The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  This was a polite reference to a Somali belief that international navies protected illegal fishing boats. I had written about this controversy myself; I had even asked President Alin for more evidence (documents, photographs). But firm proof was elusive in Somalia, and Alin had provided us nothing.

  “Does he know we’re not from Atalanta?” I asked Gerlach.

  “I have explained it to him.”

  “We urgently need support,” said Abduelle, “both military and economic. The tsunami in 2004 has destroyed our way of life.”

  The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 had flooded the coast of Somalia and wrecked a terrible number of houses and fishing boats, whole livelihoods. It had also washed ashore tubs of poisonous waste. Ships run by the Italian mob had dumped many of these tubs off the coast.

  “We will relay the message,” I said.

  I asked Gerlach in what sense Abduelle was the mayor of Hobyo, since two men were vying for the job.

  “Abduelle is not an official mayor. He does not have the government title,” he told me. “But he has the respect and support of the clans here in Hobyo. Above all, he has support from the pirates.”

  I nodded. “Where’s our mayor? Mohamud Awale?”

  “His car is making a tour of Hobyo. It’s important for him to be seen. He will join us for lunch.”

  Soon he arrived, seeming clumsy and uncertain compared with the flamboyant Abduelle. Lunch arrived, too. We had endless piles of spaghetti, steaming sweet tea, whole fried mackerel, and slabs of camel meat. Flies, excited by the food, dive-bombed our lips before we could finish chewing. We batted them away with greasy hands or with Somali flags, but they kept at it. One even landed on my eyeball. I remember thinking the flies in Hobyo were as hungry as the people.

  Gerlach and Digsi had promised that a pirate would visit for an interview after lunch. For a long time we sat and swatted flies. Abduelle vanished, and poor uncertain Mohamud Awale told me the name of the pirate boss who owned the mansion with the Land Cruiser sculpture over the door.

  “His name is Fatxi.”

  Fatxi, it turned out, had masterminded the capture of the Shiuh Fu 1.

  And the name of the pirate we were about to meet?

  Awale wasn’t sure. After another hour, though, a gangling man wearing khakis and a tan collared shirt, his head wrapped in a red-patterned keffiyeh, stepped through the door. We saw no part of his face besides the bloodshot eyes. He called himself “Mustaf Mohammed Sheikh.” Ashwin focused his camera and started the interview. Mustaf Mohammed lost no time declaring himself at war with forces of the West. He said that “white people” had attacked Somalia by trawling its coral reefs and dumping poison on its shores. “As soon as they stop leaving poison on our beaches and taking fish from our seas, we will stop hijacking ships,” the pirate said.

  Some of his complaints were legitimate, but it wasn’t rare for a pirate to invoke a cause. Pirates throughout history have piggybacked on social ideals. For example, Klaus Störtebeker, the fourteenth-century German privateer, named his gang of North Sea bandits the “Likedeelers” because they shared their loot and lived by an ethic of cooperation more equitable than the cruel hierarchies of most European ships. The complaints were real, and so was the justice of resistance, but that didn’t keep the pirates from murder and rape. What undercut Mustaf Mohammed’s speech to us was the sheer number of impoverished sailors captured in Somalia. At the time of our interview more than seven hundred hostages from India, Bangladesh, Iran, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Yemen, and the Philippines were still being held in cruel conditions. The affected shipping companies, too, were a random assortment—sometimes Danish or Greek, sometimes Liberian, Malaysian, Chinese. The profiteering had little to do with complaints against the West. Pirates just caught what they could.

  “Can you swim?” Ashwin asked, and the pirate said, through Gerlach’s translation, “Yes.”

  “I have heard that most pirates cannot swim,” persisted Ashwin.

  “But that’s an important skill for any pirate,” said Mustaf Mohammed. “Someone who works with us should be able to swim. Where did you get this information?”

  We had it from the trial in Hamburg—Ashwin had borrowed it from me. One day in court, a Dutch naval captain had described the arrest and transfer of the captured Somalis to his frigate. A young pirate had tried to escape by jumping off the deck.

