Accidental warlord

Think of him as the accidental warlord. In less than a year,Aden,who was born in Somalia and emigrated to the United States at age 22,has essentially built a state within a state. With money channelled from fellow clansmen living in the US and Europe,he has transformed Adado in central Somalia,which used to be haunted by bandits and warring Islamic factions,into an enclave of peace,with a functioning police force,scores of new businesses,new schools and new rules.

At times Aden has had to speak with the business end of a machine gun. His patchwhich encompasses around 5,000 square miles and a few hundred thousand people,most of them desperately poor nomads of his own Saleban clanis now one of the safest parts of this broken nation.

When I landed here,I was taken aback,in a good way, said Denise Brown,a United Nations World Food Program official who visited Adado recently. I didnt see what I usually see in Somalia: destitution,chaos,needy people.

Aden seems to have hit upon a deeper truth. People want government,he says,even in Somalia. Theyre begging for it. His experiment of building a small local government from the bottom up,relying on that one feature of Somali society that has bedeviled just about all national governance efforts to datethe clanmay have wider implications for the rest of the country,which seems to export trouble continuously,most recently in the form of pirates. Many pirates are from Adens area,and one pirate whose nom de guerre is Son of a Liar is building a huge house in Adadoright behind the police station.

Id take these guys on,but I cant right now because I dont have the resources, Aden said. Besides,if you take something away,you must replace it with something else.

What drove him to give up a small health care business,a comfy life with his wife,Shamso,and their five boys in Burnsville,Minnesota,to being president,which is what his constituents in Adado call him? In a way he didnt have a choice. He came to Adado last year for a few weeks,to help out with a killer drought. He organised water trucking and emergency food deliveries and channelled tens of thousands of dollars from middle-class Somalis in the US to nomads dying of hunger and thirst. Adados elders,impressed by this,asked him to be their leader.

With the elders firmly behind him,he was able to form a well-armed police force of several hundred fellow clansmenessentially his own private army,which has made it difficult for the extremist Islamists wreaking havoc in other parts of Somalia. From Adados dusty town square,he hands down new laws,like a recent one saying that anyone who cuts down a live tree has to pay a fine of 100 camels. Nowadays,the orderly refuge he has carved out has become a magnet for displaced families fleeing the relentless bloodletting in Mogadishu.

Aden grew up in Mogadishu,the son of a military mechanic,the firstborn of 10. He fled Somalia in 1992. He lived in Miami in a homeless shelter and eventually took a Greyhound bus to Minneapolis,home to the largest Somali community in the US. He put himself through college,parking cars and working in a factory,keeping abreast of politics back home,hoping to jump in one day.

It was hard for my wife and kids, he said. But Im doing something big here. As chairman of Himan and Heeb Administration,the province where Adado is located,he meets with elders on his living room carpet,and he has had to straddle a delicate religious line,respecting the conservative Muslim culture here without coming across as phony.