses in accounts, in local government administration, in human resources management. These are the kind of new programs I introduced, and I was appointed as the director general in March of 1973. So I went back [to Somalia] September ’72, and by March I was the director general of the institute.

And then there was the SNAY, the sugar factory. This was the biggest enterprise in the country, something like seven thousand employees, and that sugar complex contributed something like ten percent to the national budget. It was a massive place. It was nationalized, and immediately after nationalization, then production dropped. So as head of SIPA, and then the minister of labor or personnel at that time, Mohamed Burrale Ismail, and four members of the SRC [Supreme

Revolutionary Council]—the military guys—Hussein Kulmiye Afrah, Ahmed Suleiman Dafle, Ali Matan, and Abdi Warsame. And the two of us civilians.

AY: Ali Matan Hashi was it?

AG: Ali Matan Hashi. So we went to SNAY Jowhar [Jowhaar] and looked around—what’s wrong with the place—and we spent there about a month. [telephone interruption] So we spent a month there, and the military guys, of course, they wrote their own report of what was wrong with the factory and with the complex. But I prepared a report based on managing the place and what was wrong with the management. I had suggestions, and Siad Barre said—we came back and were reporting to him—and he said, “Forget about saying this is wrong, that’s wrong. Go ahead and do it. Go ahead and fix it.” So he appointed me as the CEO of the company, of the sugar complex.

AY: Based on that report.

AG: Based on that report. I wasn’t really very happy with that, although it was the biggest complex. I really was more interested, even if he wanted to give me an offer to be at the national university. I was even willing to go to Italy and study Italian for a year so at least to be able to communicate at a certain level with the Italian professors. The Somalis who were teaching there were people who were proficient in Italian. That didn’t happen. So I became head of that complex. Fortunately, we stopped the decline in production, increased production. That’s where I took Hurre to.

AY: My cousin.

AG: Your cousin. So I spent there about three years. The last year the price of sugar in the world just skyrocketed, and Siad Barre said, “Why don’t we build another factory?” So they made plans to build another factory in Juba [Jubba].

AY: And that was one of the major projects—or actually the largest project in Somalia then.

AG: It was the largest project in Somalia at that time. All of the funding—except the domestic costs, the price of land and a few things like that—everything else, the funding was from Saudi Arabia, [United Arab] Emirates, and Kuwait. Siad Barre appointed me as the chairman of the technical committee. From there on I spent going back and forth to SNAY and this work in Mogadishu, but also traveling overseas.

The contracts were signed actually before I was appointed as the CEO of that project. Siad Barre thought that the British were really more in tune with what’s happening in the areas he was interested in. The Emirates and Saudi Arabia—he thought especially the Emirates the British still had a very strong foothold—East Africa, Kenya. And he thought probably the only way he can accommodate the British were to give them contracts. There was this guy, Abdullahi Oomar, the late Abdullahi Oomar, he lived in the UK. And there was somebody, a businessman distantly related to Siad Barre, from Kismayo, Bashir—I will remember his name. So Bashir was in Mogadishu. He and Abdullahi Oomar are the ones who really got this company, British

10 company, Bookers, and signed the contracts without even—we didn’t have a feasibility study, we didn’t even know where we were going to plant the sugar. But he thought this is a way of accommodating the British—in his infinite wisdom.

AY: In his ways of just exactly wasting the natural resources.

AG: In a way misjudging. I mean, he wanted this to be done, but instead of a standard—it’s not your money you are being handed. We are enormous difficulty convincing the Saudi and the Emirates funds. They said, “Why didn’t you have a tender, international tender?” There are any number of companies that build sugar projects. Anyway, Siad Barre had his own way. He talked to Sheikh Zayid, he talked to the Saudis, so they waived that. But then you really had no leverage vis-à-vis the contractors. It was tough. In those days inflation was extremely, very high, and there is an escalation clause in the contract that if you don’t pay them within a month they charge you an interest rate, which in some ways was even more than the cost of the things they wanted. So, at any rate, fortunately that project we commissioned, within budget, actually, and ahead of schedule.

I was traveling. I was actually out of the country in Dubai when I was told in, I think it was August or whatever—September of 1979. I’d landed at the airport, Mogadishu, and somebody said, “Congratulations.” I said, “What have I done?” And they said, “You are a member of parliament.” “Oh.”

AY: I don’t even have a choice.

AG: Yeah, no. The powers that be will appoint you and you don’t run for this. So. And in about a month and a half—again, I was out of the country, believe me—and the same thing happened. “Congratulations.” “What?” “You are the minister of industry.”

