Mohammad Hassan

In Hargeysa, a 17-year-old boy with Canadian citizenship was killed by a gang of 14- to 16-year- olds in December 2001, when he failed to hand over money, and tried to protect a girlfriend. The case²⁶ tragically underlines the vulnerabilities of returning children, and aptly illustrates the sort of life children struggle with in post-conflict areas.

Muhammad Hasan lived in Canada with his parents after leaving Somaliland when he was two years old. According to his Hargeysa uncle, Abdullahi Ahmad, it was Muhammad's decision to visit Somaliland, to meet his relatives and see "his culture". "When he first came, he had an accent, he couldn't go out because he couldn't speak Somali well, and he was adjusting. But then he got some friends - mostly returning diaspora children - and they used to gather in a restaurant where he played pool and got his confidence up. He started saying to me that he didn't need to be accompanied any more and that he was now independent."

He befriended a local girl, and started to socialize with her. One evening, on the outskirts of the town, he encountered a notorious gang of 14- to 16-year-olds, who demanded he hand over his girlfriend and money. When he refused and tried to protect the girl, he was severely beaten, and later died of a head injury.

Abdullahi Ahmad, who was with Muhammad when he died, told IRIN that, while he believed that gang-related incidents happen all over the world, Muhammad was in a particularly vulnerable position. "I do think that Mohammed did endanger himself through naivety because he had grown up abroad. He failed to understand how dangerous the situation was, and didn't know how to handle it," Abdullahi told IRIN.

[Somali boy sent back to Mogadishu from Sweden]

Rough path to re-assimilation

In Mogadishu, all the returning children interviewed by IRIN, with few exceptions, expressed a burning desire to return to their adopted countries. While careful not to embarrass or annoy the adults they were with, they did not hesitate to say they were determined to find a way of going back. Many of them claimed they had been tricked into returning to the homeland, and had very similar stories about the ruses used by their relatives to get them back to Mogadishu. Most often they had been told they were going for a brief visit to get reacquainted with a family member.

Once back in the capital, the children described going through a tough readjustment process. They were taunted by other children because they did not speak the language, scorned and humiliated by teachers because they did not know the Koran, denigrated and ridiculed for their "foreign" manners and higher education level. They learned to shed the symbols of their former life - to dress down and acquire local mannerisms. They also had to develop resistance to infection and waterborne diseases.

The returning children, both at home and at school, must also get used to traditional methods of discipline, which include caning and beating. Compared to their previous experience, they must learn to live in a society without institutional and legal protection.

Teachers interviewed by IRIN said that "deported" children generally encountered a basic lack of compassion. During the process of re-assimilation, they were far more likely to encounter hostility and intolerance than guidance. "Maybe in Europe they could share their problems. Here no one cares; the problem is the country itself," said Abdirahman Maalin Muhammad, the principal of the Ablaal School of Primary and Secondary Education in south Mogadishu.

All the children interviewed by IRIN said they had been sent back to relearn their culture and religion; most seemed to have fallen victim to the culture clash between the generations of the Somali diaspora. While there are no figures on the number of "deported" children, teachers and teenagers told IRIN there were now "thousands" of child returnees in the capital alone.