Dubious Diplomacy

In the little grocery store he runs next to a Pizza Time on 12th Avenue East, Koshin Mohamed gets worked up as he describes his efforts to prod U.S. officials into supporting the tenuous new government in his native Somalia. Mohamed has just returned from Washington, D.C., a place he goes so often that his cell phone number has a 202 area code. There, he gave State Department officials a $316 million aid proposal to help jump-start Somalia's newly formed Transitional Federal Government, of which he says he's an official representative. The three-page request includes funding for such things as 45,000 police, military, and security officers, as well as 500 employees in the executive and judicial branches.

"It just gives me a stomachache," says the 28-year-old Mohamed, who wears jeans and a blue-and-white-striped turtleneck, and whose youthful face is framed by a well-trimmed beard. He acknowledges that the U.S. has encouraged Somalia's new government, which in late December seized the capital, Mogadishu, from an Islamic coalition that has been accused of links to Al Qaeda. But Mohamed says the U.S. has not backed up its words with money: "If the [Somali] government doesn't provide services and build the police and security forces right away, it's going to lose respect in a heartbeat," he says.

As he talks, sitting in front of a block of computers that he rents out by the minute, Mohamed is periodically interrupted by customers, who browse the shelves of couscous and curry powder and an ice-cream freezer packed with halal meat. It is an odd double life that he appears to lead. Last month, the Discovery Institute, a conservative local think tank with a budding foreign policy division, held a press conference for Mohamed at which it announced that the Transitional Federal Government had chosen the fresh-faced small businessman as its ambassador to the U.S.—or, rather, its "ambassador designate," since the U.S. does not as yet officially recognize the Somali government. Bruce Chapman, the Discovery Institute's director, says he was introduced to Mohamed through former U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton, one of several influential advisers the young man has become acquainted with.

While the local press dutifully reported Mohamed's appointment as fact, others were immediately skeptical. David Shinn, a former senior State Department official and ambassador to Ethiopia who now teaches African affairs at George Washington University, says that there's a standard diplomatic protocol that doesn't jibe with Mohamed's peculiar appointment. "Certainly, the Transitional Federal Government is going to have its primary representatives in Washington and New York," says Shinn. In fact, he says he's met current TFG officials who live in those cities.

"What this man has been doing is bouncing around from person to person trying to find a way into this building," says a State Department official in a position to know Mohamed's status, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "This man has no bona fides. He's presenting himself with all sorts of different titles he doesn't have."

As for the proposed aid request Mohamed says he submitted, the official says: "It would not be considered an official document. We deal with the government ofSomalia through our embassy in Nairobi."

Yet even the official concedes that Mohamed's lack of official standing, in the State Department's eyes, does not mean he has no relationship with the Somali government. "He probably knows people," the official says. "He may know the president."

Somalia is a country divided alongregionally based clan lines, so it is significant when Mohamed says his paternal grandfather hailed from the same northern province, Puntland, as current Somali (and former Puntland) President Abdullahi Yusuf. Both families belong to the Darood clan, and because of this, Mohamed refers to Yusuf as "uncle."

According to Mohamed, his grandfather cut an unusual figure in Puntland: Named Mohamed Ilmi Jama, he was a wealthy cattle farmer who developed an interest in women's rights, believing that true Islam afforded women more liberties than did Somalia's Muslim culture. Mohamed's father, Abdiaziz Mohamed, was purely a businessman, Mohamed says. Based in Mogadishu, he built a trade around importing and exporting. He was an early admirer, however, of now-President Yusuf, then a dissident leader who had defected from the army of dictator Siad Barre. "My father used to talk about him," Mohamed says, referring to Yusuf. "He used to say this guy is our future."

Mohamed says he himself didn't think much about Yusuf until later in life. In 1991, amidst warlord-driven chaos, Mohamed's father sent him and his siblings out of the country. Mohamed stayed with relatives in Africa and the Middle East until 1997, when he ventured to Seattle to live with an older brother. Here, he was in good company: The Seattle-area Somali community is believed to be the third largest in the U.S., after those in the Minneapolis and Columbus, Ohio, vicinities. Local activists estimate that about 30,000 Somalians live here, their presence most visible in the long-skirted, veiled women commonly seen on the streets in Rainier Valley, South King County, and other hot spots.