'The lesson is to be hopeful': Ilhan Omar's journey from Somali refugee to US Congress
Monday November 12, 2018
The Democrat politician takes a selfie with supporters. Photograph: Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images
The interviews were conducted by telephone by an experienced local journalist who is a native Somali speaker, and, while the Guardian is confident the interviewees were speaking in good faith, it is now clear these memories were erroneous.
The politician has previously spoken of her flight from Somalia, describing how militiamen prepared to attack their home in Mogadishu at midnight and had to be convinced by older female relatives to leave the family in peace.
Omar left with her family shortly after, and remembered walking through streets strewn with debris and corpses.
The Utango camp was isolated and rudimentary with limited sanitation. Omar collected firewood and water for the family, and has described how she enviously watched similar-aged children going to school in uniforms, and asking her father if she could resume her education.
They were among the first to reach the Utango camp, which had just opened. Arrivals were housed in tents or makeshift huts before the facility was closed, in about 1996.
Omar, a former community organiser and policy analyst, remembered the rough conditions. "It was isolated … in a jungle setting. There were deaths from malaria,” she said.
When Omar was 12, she and her family travelled to the US.
The Dadaab camp remains open and has grown into a sprawling complex with more than 250,000 inhabitants. Life there can be harsh, precarious and chaotic, with arrivals and departures every year.
Omar, who visited Dadaab in 2011 to help with humanitarian assistance for victims of famine in her homeland, has become a hero to many in the camp. They have adopted the politician as one of their own and insist she was once a resident. One interviewee called Omar a "daughter of Dadaab”.
The Kenyan government has made repeated attempts to close the camp. For many residents, the US refugee resettlement programme was their principal hope of a better future.
Newly arrived Somali men jostle to queue outside a food distribution centre at the Ifo refugee camp in Dadaab, near the Kenya-Somalia border. Photograph: Thomas Mukoya/Reuters
Since its creation in 1980, the scheme has led to hundreds of thousands of people from around the world being admitted to the US.
Last year, hundreds of Somali refugees in Kenya, who were days from travelling to the US to start new lives under the programme, were told they could not travel, after Donald Trump’s executive order banned migrants from seven Muslim-majority countries for three months. Since then, more stringent vetting and a review of procedures has led to a dramatic drop in refugees reaching the US.
As of 10 September, 251 Somali refugees have been resettled this year, a massive drop from the 8,300 admitted by the same point in 2016, according to Reuters.
"I talk all the time about the eight-year-old me and all the eight-year-olds who are living in their camps,” Omar said. "I hope my victory gives them hope.”
'The lesson is to be hopeful': Ilhan Omar's journey from Somali refugee to US Congress
Omar fled the civil war in Somalia with her family in 1991 and spent four years in the Utango camp, near the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa, before arriving in the US with her six brothers and sisters under a resettlement programme. "I would