When Sports Is a Symbol : Somalia: Dahir lives in the U.S. now, but uses athletics to offer hope for a country ravaged by war and starvation.

Over dinner one recent night at a restaurant near the corner of Wilshire and Vermont in Los Angeles, Ahmed Abdi Dahir pointed toward Somalia’s Olympic Committee.

“It is all in here,� he said, tapping his head with his forefinger. “We had a building in Mogadishu, but it, like everything else in the capital city, has been destroyed in the civil war. There is not even one file left, not one.�

Dahir is best known in the West as a humanitarian. As director of the Somali Relief Rehabilitation Assn., and vice president of the Coalition for African Refugees and Immigrants, he was selected in October as one of President Bush’s 1,000 Points of Light.

But, in his homeland, Dahir also is recognized as one of the founders of Somalia’s Olympic Committee and the force behind the disintegrating country’s continued presence in international sports.

“He is the father of our sports,� said Somalian runner Abdi Bile, the 1,500-meter world champion in 1987 and the flag-bearer for the country’s five-man delegation during the opening ceremony at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona.

Dahir, 47, has maintained that distinction even while living in the United States for almost a decade, much of it in Los Angeles. He left Somalia because of political differences with the country’s former Marxist dictator, Siad Barre.

Those differences, Dahir said, resulted from his “Western, democratic� leanings, which he inherited from his father, who spent part of his career as a civil engineer in Chicago.

Dahir was more fortunate than his father, whose ideology cost him his life. As did many future Somalians, Dahir’s parents lived in Ethiopia, and, in 1964, his father was killed in an assassination believed to have been authorized by Emperor Haile Selassie. Dahir’s family eventually fled to Somalia.

An all-around athlete, Dahir had been infused with the Olympic spirit in 1960, when he was among 16 students chosen to carry Abebe Bikila in a cart on their shoulders during a parade through the streets of the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa to celebrate his Olympic marathon victory.

In Somalia, Dahir became involved in a campaign to establish the country’s National Olympic Committee, which earned recognition from the International Olympic Committee in 1972. By that time, he had been the country’s vice minister for labor, youth and sports for two years, and it was in that role that he organized Somalia’s participation in the 1984 Summer Olympics at Los Angeles.

Four years later, although he had lost his government position, been imprisoned three times because of disputes with Barre and had moved to the United States, Dahir was appointed by Somalia’s Olympic Committee to head its delegation for the Summer Olympics at Seoul.

He appointed himself to put together the 1992 Olympic team because there was no one else to do it. The secretary general of the Olympic committee had moved to Yemen, the president had moved to Italy and other officials had disappeared.

Dahir went to Mogadishu early this year to find athletes to take to Barcelona, stayed five months and left with no one.

A marathon runner who had competed in the 1984 and ’88 Olympics, Mohiddin Moh Kulmiye, had been killed in 1991, a victim of random gunfire on a street in Mogadishu. Other potential Olympians could not be located, either because they had left the country without leaving forwarding addresses or were dead.

“You can watch the news of Somalia on television, but you still cannot believe the tragedy unless you’ve been there,� Dahir said. “You have to see it.

“I have seen people die in my arms. I have seen people killed in front of me and been splattered with their blood. I have seen bombs go off in buildings and kill 20 or 30 people. I have seen hundreds of bodies, not buried in a cemetery but in the streets. You cannot describe how terrible it is.

“When I saw it was hell, I just left.�

Dahir marched in the opening ceremony at Barcelona with the secretary general and president of Somalia’s Olympic Committee and two track athletes, Bile and Ibrahim Okash, who have been living and training in the United States for several years. Bile, who lives in Albuquerque, N.M., paid the delegation’s expenses that were not covered by the IOC.

Bile and Okash did not compete at Barcelona because of injuries.

“We all cried during the ceremony--Abdi, myself, everyone,� Dahir said.

“We were there with the King of Spain while our people at home were dying. We had the best food in Barcelona, and our people did not even have dry bread.�

Yet the fact that Somalia’s flag was unfurled alongside all the others at Barcelona was an important symbol for his country, Dahir said.

And he said that he is certain the flag will fly in future Olympics.

“Many of our young athletes and our future athletes are dead by now, but sports is going on right now in Somalia,� he said. “Outside Mogadishu and the 250 miles surrounding it, the so-called ‘Death Triangle,’ we have a 14-team soccer league, a six-team volleyball league and track and field. The facilities have been destroyed, and there is not much equipment, but they play every day.

“Somalia still has some of the best athletes on earth. We have not had the success of some countries near us, like Ethiopia and Kenya, because they have a better economy. It is hard to develop athletes if they are hungry. We have been able to do it only if they go abroad to train.

“But I think we can do better in the future. The destiny of the nation has to be determined first. The country has fallen to pieces. But when that is accomplished, if together we--myself and athletes like Abdi and Okash--will go home and teach, help raise money and rebuild facilities, I think we can do it.

“I will never lose hope.