  “Could he swim?” the judge had asked.

  No, said the Dutch captain, but that wasn’t unusual. And then he uttered one of the few memorable lines of the long and tedious trial:

  “In my experience,” the captain said, “most pirates can’t swim.”

  But Mustaf Mohammed lectured us about his pirates’ water skills. “Most people understand what it takes to be a pirate. Courage, speed in boarding a ship with a ladder or a rope,” he said. “Above all, a strong will. Those are the criteria.”

  We nodded. It was my turn to ask a question.

  “Would it help if there were piers along the shore of Galmudug,” I said, “to promote the economy and create jobs? If there were more jobs here, would you stop hijacking ships?”

  “When foreigners stop robbing our fish, stop poisoning our water, and leave us in peace, then we will accept limitations. Not before.”

  “How did your career as a pirate start?” I asked.

  “Someone sank my boat,” he said. “My brother was killed, all our equipment—our nets and everything—were destroyed. That was the beginning.”

  “When?”

  “Ten years ago.”

  “Who did it?” I said.

  “Denmark. A Danish ship. A trawler.”

  Warm sunlight stifled the room; flies swirled over the plates of food. The pirate, with his face covered, seeming anxious, fixed me with his unquiet eyes.

  “I have a final question,” said Ashwin. “Have you ever kidnapped anyone on land?”

  “No, we have never kidnapped any innocent person,” said Mustaf Mohammed Sheikh. “We would never do such a thing. If we did such things, we might kidnap you now.”

  “I understand,” said Ashwin.

  Throughout the conversation, one elder whispered to the pirate, as if to feed him lines. It was odd. When Mustaf Mohammed left—as he’d arrived, still wearing his keffiyeh, in a pall of portentous self-regard—Ashwin asked the elder what he’d whispered. The old man shook his head.

  “He says he was not whispering to the pirate,” Gerlach translated.

  VIII

  Abduelle then presented the Galkayo elders with his bill for lunch. He smiled and vanished again like a Cheshire cat. Digsi, the dignified elder, sat on the floor with his back against the couch and passed the bill up to another man with a look of rueful amusement. I watched the piece of paper move from hand to hand. Abduelle’s family, the Sa’ads in Hobyo, were sticking it to Gerlach’s family, the Sa’ads from Galkayo. Or so it was explained to us. For the lunchtime spread they wanted $620.

  It was an exorbitant price in any part of the world, but Ashwin and I had paid Gerlach thousands of dollars to organize these two weeks in Somalia. We knew that disputes over money could lead to kidnappings, so we paid close attention to this controversy. It seemed to fizzle.

  The heat and flies continued into the late afternoon; for “safety reasons,” we had to wait for the right moment to leave. At last we filed out to the cars and drove north from Hobyo along the Pirate Road. The plan was to spend a night on the coast, at Idaan,* a beach north of Hobyo, where Digsi and the other Sa’ads wanted to build another pier.

  After sundown, we came to a stretch of washboarded mud that rattled under our tires. The caravan slowed. Our driver made a phone call, and three Somalis emerged from bushes along a ridge, holding flashlights. They swung the beams until our cars steered into a narrow gap leading through the ridge and down to a camp on the sand.

  This was Idaan. Our shelter consisted of a round, thatched roof with a single fat post for support. We unloaded our bags and made ourselves comfortabl
e. Gerlach settled into a plastic chair to smoke a cigarette. “It would be nice to spend the end of my life here,” he said ruefully. “There is an old canning factory up on the cliff. Hamid and I have discussed buying it. If this place was secure, we could turn the factory into a water treatment plant. Somalia will always need bottled water.” He sighed. “I would like to retire here.”

  Even in the dark, I could sense the allure of this wild coast. Idaan had a deep quiet, a spooky sense of wilderness and desolation.