AY: [chuckles] So all you have to just do, whenever you want to be promoted, you have to go outside of the country.

AG: So you are out, and it’s a pleasant surprise. At any rate, I think that is when I realized the kind of hanky-panky what was going on in the country. If you are a civil servant—and especially what I was doing was mostly outside of Mogadishu, so I didn’t have a very good understanding of how the country has really—it’s after the war in Ethiopia. There is moving from being an ally and close ally of the Soviet Union to the Western world, dealing with whole new bodies like the IMF [International Monetary Fund], the World Bank, these funds. So it’s a different world. And how when you are the number one, supremo, el Supremo, and you want to decide on all of these things—and Siad Barre never did this kind of before. He used to go to Moscow. He would be meeting the top dog, whether it’s the secretary general or president of the country. They will talk, they would agree on something, and this is carried out. But there is a mission from the IMF, there is a mission from the World Bank, there is the USAID. Or the British or something from the French or whatever. So it really became very complicated, and that opened doors for…

AY: For conflict.

AG: For conflict and conflict of interest. But at the same time trying to work within a system which really is not geared to be effective. The capacity to run with the ball, so to speak, was limited.

AY: So you collided.

AG: Yeah. So there were also the formation of already Abdullahi Yusuf had this armed opposition group operating out of Addis Ababa, and the SNM [Somali National Movement] was formed. And I realized there and then that there’s going to be a day of reckoning. There would be a collective responsibility. You can’t later on say, “I didn’t know about this.” Even if you are not taken to some kind of court. But in your conscience, you are part of this. And that’s where we decided—a group of people, mostly youngish, who were in the cabinet—to leave the country. To defect.

AY: So how many of you and what…

AG: I think probably at least about ten, twelve were the initially people who decided. You don’t talk about these—bloody dangerous talk about these kinds of issues. So the few people you trust. And our team probably were mostly from the north and what is now Puntland. These were the two main groups.

AY: Were there also oppositions—the rebel groups were also based on those particular regions.

AG: That’s true. What is now Puntland, that was the SSDF [Somali Salvation Democratic Front], and then the SNM were in the north. And these are the issues we talked to Siad Barre about. “Look, we need fundamental changes in this,” in terms of reforms, not only the economic and technical areas, but also we have these armed groups. And the military was no longer relying on the Soviet Union which just used to give them carte blanche. I mean, believe you me, at times the Somali military, and especially Mohamed Ali Samatar, has developed a relationship with the Soviets where all of a sudden they realize there isn’t enough gasoline in the country, so they will talk to the embassy and some tanker, Russian tanker, out there in the Indian Ocean will—

AY: Floating in the Indian Ocean?

AG: Yeah. They’ll say, “Come.” They’ll be called, and the military will be using them. After the war, when Somalia changed sides and the American Congress was not eager to help, the army, which was badly beaten during the Ogaden War, was in shambles. No funding. Even their uniforms—and Russians were not being—government was hard-put to supply. So there is also these internal problems. There was an attempted coup. Remember in 1978?

AY: In ’78, ’79?

AG: It was in ’78.

AY: Seventy-eight.

AG: April ’78. And there were always fears of other coups. So at any rate, we talked to Siad Barre and at times he appeared to go along with the advice we were giving him. “Why don’t you be the—if you want president or if you relish the powers of the party—be secretary general of the party. But leave the administration to somebody else.” And at that time, really, all of us agreed that Siilaanyo should be an effective prime minister. At any rate, we decided to leave the country when we realized that—see, we got wind that he is going to put us in jail. So we left a good at least…

AY: Number of you.

AG: A number of us decided to leave, but the only two who left were Siilaanyo and I. The others…

AY: Yes, I remember that, actually. I was getting to high school, so I remember that the whole media—or whether you call the whole media then, because we relied on BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation]—I was just listening to the BBC. That’s actually another issue. But you came to the United States, went back to Syracuse.

AG: No, I didn’t go to Syracuse. Actually, I was in Somalia, still, before I decided to leave, and technical teams were coming to Somalia from the World Bank and from the IMF. And I met fellows who were teaching at Harvard.

AY: In Somalia.

