The Pirates of Somalia

by Jay Bahadur

  “No,” he said, “it has nothing to do with that. It’s a moral issue. We started to realize that we were doing the wrong thing, and that we didn’t have public support.” Their public support, according to Boyah, had taken a plunge last summer when a delegation of local clan and religious leaders visited Eyl and declared to the local population that dealing with pirates was haram—religiously forbidden.

  The current NATO deliberations regarding possible missile strikes on Eyl did not seem to concern Boyah. “Only civilians live there, it would be illegal for them to attack,” he paused, before continuing, “if they do … that’s okay. We believe in God.” Forgetting for the moment his erstwhile promise of a ceasefire, Boyah’s tone suddenly turned vehemently passionate. “Force alone cannot stop us,” he said, “we don’t care about death.” Boyah’s vocal display of courage was not idle bravado, but the plausible truth of a starkly desperate man. His desperation was not as stark as before he had accumulated his small fortune, but how long his current state of affluence would last was unclear—Boyah announced with pride that he had given his money away to his friends and to the poor, and that he hadn’t built a house or a hotel like many of his more frugal colleagues.

  As for his plans for the future, Boyah refused to give a straight answer. “That is up to the international community,” he said. “It needs to solve the problem of illegal fishing, the root of our troubles. We are waiting for action.”

  * * *

  Throughout our conversation, Boyah had been gazing off into space between my questions, looking bored. Soon he grew restless, mumbling discontentedly as he glanced at the two o’clock sun that “the day is already over.” I managed to slip in one final question, asking him for his most exhilarating high seas chase. He immediately brightened up and launched into the story of the Golden Nori, a Japanese chemical tanker he had captured in October 2007 about fourteen kilometres off the northern Somali coast.

  “Almost immediately after we had boarded the ship the US Navy surrounded it,” said Boyah, with the destroyer USS Porter the first to respond. Boyah’s memory, perhaps augmented with time, recalled seven naval vessels encircling him. Clearly he had told this story before; with obvious pride, Boyah recited by rote the identification numbers marking the sides of four of the vessels: 41, 56, 76, and 78 (the last being the designation of the Porter). The swiftness and gravity of this response nearly spooked Boyah’s men into fleeing the ship and attempting an escape in their overmatched fishing skiffs. Fortunately for them, the Golden Nori was carrying volatile chemicals, including the extremely flammable compound benzene. With mirth lighting up his face, Boyah told me how the American ships were too afraid to fire on the ship for fear of detonating its payload, seemingly undisturbed by the fact that had his assessment been incorrect, he and his men would have been incinerated.

  The standoff dragged on through November and into December. “We ran out of food,” Boyah said, “and we almost abandoned the ship so we wouldn’t start eating the crew.” Attack helicopters whirring overhead, Boyah ordered the ship into the harbour at Bossaso, Puntland’s most populous city. In case the Nori’s explosive cargo proved an insufficient deterrent, Boyah added the defensive screen provided by the presence of the city’s civilian population.

  His perseverance paid off. After lengthy negotiations aboard an American vessel, a pirate delegation finally secured a generous ransom of $1.5 million in exchange for releasing the Nori and its captive crew. As part of the deal, the American military guaranteed Boyah and his team safe passage off the hijacked ship. Puntland security forces, waiting on shore to arrest the brigands, could only watch as US Navy helicopters escorted the pirate skiffs to land and allowed the pirates to disembark. I asked Boyah why the Americans had let them escape once they had left the safety of their hostages on board the Nori.

  “Because that was the agreement,” Boyah said. But I already knew the real reason, at least from the US point of view: the Americans would not have known what to do with Boyah and his men if they had captured them. According to international law—to the extent that international law has any meaning in an utterly failed state—the Americans were not even supposed to be in Somali territorial waters. Their hands were tied, and they let the pirates go.

  The Golden Nori was one of the first major commercial vessels hijacked in the Gulf of Aden, before the international community had truly become cognizant of the problem. During this period, foreign navies tended to give pirates a slap on the wrist: their weapons and boats were impounded or destroyed, and they were released. More recently, states have begun to use the international legal instruments available to them—particularly a UN Security Council resolution permitting foreign entry into Somali waters—much more rigorously. Foreign warships are increasingly interdicting, detaining, and rendering suspected pirates to neighbouring countries to face justice.