  A young woman shuffled up in her robe to unlock a door set into the earthen wall. It flipped up to reveal a little shop, no more than a closet, packed with snacks and drinks. The guards crowded around to buy cigarettes. They’d been here before. Outside our shelter, their boss gave soft-spoken orders. He was a middle-aged man called Nuur, with a gap in his teeth and an open-collared shirt, who smoked constantly. The skeptical look in his eye, the cigarettes, and his rough beard all reminded me of a friend of my parents. It was a strange association to make in the Somali bush, but it clung to me. Denis Lyon—the father of Sonja, my kindergarten romance—had the same gravelly voice and the same gap in his teeth. The association was dreamlike and surreal and had nothing to do with Denis’s character, or Nuur’s, but once I had made it, I thought about Denis for a long time. He was a hard-bitten but clever engineer, a no-nonsense Lockheed man with a brownish beard who used to smoke like a chimney and chide his children with good-humored authority. In my father’s absence friends like him had become distant surrogate fathers, the last men from a certain generation to remember me as a kid.

  When the sun rose in the morning, it revealed a wide cove, where a sandstone riverbed led to a freshwater well near the surf. Nomad shepherds moved herds of camels and goats to the well. Gerlach took us for a walk along the beach, and we found a massive industrial waste canister, yellow and almost cube shaped, seven or eight feet tall, sitting in the shore break.

  “This washed up in the tsunami,” he said. “It is too heavy for anyone to move.”

  “Where is it from?” I said.

  “We don’t know.”

  It looked like radioactive waste canisters I had seen in photographs. Italian journalists had uncovered collusion between ’Ndrangheta Mafia bosses and warlords in Somalia to bury tons of waste in Somali soil—or sink it in the waters offshore—during the nineties. This container was similar. I wondered if it would hamper Gerlach’s dream of a water treatment plant.

  We left Idaan late in the morning and drove north. Digsi’s car ran far ahead of ours. The landscape was still dry and blasted, and after a while it occurred to me that we weren’t headed west, toward Galkayo.

  “Where are we going?” I asked Gerlach.

  “To Garacad.”

  The next significant pirate town to the north.

  “Does Digsi have influence there?” I asked.

  “Not really.”

  One pirate from the Hamburg trial came from Garacad, but we’d ruled it out as a town to visit. Gerlach had declared it too dangerous.

  “Why are we going there?” I said.

  “Digsi wants you to see the horizon,” Gerlach said. “He wants Ashwin to film it.”

  The elder hoped Ashwin would film the empty sea at the same spot where the German reporter had compared the waterline to Amsterdam’s. Sa’ads in Galmudug were solving their problems, Digsi wanted us to know. Pirates weren’t flourishing here.

  “Ashwin, was this your idea?”

  “No.”

  I didn’t like it. We asked the caravan to turn toward home. Gerlach nodded. Our driver cut across hard mud to the west while Digsi’s car struggled over some terrain about half a mile ahead. Gerlach dialed Digsi’s phone. The normally cheerful elder grew angry. From the other car, he asked us all to stop. We did—a whole line of vehicles stalled in the bush—and Digsi climbed out to argue with Gerlach. They stood under the strengthening sun and bickered in Somali. Hamid translated some of what he heard. “You cannot treat us like children!” Digsi said. His honor had been wounded. Ashwin watched the argument in a sideview mirror.

  “He is not letting go,” he said.

  At last Gerlach came back to our car and sat next to us, looking miffed. He muttered about bowing to an “illiterate” like Digsi. But he’d won the argument, and our caravan continued to Galkayo.

  IX

  After this trip to the coastal wilds, Galkayo seemed bustling and familiar, less menacing and unpredictable. The fear and tension I had felt in Hobyo resolved into a strange feeling of affection for the dusty crossroads town. Hamid said the Garfanji rumors had fizzled. But Ashwin and I made up our minds to leave, as soon as possible, because of Gerlach’s altercation with Digsi.

  The families of the arrested pirates in Hamburg lived in North Galkayo. I still wanted to talk to them, though it wasn’t clear that a tour of the north would be safe—I would try, but I wasn’t about to take any (more) stupid risks. In any case, I would take the next flight to Nairobi. Ashwin was off to Mogadishu, and our flights fell on separate days.

  “Mike, how do you feel?” he asked in our room.

