Mild-mannered Clerk Turns Into A Warlord

Eric Ellis, Los Angeles

05/13/1998

It is enlightening, and perhaps even disturbing, that for a place with such a penetrating influence on international popular culture, Los Angeles often seems to know remarkably little about the outside world.

It is evident in The Los Angeles Times, paraded as one of the world's great newspapers but delivered not with the front page demanding attention, but with the cartoons and the Life and Style wrap-around first enticing readers.

Moving around a sprawling melting pot that is home to every conceivable culture all desperately trying to be American, this correspondent has often been compelled to explain to people whose salaries and jobs suggest they should know better that "cappuccino" is not an American idea but an Italian one.

It has also amused some locals to learn that Australians speak English and that Spanish was originally spoken in Spain and not just by their gardener.

But in this ever-sunny paradise of parochialism, one place Angelenos seem particularly well- informed about is Somalia.

The obvious reason might seem because presidents Bush and later Clinton made such a hash of US peace-keeping efforts in the war- and famine-torn East African nation, portrayed by the shocking images of naked Marines dragged around the capital Mogadishu.

But a more accurate reason local media have honed in on Somalia is that the new president is a 36-year-old former municipal clerk and professional student from the middle-class LA suburb of West Covina.

According to his former colleagues at West Covina City's engineering department, one day Hussein Mohamed announced he was going to some place called Somalia to get married and the next thing they knew he popped up on CNN as the president.

West Covina official and Hussein's former boss, Harry Thomas, was vacantly watching a news bulletin in August, which featured an item about the sudden death of demonised Somali warlord, Mohamed Farah Aidid.

The image of the replacement flashed on the screen. It was Hussein, Harry's office underling whom he thought was on his honeymoon.

He called out to his wife the excited way ordinary people do when they think they've caught out something on the box. Now, Harry's wife's name is not Martha but it may as well have been. "Hey, they've got the wrong guy! They're showing a picture of Hussein."

But the TV news wasn't wrong.

Hussein's father was the recently deceased warlord Aidid, the man who humiliated US and UN forces with an expensive four-year run around Pentagon policy.

It was Hussein's dad who authorised the dragging of the dead Marines that so horrified Middle America. And it was Hussein's dad who'd just died.

How Hussein got to be president of Somalia is a typical American story about seizing opportunities, or perhaps having them thrust upon you, albeit with an unusual take on the oft-quoted democratic dictum that anyone can be president.

Born in Somalia in 1962, Hussein migrated to the US with his mum after she separated from her then businessman husband in the mid-1970s.

He went to Covina High and later the polytechnic at Pomona, way out in LA's eastern sprawl where he began a civil engineering degree.

In 1987, he joined the US Marine Reserves, ostensibly to better qualify for financial benefits to continue his studies.

Students and colleagues don't remember him as being particularly bright, or passionate about his homeland.

Los Angeles Magazine says he was best known for being "almost excruciatingly polite". Thomas recalled that Hussein was "the only one [in the office] that called me sir".

As a reservist, Hussein was summoned to boot camp in North Carolina in 1991 for preparation for the Gulf War but never went. The following year he became a US citizen and voted Republican.

While Hussein was cementing himself into Middle America with barely an interest in his homeland, the Bush Administration belatedly called itself to action in Somalia.

Someone, somewhere, remembered that Hussein spoke Somali and he joined the Marine Corps as an interpreter in Mogadishu. He served for just a month and this is where the story gets a little hazy.

A Marine spokesman claims the corps knew he was the son of the warlord Aidid BEFORE he arrived in Somalia and that while he was in Mogadishu his tasks were limited to translating to menial Somalis to "clean up the goat shit".

Hussein claims he got friendly with one of the most-senior ranked Marine generals and did a lot of liaison behind the scenes. Whatever the reality, Hussein was back in California at the local council and completing his degree part-time, his office colleagues none the wiser.

In July 1995, he told his colleagues at the council he was going on a short leave to get married. He never returned and the next they saw of him was on the evening news, appointed President of Somalia and heir to his father's leadership of the country's most bloodthirsty faction.

His former colleagues at West Covina Council worry about him, and whether the next they hear of him is him taking a bullet in strife.

"We're worried that he's in over his head," said one. "I just can't imagine him as a warlord."