globeandmail.com
TYLER STIEM
Special to The Globe and Mail
Friday, May 18, 2007
When Aden Ismail flies home to Somaliland, a breakaway republic in northern Somalia, the low whine of the plane's engines triggers flashbacks to the dark months before he fled to Toronto 18 years ago. As the plane descends into the capital, Hargeisa, he feels himself back in the carnage of the Somali civil war.
“There is nothing so terrifying as the sound of a warplane chasing you,” Dr. Ismail says, recalling his time as a refugee, in 1988, camped out in the hilly scrubland north of Hargeisa.
He pauses to examine a tunic hanging in a shop doorway near Rexdale Avenue and Martin Grove Road, fingering the curlicues of gold thread. “The planes bombed us during the day, so we would work on patients from dusk until dawn. Then we all hid in the forest.”
We're strolling through Suuqa Ceel-Gaab, a bazaar in northwest Toronto. Housed in a brick warehouse, it's a mix of Somali- and Somalilander-run shops arranged in an orderly, glassed-in grid: a New World take on an Old World institution. Many refugees from Somaliland's long war of secession have resettled in Scarborough, where they have established a tight-knit diaspora community, and here in Rexdale, where their businesses attract the custom of the larger Somali community.
A pleasant afternoon languor hangs over the bazaar. Women wearing direh – flowing, brightly patterned dresses and hijabs – congregate around shop counters, gossiping. A few thin men loiter near the entrance, chatting. The plaintive voice of a Somali balladeer drifts on knotty melodies from the music shop, and at the back a shabby, fluorescent-lit money transfer kiosk sits empty next to a snack bar.
You wouldn't know it from the low profile Somalilanders keep – politics takes a back seat to commerce in places like this – but many are engaged in nation building back home. Torontonians' influence can be felt from the dusty villages along the Gulf of Aden to the rebuilt capital of this unofficial country.
Toronto Somalilanders sit in Somaliland's parliament, support its struggling economy, lobby the Canadian government for recognition and aid, and givelegal and medical expertise.
Jim Karygiannis, MP for Scarborough-Agincourt and a supporter of Somaliland independence, describes them as “quiet but tireless advocates for their cause.”
This weekend, they will raise their voices in celebration of Somaliland's secession from Somalia 16 years ago. On Saturday they will launch a postcard campaign targeting Mr. Karygiannis's colleagues in Ottawa, and on Victoria Day they will rally at Queen's Park.
As the community prepares to celebrate the anniversary of Somaliland's secession from Somalia, Dr. Ismail, a large, gentle man in his mid-50s, is preparing to spend the summer in Hargeisa. He and his colleague, fellow psychiatrist Abdishakar Jowhar, take turns going back to their homeland to help. They train doctors, traditional healers, even whole communities to treat post-traumatic stress disorder – a legacy of the war that, in 1991, effectively divided Somalia in two – as well as other forms of mental illness.
Like most development projects, Dr. Ismail's was inspired by personal experience. As he and his wife started their new life in one of the social housing complexes on Lawrence Avenue East, thousands of kilometres from the conflict, they struggled with post-traumatic stress. The sound of a plane passing overhead could paralyze them with fear even months after they arrived in Scarborough with their infant son.
“At least half of the population was touched by PTSD in some way, myself included. On some level I was thinking about that,” Dr. Ismail says of his decision to abandon obstetrics, and train as a psychiatrist when he came to Canada.
“Ismail was there when [former Somali dictator Mohammed] Siad Barre's forces attacked,” says Dr. Jowhar, who immigrated to Canada, before the war, settling in Edmonton and later Toronto. “He knows how people were affected because he was affected himself.”
Somaliland extricated itself from the war in 1991, but not before Mr. Barre's forces had destroyed much of the region's infrastructure and displaced two-thirds of the population.
In Canada, the community in Scarborough struggled to get on its feet. “In the early days, people had to look after their immediate families,” Ifrah Osman, an organizer for the independence-day rally and postcard campaign, says over coffee. “My parents followed what was happening back home, but their focus was on survival – finding jobs, enrolling us in school, adjusting to a new culture.”
By the late nineties, the former refugees had created homes for themselves in Canada, found jobs, watched their children grow up straddling two cultures. Somaliland, a fledgling democracy, ineligible for foreign aid, began to rebuild itself on a shoestring.
The diaspora in Canada had always supported their relations back home, sending what money they could, but then people started trickling back to Somaliland. They would go for a holiday, their first since the war broke out, and return to Toronto inspired by the modest but meaningful changes they saw taking place.
“Every time I go, I see progress,” Ms. Osman, 33, says. She visited Hargeisa in 1997 and has been back every two or three years since. “Now, there's a real sense of hope and purpose.”
On previous trips she and her friends had seen what a few local women were doing to help mentally ill patients, supplying them with blankets, slippers, soap and toothbrushes, and felt compelled to help. So last last December, she and her friends organized a fundraiser in Scarborough – an evening of African dance. On a subsequent trip to Somaliland, she was able to deliver $8,000 to the mental-health wing of the Hargeisa Hospital and to a school for deaf children.
In addition to helping the nation rebuild, Somalilanders here aren't afraid to adopt an adversarial role when they feel the interests of the country are at stake. Last year, for example, when Somaliland's president, Dahir Riyale Kahin, imprisoned journalists for publishing unflattering articles, Somalilanders in Toronto and around the world rallied behind the journalists, and they were eventually freed.
Dr. Jowhar and two colleagues in Britain and Italy have since established Article 32, a global organization that promotes press freedom in Somaliland. This summer, the Toronto chapter will send two law students on a tour of Somaliland's towns and villages.
The lawyers-in-training will engage people in debates about the importance of freedom of expression, a relatively novel concept. In a culture that places a premium on eloquence and verbal dexterity, they will have their work cut out for them. But the doctors see promise in the young.
“The generation that grew up here in Canada, they don't have the same history as the older generations,” Dr. Ismail says.
“They can bring fresh insights to the old problems. The rebuilding has just begun. We still have a lot of work to do.”
Source; The Globle and Mail, May 18, 2007