  “Much better.”

  “Do you have enough material?”

  I said we would have to see how it went in North Galkayo.

  “It does not look promising, to be honest. Sometimes you just have to take what you can get,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Well, do you want me to stay until you fly out?” he offered. “Or should I take this flight to Mogadishu tomorrow?”

  The Galkayo airport roads could be dangerous. Two Western aid workers, Jessica Buchanan and Poul Thisted, had been kidnapped on one of them several months before. I didn’t like the idea of an extra trip through such a bad stretch of dirt. But Ashwin had nothing to do; he wanted to leave.

  We talked to Hamid and forged a plan. Hamid knew a man called Robert at the U.N. who could assemble a strong security detail for an excursion through North Galkayo. The next day—January 21, a Saturday—I would accompany Ashwin to the airport, and we could meet Robert there. After Ashwin flew off, we could leave for North Galkayo under U.N. guard. The gunmen would be Darod clan members from Puntland, rather than the Sa’ad guards we’d used until now. It was a reasonable solution. I felt less nervous than before. I even wrote cheerful messages home about the food, the slabs of watermelon and the wild camel meat.

  Saturday morning, we woke early and waited for a ride to the airport. Our regular Hobyo guards were supposed to escort us. They failed to show up. After half an hour, Gerlach said, “Now I am starting to worry,” and he called President Alin, who sent a white jeep with a single gunman for the airport dash. There was no clear explanation for this switch in security and transportation. I considered staying at the hotel, but the safest place for either of us was wherever Gerlach happened to be. “If you are kidnapped, I will be kidnapped,” he had told us more than once. “And if I am kidnapped, there will be war,” meaning a flare-up of violence between subclans.

  The “airport road” was actually two or three trails winding out of Galkayo through an arid, boulder-littered landscape. The piles of dusty rock were traditional Sufi graves, and they memorialized Galkayo residents killed in the long civil war.

  A Somali sat in a chair beside the airport gate, which wasn’t a gate but just a rickety steel barrier, a piece of junk in the dust. The Galkayo airport had strict rules against weapons, in this nation lousy with guns, and he demanded our guard’s rifle. The airport was still closed, he said. We were too early. After a moment, he accepted a one-dollar bribe to move the piece of junk and let us park beside the terminal.

  The chalk-white building had the lassitude of a lonely bus terminal, and it was, in fact, closed tight. The rising sun cast a fresh young light across the airstrip, and a patio had a number of plastic chairs and some words painted on the wall suggesting that a shuttered window might open soon for refreshments. When it did, we bought glasses of tea.

  Other Somalis came to settle in chairs and wai
t. Hamid’s phone rang. Robert, the U.N. man, had bad news.

  “He says his security team will not make the appointment,” said Hamid.

  “Let me talk to him.”

  Robert, who spoke European-accented English, sounded gentle and concerned. He had to apologize—his security team had an urgent job somewhere else. He’d been doing Hamid a favor. He wasn’t contracted to help.

  “We won’t make it to North Galkayo today,” I told Hamid. “We can’t do it with the security we have.”

  “Maybe tomorrow,” he agreed and lit a cigarette.

  The tense prospect of a visit to North Galkayo had eased, but now we had just a single guard, in the president’s jeep, for the trip back to our hotel. I blinked away a bad intuition and took a sip of tea.

  Hamid asked for my email address. I gave him a card from Spiegel Online. He read my name out loud, and a fat young Somali at a neighboring table glanced over.

  “You are Michael Scott Moore?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have seen you on the internet,” he said. “You are famous.”

  I wrinkled my forehead.

  “No, I’m not.”

  Alarm bells should have been ringing in my head—whispers had swept the rumor kitchen. I felt a mild wash of dread from this weird conversation; but by now it was far too late.

  Ashwin’s plane landed, after a long delay, and we shook hands with him on a square of tarmac beside the airstrip. We started back to our hotel in President Alin’s car. It was midday, and the sun glared on the rocky graves. Other cars wound behind us. But soon our driver slowed and made a careful remark in Somali.