  Boyah had experienced this approach as well. In April 2008, his gang seized a rare prize, a speedy French luxury yacht on route from the Seychelles to the Mediterranean. Boyah called it the “Libant,” a clumsy fusion of the ship’s French name, Le Ponant. After delivering a ransom and freeing the hostages, French attack helicopters tracked the pirates inland to the village of Jariban. On the executive orders of President Nicolas Sarkozy, French commandos launched Operation Thalathine: special forces snipers disabled the pirates’ getaway vehicle and captured six of the brigands, subsequently flying them to Paris to face trial. Such a determined, and exceedingly costly, pursuit was a rarity. But the incident illustrated that the international community was starting to take piracy in the Gulf of Aden more seriously—as well as showcasing the touchiness of French pride.

  But a military solution alone is incapable of completely eradicating piracy off the Somali coast—nor is one either economically or politically feasible. Boyah’s men had been captured or killed with increasing frequency in recent days (his brother was sitting in a Bossaso prison), but it did not matter. Imprisoning them was like trying to use a bailer to drain the ocean: for each pirate captured by the authorities, there were dozens of desperate young men on shore ready to rush in and fill the void.

  At its very core, the solution to piracy lies in basic economic principles: the cost-benefit analysis for these men must be shifted to favour more legitimate pursuits. Naval battle fleets can do their part to boost the “cost” side of piracy, but without the alternative “benefit” of meaningful occupations on land, no permanent resolution is possible.

  * * *

  Boyah had become visibly irritable, and the next pause in my questioning heralded the end of the interview. His bothersome task completed, he rose and started heading back to where the vehicles were parked. As he walked, Warsame casually sidled up to Boyah and slipped him a folded hundred-dollar bill; suddenly the puzzling incongruity between Boyah’s irascible manner and his willingness to speak to me was perfectly clear. “These pirates always need money, you know, to buy khat,” said Warsame, referring to the stimulant drug religiously consumed by pirates. “Always, they chew khat.”

  Meanwhile, Boyah had once more leaked out ahead of the rest of us, bounding up the trail alone. Warsame and I gaped as he suddenly took off and effortlessly cleared the metre-wide knee-high bramble patch separating the farm from the shoulder of the highway. With gigantic strides, he ran up the slope to the cars and waited impatiently as we slowly climbed up after him.

  It was time for his khat.

  2

  A Short History of Piracy

  SOMALIA WAS NOT ALWAYS THIS WAY. THE COUNTRY OF FAMINE and bloodshed, the lawless land where Boyah and his accomplices, like the pirates of yore, have been able to operate virtually unmolested, is the result of one of the most dramatic state collapses in modern history.

  On October 15, 1969, the Somali Republic’s second democratically elected president, Abdirashid Ali Shermarke, was shot and killed in the northern town of Las Anod by his own bodyguard. Though he was never proved to have ordered the assassination, army chief General M
ohamed Siad Barre quickly initiated a bloodless coup that brought him to power for the next two decades.

  Siad Barre was not a country person. Holding a profound contempt for the nation’s nomadic traditions, he forcibly relocated whole populations of herders into collective settlements and communal farms. In his relentless drive to urbanize the country, Siad Barre directed virtually all government investment towards the capital, Mogadishu, which contained Somalia’s only hospitals, universities, and professional opportunities. The city became a magnet for Somalia’s diverse clans, drawing a cross-section of inhabitants from their traditional tribal homelands. For all his misdeeds, Siad Barre turned Mogadishu into the jewel of the Horn of Africa, a modern cosmopolis that attracted tourists from all over the world. The northern desert, conversely, was treated by the regime as a sterile and unproductive backwater.

  In the late 1990s, Somalia erupted into civil war. Years of disastrous military campaigns, backward Marxist economic policies, and clan-based discrimination caused an increasingly isolated Siad Barre to fall back on a combination of his Marehan clan network and brutal repression by his security forces. Rebel groups, formed more or less along clan lines, descended on Mogadishu from all sides: the Somali National Movement drawn from the Isaaq clans of Somaliland, the Darod-dominated Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF) operating from present-day Puntland, and the Hawiye United Somali Congress (USC) based in the south.

