Encino Resident Prepares for an Exile’s Return to Somalia : Reconstruction: Former diplomat Omar Mohallim spent years in prison as an enemy of the dictatorship. Today, he flies back to provide aid.

Each day he awakened in a prison cell in Somalia, Omar Mohallim wondered if this would be the day he would die.

The repressive government of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre had confiscated his land, taken his money and accused him of betraying the state in 1969, all without filing formal charges or presenting evidence, he recalled this week.

“With this kind of regime you don’t ask the charges,” said Mohallim, who became the first Somalian ambassador to the United States in 1960. “They can invent anything. Once you fall out of graces with the regime, your days are numbered.”

When he was finally released in 1975, Mohallim and his family left the country and spent the next 14 years in self-imposed exile.

But the 68-year-old former ambassador, who has been living quietly in Encino the past four months, plans to board a plane today to help rebuild his chaotic homeland--now partially occupied by U.S. and other United Nations military forces. He realizes, however, that Somalia is even more dangerous and devastated than when he left 15 years ago.

He hopes to join with fellow veterans of the political opposition to form a force to combat Somalia’s problems or help in any way he can.

“It’s a national responsibility,” Mohallim said, explaining his reasons for returning despite the danger. “If I could just contribute one seed to the flourishing of Somalia, my life has been worth living.”

Mohallim’s decision to return is significant, not only on a personal level, but because journeys such as his may ultimately help determine whether the country is rebuilt or remains in chaos, said Edward A. Alpers, an African history instructor at UCLA.

“What this individual is doing is a courageous act,” Alpers said.

“There’s an impressive Somalia intelligentsia, and most of them are outside of the country. They’re in exile in the United States, in Canada, Italy, the U.K. That’s a big problem. There’s going to have to be a great many more individuals going back because the country needs them.”

Mohallim’s personal story chronicles the history of the nation itself, from colonial rule to democracy to dictatorship and, finally, anarchy.

In the early 1960s, as ambassador to the United States, Mohallim helped usher in a new chapter in African history, a time of renewed pride and unabashed hopefulness.

One by one, beginning with Ghana in 1957, African nations were winning independence from colonial rulers. Somalia, like other nations, reveled in its newfound freedom.

“People were euphoric,” he recalled. “They were very, very happy--like independence would bring miracles.”

During the administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, Mohallim was the voice of his people in America.

Among all his interactions with diplomats in Washington, Mohallim was most struck by Kennedy, he said, and his “special gift” of ingratiating himself with those he met.

“He made you feel like you were as important as the Pope,” Mohallim said. “After him, I met many heads of state, but Kennedy was special.”

During his tenure in Washington in the ‘60s, “discrimination was still rife” and black ambassadors fared no better than blacks in general when it came to Jim Crow laws and other discriminatory practices, he said.

“You couldn’t go to certain quarters and rent a house,” Mohallim said, and an attempt to get a haircut at a white-owned barbershop led to the State Department getting involved.

In the barbershop, “somebody suggested that it would be easier for them to cut my throat than to cut my hair,” Mohallim recalled. “They didn’t know I was an ambassador. I was a black man just like anybody else.” After the State Department complained, the shop operator apologized, Mohallim said.

Syndicated columnist and professor Chuck Stone met Mohallim during those early years and has been friends with him since.

“When I met him, I was White House correspondent for the Washington Afro-American and he was the first Somalian ambassador to the U.S,” said Stone, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Stone and his wife, Louise, befriended Mohallim in the early ‘60s, beginning a relationship that has lasted decades. The two have shared aspects of their culture--from pinochle to Ray Charles--a tribute, Stone said, “to the universality of negritude.”

“One night we were playing Ray Charles and Omar said, ‘Who’s this?’ ” Stone recalled. After listening to the soulful strains for a while, Mohallim proclaimed in his Italian-Somali accent, “ ‘I like this Ray Char-les!’ ” Stone said, laughing. “ ‘He’s a real brother.’ ”

But for the next several years, Stone and Mohallim would not see or hear from each other.

A military coup in 1969 brought Siad Barre to power, marking “the beginning of the end” of freedom in Somalia, Mohallim said.

Under the dictator, there were arbitrary arrests and a controlled press. Foreign connections suddenly became serious liabilities. Because of Mohallim’s friendships with Americans and Italians and his businesses interests, the government accused him of being a spy and “selling the country” to foreign interests.

For six years he sat in solitary confinement with only a copy of the Koran, uncertain of his sentence and his future. “The fact of waiting is unbearable,” Mohallim said. “You want to say, ‘Please come and shoot me the next day.’ ”

When he was released in 1975, Mohallim left Somalia and spent the next several years in Yemen and the United Arab Emirates, but he was not alone in his decision to leave.

Many of the nation’s professionals left, because “if they stayed they probably would have been killed,” said Alpers, the African history professor. “The most severe sort of brain drain and exodus began in the late 80s . . . as Siad Barre’s regime became more paranoid.”

Shortly after Siad Barre’s regime was toppled in 1991, Mohallim returned to his country. But the Somalia he saw was very different than the euphoric, young nation of the ‘60s.

“It is very sad for somebody who could see the country growing,” Mohallim said. “So many of the people you knew are killed, dead, fled the country. A country that was flourishing is eaten up by cancer, just emaciated.”

Mohallim participated in an attempt to form an accord between several factional leaders, but that alliance was short-lived.

“The glue that kept us together apparently was the hate of the regime,” he said. As soon as Barre was toppled, “that love melted like butter in a very hot frying pan,” he said.

“In 20 months, we did worse than the dictator had done in 21 years,” he said.

This time, Mohallim headed to the United States, where he has attempted to win public support for aid to Somalia.

“I came here because I realize our salvation is in the U.S., the United Nations, the White House,” said Mohallim, who strongly supports the current U.S. intervention in Somalia.

Mohallim has spent his time here with his family, writing letters to members of Congress and other officials, speaking at universities and writing about the situation in Somalia.

He and his wife, Saca Abdille, chose to live in Encino because two sons and a daughter live there and because of the warm weather in Southern California.

“I’m from the Equator,” Mohallim said with a laugh.

His wife will remain in Encino with the children for the time being. They have been supporting themselves on money they earned in Yemen, he said.

A shadow of uncertainty shrouds his return to Somalia. With the nation torn by fighting between heavily armed clans, Mohallim does not know what conditions he will face when he arrives.

“In a country like ours, there is always an element of danger,” he said.

What he is certain of, however, is his obligation to have a part in the rebuilding process at this crucial juncture in Somalia’s history.

“Foreigners can only do so much,” he said. “It has also to be the nationals.”

Mohallim said he does not aspire to political office, but he hopes his age, his former position in the country and his absence during the years of corruption and violence will grant him the stature to exert a positive influence upon others.

This time, he said, he will stay “as long as my presence is justified.”