AG: While I was still in Somalia. And we talked, and I was a member of the people who were negotiating with them. I communicated with them and said, “Look, my life is—I feel a bit worried, and I want to leave the country.” So they offered me this position—Harvard did— before I even left. And they gave me a green card, and that’s how I stayed on. I stayed at what was the Center for International Affairs Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Later on the name has been changed. And I was there from 1982 to 1988. I’m really grateful they gave me the green card. That’s where I mostly dealt with regional conflicts, because of the war we had with Ethiopia. So I spent a good bit of time on regional conflicts, not only in Somalia, Ethiopia, but the Middle East. Where I spent the most time, though, was southern Africa. Those were still apartheid days. So I used to go twice a year to Arusha, Tanzania, where there was a conference organized by the UN [United Nations], the Ford Foundation Institute in New York—funded by the UN and the Ford Foundation. And I used to write papers on the issue of sanctions—how the sanctions were affecting South Africa itself, but also how it was affecting the independent African countries, like Mozambique, Botswana, Zambia, Angola. Mozambique and Angola, these are the two places that really suffered most. So that’s what I did, although I was operating out of Harvard. That was my base, but I dealt with regional conflicts. I used to travel quite extensively to Arusha and sub-Saharan Africa, but also to the Middle East, because, again, if you are in regional conflicts, how can you avoid the Palestinian-Israeli conflicts? So that’s what I did. And then in ’89, my alma mater, Syracuse, offered me a position, and I moved to Syracuse and taught there and was there from ’89 to ’97.

AY: Okay. So I think just because of the Minnesota Historical Society, they want us to also focus in Minnesota, and we don’t have that much time left. But, on the other hand, I am just going to speed up the process a bit. You became a prime minister, at one point, of Somalia. Finally, you came to Minnesota. How did you end up in Minnesota, by the way?

AG: I went from Syracuse. I established a telecom company in the Emirates, because when the Somali state collapsed, the Somali state owned the telephones and telecoms, so there was nothing. I got together with Dahabshiil and somebody from Djibouti called Abdourahman Booreh, and we formed a holding company and established a telephone system in about twelve towns, most of them in the north, but others in what’s now Puntland. We wanted to really establish in the regions and then compete, because there were telephone companies in Mogadishu, in Hargeisa [Hargeysa], and in Bosaso. Our strategy was to establish ourselves in all the regions, and then not only for foreign telephone region externally and receiving calls from outside, but the domestic calls from the regions to these urban areas. At any rate, I did that.

Then there was a national reconciliation meeting in Djibouti. I went there representing the Somali Business Council in Dubai, not thinking of anything to do in the political side of things. Things happened. I ended up in that conference. A parliament was formed, the president was elected. I ran for president, and the three top vote-getters were Abdirahman Abdullahi Ahmed Adow, Abdiqasim Salad Hassan, and myself. So Abdiqasim and I joined forces. He was elected president and I became prime minister. Things didn’t work out, and I decided not to go back to my business, but to come back to the US and teach. And I was planning to go back to Syracuse, but Mariam’s family was here.

AY: Mariam is your wife?

AG: My wife.

AY: And you have children.

AG: And my children were already in Owatonna, so I joined them. And I was still trying to go back and teach at Syracuse, but a friend of ours said, “Why don’t you check with the University of Minnesota?” I did, so they offered me this job, to teach at the Humphrey Institute. So I came here. I started teaching. I think we moved to Minneapolis on the second of September 2002, and I started teaching my classes on the third of September. We moved to this house on the second of September.

AY: Which is in the suburbs of the city called…

AG: Shoreview.

AY: Shoreview. [chuckles] To me it’s a mansion, but someone who came from all the way a nomadic life to a mansion in Shoreview—how did that happen?

AG: Well, it’s again this offer, this great opportunity I got to teach at the University of Minnesota. We decided, instead of renting, to buy a house. And in America, when you say you

14 are buying a house, probably at the most you pay a little down payment. The house actually belongs to a bank, and all you do is what would have otherwise been rent you pay as mortgage.

AY: I don’t think you should say that out loud. In America it is still a dream to have a house, right?

AG: You organize, and this is something this country has led the way in giving opportunity to its citizens to facilitate. For the farmers, what the US has done for the farmers—I mean, all of these land grant universities—the University of Minnesota started as a land grant. It was supposed to provide the services to the agricultural community, the farmers. You do the research in terms of the different products, whether it’s corn—corn which probably has a high yield, is resistant to the local diseases, is hardy in terms of probably the cold spells even during the summer, and in terms of fertilizers, herbicides. So this is the land grant university. And I think in other areas, the whole business of the interstate roads—I mean, Detroit and the motor company would not have been able to do a thing were it not for the federal government. Eisenhower started these super highways, so you need cars. And I think the same thing in terms of housing. The government— Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac—these provide the wherewithal in terms of funding. As you would know only too well, there have been some problems. But this is really what made this country, to create a middle class, to create stability, to create people having a sense of ownership.

