By Abdisalam Issa-Salwe

Abdirazak Haji Hussein the former prime minster of Somalia ( 1964-1967), who died on Friday, 31 January 2014, at the age of 90, was born on 24 December 1924, in Ceel Wacayseed near Garowe, the capital of the autonomous region of Puntland, Somalia.

Abdirizak grew up in a nomadic environment that required continuous movement from one place to another. Abdirazak received his earliest education from a Quran teacher who accompanied the family and taught Abdirazak and the other children of the nomadic hamlet.

Abdirazak moved to Mogadishu in 1939 where he started working as a wireless officer and–occasionally – an interpreter, first for the British Military Administration and then for the Italian Trusteeship Administration.

He started his political career at a young age, as he became a member of Somali Youth League (SYL) in 1944. The SYL had been founded in 1943 as the Somali Youth Club. In 1947, the group organised itself as a political party and adopted the name of Somali Youth League.

In 1955theSomali Youth League elected Abdirazak as its secretary-general. He was elected to the National Assembly in 1959. Afterwards he served in the cabinet of Prime Minister Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke as Minister of the Interior (1960 to 1962) and Minister of Public Works and Communications (1962 to 1964).

On 14 June 1964 Abdirazak Haji Hussein became Prime Minister of the Somali Republic. One major challenge of Somalia’s leadership in this period was how to overcome the divisions caused by British and Italian colonial rule and, especially, how to integrate the former Italian and British Somalilands with their different administrative and legal languages (English in the former and Italian in the latter). This problem was aggravated by the fact that there was no officially accepted Somali script to facilitate communication in Somali within the government.

In the early 1960s, Somali insistence on incorporating its missing territories into the new nation-state was creating more enemies than friends in Africa and the world. By the time Abdirazak took office in 1964, the Somali leadership had become wary of trying to find a diplomatic solution to Somalia’s territorial claims. Disappointment with the inefficacy of formal diplomacy and popular outrage at the marginalisation and oppression facing ethnic Somalis in Ethiopia, Kenya and French Somaliland contributed to increasing political estrangement from the western powers.

At home, Premier Abdirazak Haji Hussein introduced bold reforms in government administration by mounting an anti-corruption campaign and taking measures against incompetence in the government bureaucracy. The campaign was known as busta rossa (the red envelope), named after the official envelope received by those bureaucrats who were going to be fired. Abdirazak is remembered for the formation of the most efficient civilian administration in Somalia and for relinquishing from power peacefully and democratically (together with Aden Abdulle Osman) when they lost the 1967 elections. Abdirazak went on to organize an opposition party called Dabka.

On Tuesday 21 October 1969, the Somali military army seized power by way of what has been called a ‘bloodless coup’. The military junta rounded up all current and former members of the civilian administrations, including former President Adan Abdulle Osman, former Prime-Ministers Abdirazak Haji Hussein and Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Igal, and former Police Commander Mohamed Abshir Muse. They were to remain imprisoned for many years without trial.

In 1975, Abdirazak was called to serve as the country’s ambassador to the United Nations in New York, a post he occupied until 1980, when he resigned his position and asked for asylum in the U.S. This was accepted on condition that he would not publicly oppose the military regime. However, Abdirazak remained politically active. Although he never joined a particular opposition front, in the years that followed he did his utmost to unify the opposition against the military regime. From his base in the U.S., he actively promoted the cause of the Manifesto Group of May 1990 and, once the state had collapsed, participated in the ongoing attempts at political reconciliation.

In his will Abdirazak asked to be buried in Mogadishu next to the former President Adan Abdulle Osman. This shows how close the connection between these two great leaders of the Somali past was and remained.

Abdirazak was survived by his wife wife and three adult children, nephews and grand children.

Abdisalam Issa-Salwe
TaibahUniversity
Email:binsalwe@aol.com