She was set to marry Canadian, but he was sent to Ethiopia after arrest on Somali border

Jan 02, 2008 04:30 AM
Tia Goldenberg
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

NAIROBI–If things had gone according to plan, Asiso Osman Abdi and Bashir Makhtal would be celebrating their one-year wedding anniversary in early 2008.

But instead, Abdi is marking another date. One year ago this week, Makhtal, a Canadian citizen, was arrested on Somalia's border with Kenya, fleeing war in the anarchic Horn of Africa country. Less than a month later, shackled and blindfolded, he was handed over to Ethiopia.

Little has been heard of him since.

Abdi and Makhtal were engaged in March 2006 and planned to wed in early 2007. "I just wanted a bright future with him. I wanted kids and a family with him. But I don't know what will happen," said Abdi, speaking in Somali, her eyes, the only exposed part of her under her veil, staring blankly as she talks.

The last time Abdi saw her fiancé, he was on his way to Somalia, a country that was then, for a change, somewhat stable and peaceful.

He was going to import second-hand clothes from Dubai, his new business venture.

"He is a very good, intelligent man," said Abdi, 19, of Makhtal, who worked as a computer programmer in Toronto. The two met through relatives and were arranged to be married. They got to know each other mostly from extended phone conversations.

Ethiopian officials say Makhtal, 40, has connections to an ethnic-Somali separatist group in Ethiopia's eastern Ogaden region, the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), which has been waging a low-level insurgency against the government.

Makhtal's grandfather is one of the ONLF's founders, but his family and Abdi staunchly deny he has any links to the group, which in its bloodiest attack last year killed 74 people on a Chinese-owned oil field. But no matter what the reasons for his detention, Abdi says she is being left in the dark.

His exact whereabouts remain unknown, even one year later, and human rights groups have warned he may be undergoing torture in secret prisons outside the capital Addis Ababa. Ethiopia led a U.S.-blessed assault on an Islamic group in Somalia last December and January, which sparked the exodus and subsequent renditions of the scores of men, women and children.

The Kenyan Muslim Human Rights Forum, which has been following Makhtal's case, has said Ethiopia was taking advantage of the U.S. war on terror to settle its own scores, detaining Makhtal without charge because of his ties to the ONLF, which makes his situation "precarious." Abdi said she is angry at the Kenyan government for assisting in the more than 100 renditions, but moreover she said Canadian officials aren't doing enough to secure his release.

"I have no idea if people are working on his case. I doubt the Canadian government is doing what it will take to release him," she said. Not one Canadian consular official has met Abdi and the little she knows about her absent fiancé is from the BBC Somali Service.

But she's surprisingly hopeful.

"I have never lost hope" since his absence, Abdi said. "I still dream that one day he will be my husband."



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Tia Goldenberg is a Canadian journalist based in Africa.

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