February 23, 2006

By ROSETTE ROYALE
Staff Reporter

“ You come to a foreign land,” Asha Mohamed explains. “It’s totally empty.

“ They give you a tent that you have to put together, a blanket, and whatever you can put yourself to sleep on, that’s your bed. Then they give you a card, so they can give you food. You’ll get a couple bottles of water, if they have water.”

This land Mohamed describes — foreign, empty — was a refugee camp called Utanga. Located in Kenya, Mohamed, now 30, found herself living there in 1991. She was a 15-year-old Somali girl; she was escaping the civil war in her own country.

“ But in the chaos and everything…” Mohamed pauses briefly. She was separated from her parents: Mohamed was in the camp alone.

Her parents, however, had provided Mohamed with two unexpected gifts before their being rent apart: the Italian and English languages. Born into a military family, Mohamed’s parents had moved the family to Italy when she was six months old. When they returned in to Mogadishu, during Mohamed’s winter break from school, it was the first time she had ever stepped foot upon her home soil. “Then, about 25 days after I arrived in Somalia, war broke out,” she remembers.

But in the refugee camp, her ability to speak Italian and English allowed her to work with United Nations and UNICEF registering other Somalis. The Somali people, in return, provided something in exchange: stories about Somalia, the culture, the fight against colonialism (both Britain and Italy had, for a time, held Somalia in their imperialist grips), and the dictatorship that formed after independence in 1960. “Just absorbing that, for me, was a very empowering, eye-opening, and defining moment in my young life,” Mohamed recalls.

Her young life was granted another boon: Mohamed was joined with an aunt in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. Through her aunt, she was reunited with her parents.

But an education was available at the refugee camp, and her parents bid her return there, to finish school. She complied. Her return to Utanga helped opened the door to the United States.

Mohamed says that in the camp, representatives from foreign governments would entice refugees to immigrate to their countries, because, Mohamed says, each country “advertises themselves.”

“ Let’s say you are a refugee. You are told [by a U.S. representative] that if you go to my country, you would earn $4.50,” she says. “Your psyche tells you that $4.50 in [Somalia] is a lot of money.” Welfare programs, says Mohamed, were also promoted.

But a greater opportunity for Mohamed came about through some light reading: namely, the U.S. Constitution. From that quill-etched document, she latched onto declarations that women and men were equal, that everyone could enjoy free speech. These were concepts, she says, that spoke to her heart. “That’s how I was called to the American dream.”

There, she says, in the refugee camp, she became committed to social justice.

She says she convinced her parents to come to the U.S. And at 17, Mohamed ventured to a new land. What she found upon arrival, unfortunately, didn’t match what she’d heard and read. “We were told that we were foreigners” when we got here, she says.

It was 1993. Mohamed and her family had landed in San Jose. The following year, she moved to Seattle. At the time, she remembers only five Somali families in the area. But by the mid-90s, more Somalis found their way to the Emerald City, crystallizing into a community Mohamed estimates to be 25,000 – 30,000 strong. But the local Somali community soon found itself beset with worries, the mass of which she credits to one seminal event: “9/11.” Since then, Mohamed says Somalis have been relentlessly targeted. She cites numerous instances.

In November of 2001, federal agents cracked down on Somali markets’ use of hawaala, a Somali system of money transfer that Mohamed says is cheaper and more accessible to the community than Western Union. In early 2002, the Dept. of Agriculture barred three Somali-run markets from accepting food stamps. In July, the decision was reversed. In November 2002, five local Somalis were detained by the then-INS, with the threat of deportation. (INS is now called ICE, for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.) A federal court ruling protected those local Somalis, and some 2,700 others in the U.S., from deportation until 2003. “So I looked at this and I became very involved in immigration” and community organizing, Mohamed says.

And now the Somali community faces another immigration battle. Abrahim Sheikh Mohamed, an imam at a Rainier Valley mosque, has been detained since mid-November on an immigration violation. A bond hearing for Sheikh Abrahim, as he is referred to in the community, came to a close last week. An attorney for the imam says legal briefs are due Feb. 25, with a ruling to be handed down some time after that.

In Mohamed’s view, the targeting of the imam, whom she knows personally, is simply one more example of the anti-Muslim sentiment stoked after 9/11. The alleged evidence against him, she says, is hearsay. “He has done nothing but to promote his culture, to serve his religion,” Mohamed asserts.

Such incidents have created a climate of fear, she says, one that keeps many Somalis, already hemmed in by language barriers, silent. But Mohamed says she will not and cannot be one of the silent people. Her claim gained veracity at a Feb. 9 rally for Sheikh Abrahim, where Mohamed gave an impassioned plea for justice, reminding listeners that fear was what initially drove Somali people to the United States.

Now, Mohamed says, she sees a similar fear taking hold of not only Somalis, but nearly everyone in the country. Having been granted citizenship two years ago, she says that being an American comes with a responsibility: to speak out against fear and hatred. She says she intends to continue to do just that, joining her personal beliefs with a rallying call for social justice born in the dust of a refugee camp’s foreign, empty land.

“ I refuse to be afraid while I am in America,” Mohamed declares, “and I’m challenging all Americans to stare fear in the face and overcome that. I came here for freedom, not to be afraid.” n