Mohamed Osman Hassan never questioned his close friend and mentor Bashir Makhtal when in early 2001 he announced plans to leave a well-paid job as an information technologist at CIBC in Toronto for the unlikely sounding, but lucrative, business of hawking used clothing across the volatile Horn of Africa.
“He saw an opportunity,” said Mr. Hassan, who at the time was finishing a degree in computer science at Brock University. “He's one of those people that when they see an opportunity, they don't dither.”
So, in June of 2002, still paying the rent on his Scarborough apartment, Mr. Makhtal, who had immigrated to Canada a decade earlier and once tended his family's camels over a desiccated African countryside, set off from Pearson International Airport on an extended business trip that would take him to Dubai, Djibouti, Eritrea, Kenya and eventually even back to Somalia.
Today, the Canadian languishes in a tiny Ethiopian prison, isolated from family, accused and convicted of terrorism, awaiting a grim judgment. What he couldn't have known the day he stepped on that plane was that a maelstrom of forces – a bloody civil conflict in Somalia, the global campaign against terrorism, a vendetta against his conspicuously political family – were converging to deprive him of his liberty and, perhaps, his life.
For the past two-and-a-half years, Mr. Makhtal has been imprisoned in Ethiopia. For much of that time he was held incommunicado in solitary confinement and denied consular access.
On Monday he was convicted, but not sentenced, by a civilian court in Addis Ababa on three counts of terrorism-related charges, each of which carries a potential death penalty. He will be sentenced Monday and Canada, which has been closely monitoring his case, says it will seek clemency if Mr. Makhtal is given a death sentence.
Friends and family say it is all because of his name.
Bashir Ahmed Makhtal was born in 1969 in the Somali region of eastern Ethiopia to a famously political family, the grandson of Makhtal Dahir, a senior member of a separatist movement known as the Ogaden National Liberation Front, which grew out of an ethnic Somali struggle against the military dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam. The ONLF has been locked in a bitter, at times violent conflict with the Ethiopian government. When his father died, the 11-year-old boy was sent to begin a new life in Mogadishu with his uncle, a Western-educated Somali diplomat.
It was there, under the apple and lemon trees in the large, well-tended courtyard of his new and peaceful home, that he came to know Said Maktal, his younger cousin by three years, who spells his name differently. The two would grow up as brothers.
Now a 36-year old chemical lab technician living in Hamilton, Ont., by his own accounts a typical Mogadishu kid, spoiled and immature, Said said he was awed by his older, worldly cousin, who had come from afar. “If I remember back then, it was fantastic. Bashir used to tell us amazing stories that we never heard.”
As is customary, Mr. Makhtal, as the older cousin, was the first to go abroad. He first went to school in Italy in 1989 before moving on to Canada two years later, all the while supported by his uncle, who understood the value of a Western education.
If your business is done, please get the hell out of there — Said Maktal's last words to his cousin Bashir before he was rounded up by authorities
Within a year of landing in Canada, Mr. Makhtal was working toward a computer science degree at the DeVry Institute for Technology in Toronto, on a career path that would land him a job at CIBC and BMO.
But Mr. Makhtal never forgot about his family back home. “Bashir always said, ‘I come from a big family,' “ Said Maktal recalled. “ ‘I am the only one who is outside. I have to work hard to support my family, my nephews, my nieces.' “ It was in part this same sense of obligation toward his family in Ethiopia that, according to Said Maktal, compelled Mr. Makhtal to set aside his bank job and go into business for himself. He headed back to Africa in 2002, and spent the next few years criss-crossing eastern Africa and, from time to time, returning home to Canada to visit.