AY: I think there is a major argument against that right now. Some politicians are not in the belief of that philosophy at all.

AG: Well, there have been mistakes. I mean, as you go on, this is not the work of God, this is the work of man, so mistakes have been committed. The financial markets have really collapsed, 2008 to 2009, and the bulk of it goes back to the poor management of this mortgage. I mean, people were supposed to be given loans, people who are able to—

AY: Able to pay.

AG: To pay. But the banks got out ahead of the game, and people who were not able to—so I think they were greedy, the banks, and the people who were financing the real estate. At any rate, thanks for the compliment. This is a modest house in the shores, beautiful lakes in Shoreview. This is where our kids grew up, so we have been here now for eleven, almost twelve years.

AY: But the point that I was just trying to drive home is just that exactly, how Somali are your kids? What is the difference that you see, the stark difference between you and your kids, your children? How many are there?

AG: We have, I have four kids. One grown-up girl who is already working.

AY: Graduated from…

AG: The University of Virginia, she graduated, and she works for a hedge fund in Washington. Actually, the hedge fund is owned by Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state. But here,

Mariam and I have three kids. The oldest kid, Warsame, is the one who graduated from Carleton in Northfield.

AY: Which is aka [also known as] the Ivy League of the Middle West.

AG: That’s what I hear. Fortunately, Warsame graduated from there and is just writing his master’s thesis. He is attending New York University and started work January twentieth in Washington, DC. He works for a company that does analysis for some government agencies, but also for private firms. Country risk analysis. If a private firm wants to invest in Uganda, they need information and an analysis, and that is what the company Warsame is working with is doing, that work. He is really delighted, too. This is his first job. So he’s there. Waleed and Aisha are still here and attending college here. Mariam and I are really grateful to God—it’s not easy raising kids in this country, even for Americans. It’s a blessing to have kids in this country, but they take a lot of things for granted. In my case, and I am sure in your case, you don’t assume and you don’t take for granted the blessings that we had back home, even the opportunity to attend school. Here you attend school and it’s all free, but the kids don’t appreciate that. And there are lots of distractions in this country. The young Somalis who came from refugee camps and attended schools, from what I hear, that generation has done very well, because they appreciate the education. It’s the ones who were born here who really don’t appreciate at least this opportunity they are being given. And, yes, they are Somalis, ethnic Somalis, but like all the different waves of immigrants who have come here—whether they are Norwegians, whether they are Hmong, whether they are Latinos in a place like Minnesota—all of them struggled with how best to integrate, how best to become part of the society in Minnesota and in America.

In our case, Mariam and I, both of us studied in this country. Mariam has two master’s degrees she got from here, one in California and one in Syracuse. But even for us it has been tough, working with schools and with teachers. It’s more interactive. Where we come from the parents send their kids to school, and the deal is between the kids and the teachers. You don’t get involved in homework. You don’t get involved in curriculum and interacting with the administrations of the schools, or help the kids in terms of what they’re doing in the school. And there are all of these other distractions that go on. We’re fortunate we live here and there is at least a modicum, at least a more managed, what’s going on for the kids. But you have kids who are in Cedar and Riverside in these high-rise buildings, and it’s a challenge for parents or single mothers who don’t speak English, who really don’t have a clue how best to work with the schools, and we realize there are these difficulties. Fortunately we didn’t have those kind of difficulties. But still, we’re really lucky that the kids are finished in schools and now are in universities. But when it comes to how much Somali do they speak, what distinguishes them as Somalis, I think probably biologically they are, but…

AY: [chuckles] Any other way.

AG: Any other way they are no different than American kids. They are American kids.

AY: Ali, I think we are running out of time. You have another appointment and this concludes this version of our interview. Thank you very much. I appreciate the time that you’ve taken from your busy schedule.

AG: Well, thank you very much, Ahmed. One comment. If you have spent ten, twelve years in Minnesota and you survived the winters, you can’t complain. I think if there is something that is a bit difficult to adjust to, it’s the brutal cold winters here. I just came back from Somalia and Kenya, and although I hear this is a year which really is even worse than most of what we have seen, it’s enormously difficult, really, to adjust. Other than that, we’re really happy to be here. It has been a pleasure, and we would very much like to sink roots here and stay on for the rest of our lives.

AY: Thank you very much. I think that’s what Minnesota would like to appreciate of all of us. At least we could say that.