Hundreds of Somali-American Youths Held Captive in Rehab Centers; ‘They Were Torturing Me’
Immigrant parents send children back to East Africa to receive “treatment” for addiction, being gay or just acting too Westernized.
www.wsj.com
NAIROBI, Kenya—The young Americans imprisoned at Irshad Rehabilitation Centre feared the isolation room the most.
When they violated some rehab-center rule, or no rule at all, they’d be locked in the room, located in a corner of an inner courtyard that was topped by electrified wire and razor coils.
Abdirizak Aden Ahmed, a Somali-American teenager from Mechanicsburg, Pa., says he spent a dozen or so stints in isolation during the eight months he was confined against his will at Irshad, in Nairobi’s heavily Somali Eastleigh neighborhood.
Irshad and similar facilities in Somalia and Kenya market themselves to desperate diaspora Somali parents as professional treatment for young people who are drug users, alcoholics, mentally ill, gay, disobedient, sacrilegious or simply too Westernized.
Mr. Aden’s mother, frantic about his marijuana use in Pennsylvania, says she paid Irshad $600 a month for what the center promised would be effective drug-treatment, room and board.
The reality is much grimmer.
Mr. Aden says inside the darkened chamber a man named Cherad “Abubakar” Okumu, the rehab center’s staff supervisor, punched him until his face bled and doused him in urine and cold water for perceived offenses as minor as failing to memorize verses from the Quran. Mr. Okumu left the 18-year-old laid out on the isolation room’s concrete floor, undressed and shivering in a puddle for days, Mr. Aden says. “They were torturing me,” he says.
In April, Kenyan police raided Irshad and rescued Mr. Aden, five other Somali-Americans and one Somali with U.S. residency, as well as ethnic Somalis from the U.K., Canada and the Netherlands. The U.S. Embassy in Nairobi secured passports and air tickets home for the American citizens.
The group is among several hundred Somali-Americans the embassy has helped escape from for-profit rehab centers in Somalia and Kenya over the past five years.
According to former residents, an ex-Irshad employee, U.S. diplomats, Somali human-rights activists and Kenyan police, Irshad and many other so-called cultural-rehabilitation centers in East Africa are little better than private prisons where hundreds of young people raised in the U.S. and Europe are stripped of their passports and beaten into mending their ways. In some centers, residents spend their days and nights in chains.
“These cultural-rehabilitation centers are moneymakers and pop up everywhere,” says Robyn Luffman, a consular officer at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi.
Embassy officials say there are four licensed rehab centers in Kenya; police raided two others in 2017.
A spokesman for the Kenyan National Authority for the Campaign Against Alcohol and Drug Abuse, which supervises anti-addiction programs such as the one at Irshad, declined to comment on the treatment of residents at Irshad.
The vast majority of cultural-rehab centers are next door, in Somalia, operating with little or no government oversight, according to diplomats and human-rights advocates.
“Hundreds of people are in there—we don’t know the exact number,” says Guleid Ahmed Jama, a prominent Somali human-rights lawyer.
Since the 1980s, Somalia has slogged through phases of civil war, inter-clan violence, Islamist terror, famine and political strife. Many Somalis escaped to America or Europe, only to watch their Westernized offspring stray from their religion and a culture in which parents traditionally have the last word until their children marry. They sometimes find themselves unable to steer their children clear of drugs, gangs and an unfamiliar legal system, or to help them cope with mental illness.
Large numbers of diaspora Somali parents from the U.S., the U.K., Denmark, Canada and elsewhere have decided their best hope is to take their children—most in their late teens or early 20s—back to Somalia to relearn traditional ways.
Some parents deposit their children with family in the hope that Somali behavioral standards will rub off on them.
Others commit their children to private centers in Somalia and Kenya that promise to turn young people ruined by the West into respectful, drug-free Somalis.
In Minnesota, home to 79,000 Somali immigrants, the threat is so pervasive that young Somalis warn each other darkly to run for it if their parents announce a family vacation to Dubai or a visit to a dying grandmother in the old country.
“We have found in many cases the victim’s parents had no idea of the conditions and were shocked to hear of the physical, mental, and sexual abuse their children suffered,” says Larry André, the U.S. ambassador in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital. The State Department has issued a travel advisory warning that such centers operate with “inadequate or nonexistent licensing and oversight.”
Mr. Aden, who split his childhood between Mechanicsburg and St. Cloud, Minn., admits he smoked marijuana in the U.S., and he spent two years in and out of juvenile detention. “My son made some mistakes when he was young,” says his mother.
She says she worried if he didn’t straighten up before he turned 18, he’d end up with an indelible criminal record that would ruin his chances of getting a good job in the U.S.
A cousin suggested a rehab center in Mogadishu.
Early last year, she told Mr. Aden they were going to Africa to see family. They paid a visit to relatives in Kismayo, on the Indian Ocean coast of Somalia, then traveled to Mogadishu.
Mr. Aden smoked marijuana on the morning of his 17th birthday that February in Mogadishu. An older cousin picked him up, and Mr. Aden, very high and barely familiar with Somalia, let himself believe they were going to McDonald’s as a birthday treat.
Instead, the car pulled into a walled compound. Mr. Aden was taken aback when a group of men grabbed him and seized everything he had—his Crocs shoes, his lighter, his money, even the rubber band that kept his ponytail secure. Within minutes, guards locked chains around his ankles and wrists and threw him in a cell. He realized too late that he had been tricked into a rehab center, a fate he had heard about but hadn’t taken seriously.
On the first night, he says, staff members whipped him with a hose, working their way from one part of his body to another. “Your feet are the worst,” he recalls. “They’re sensitive like crazy.” His ankles and wrists were shackled day and night for virtually the entire six months he was confined at the center, he says. His ankles still bear visible scars. “I wanted to kill myself,” he says. “I didn’t want to wake up.”
Mr. Aden’s parents are separated and tell sharply different stories about their son’s experience in East Africa. Mr. Aden’s Ethiopian-born father, Aden Wako, a truck driver, says he thought his wife had enrolled their son in school in Somalia.