  Siad Barre did not mince words with his adversaries: “When I came to Mogadishu … there was one road built by the Italians. If you try to force me to stand down, I will leave Mogadishu as I found it,” he threatened. Sadly, he did even worse; when he finally fled Mogadishu in 1991, Siad Barre left the city in chaos.

  Following Siad Barre’s defeat, Mogadishu was left in the hands of USC warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid, a man best known as the target of the manhunt that culminated in the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident, in which eighteen US Army Rangers lost their lives. Taking retribution for Siad Barre’s persecution of their own clan, Aidid’s Hawiye militias hunted down and massacred Darod civilians in the streets. In his book The Zanzibar Chest, former Reuters correspondent Aidan Hartley describes in chilling detail the life-and-death importance of clan lineage during the worst days of the war:

  A queue of civilians was huddled at a roadblock before a gang of rebels. As each person was waved through, another came forward and began uttering a litany of names. My guide with the flaming red hair said the people were reciting their clan family trees. The genealogies tumbled back generation after generation to a founding ancestor. It was like a DNA helix, or a fingerprint, or an encyclopedia of peace treaties and blood debts left to fester down the torrid centuries. I was thinking how poetic this idea was, when bang!, a gunman shot one of the civilians, who fell with blood gushing from his head and was pushed aside onto a heap of corpses.

  “Wrong clan,” said my flaming-haired friend. “He should have borrowed the ancestors of a friend.”1

  If not quite as inborn as DNA or fingerprints, amongst Somalis the concept of clan operates almost like a mental grammar, an innate neural structure that defines how one processes and interprets the world. Before Siad Barre’s time, it had been customary for a Somali to greet someone he was meeting for the first time with the question Yaa tahay? “What clan are you?” In his efforts to weaken the clan system (and thereby buttress loyalty to the state), Siad Barre outlawed the question, but to little effect; to this day, clan strongly determines how Somalis assess one another’s social position, motivations, and trustworthiness.

  Like the Bedouin, Somalis have traditionally been pastoralists, their resource-poor desert environment giving rise to a rigid and strictly territorial tribal system in which members are fiercely defended and outsiders ruthlessly attacked. Indeed, the oft-quoted Bedouin saying “Me against my brother; my brother and I against my cousin; my brother, my cousin, and I against the world” could well be adapted to Somalis: “My sub-sub-clan against my sub-clan, my sub-clan against my clan, my clan against the world.” In order to avoid mutually destructive vendettas, a system of clan law, known as heer, developed to resolve disputes through traditional rules of blood compensation, which stipulate the number of camels, goats, and so on paid to expiate each offence. The murder of a man, for instance, would demand a restitution of one hundred camels (the equivalent of about $20,000); a woman, fifty camels.

  Despite Siad Barre’s attempts to dismantle traditional patterns of Somali life, clan loyalty remained a more dominant force than Somali national identity, to the point where it eventually tore the country apart. In a sense, the whole idea of Somalia was a contradiction—an attempt to graft the trappings of a modern state onto a mode of social organization suited to a centuries-old nomadic lifestyle. Jobs, business opportunities, military appointments, government posts, and patronage were all awarded through clan networks, reinforcing ethnic divisions and undermining the legitimacy of the central state. Ironically—given its role in sparking Somalia’s descent into civil war—the clan system has since ensured a degree of order and social cohesion in many areas, including Puntland and Somaliland, that otherwise might easily have degenerated into their own versions of Rwanda or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For a country in “anarchy,” law and order in some parts of Somalia is remarkably well-preserved.

  * * *

  Many of the Darod lucky enough to escape Mogadishu’s urban killing fields fled north to their ancestral clan homeland, which at the time was under the control of the SSDF, headed by the squabbling duo of Colonel Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed and General Mohamed Abshir. Towns that had been little more than underpopulated crossroads along nomadic migration routes swelled into urban centres. In the years following the outbreak of the civil war, Garowe grew from a population of five thousand to a current estimated thirty to forty thousand.2

  Though the desert provided a safe haven against the persecution suffered by the Darod in the south, without political unity they remained vulnerable. Leaders of the Harti Confederacy (see Appendix 1), a grouping of the three Darod sub-clans inhabiting Puntland (the Majerteen, Dhulbahante, and Warsangali), looked on with apprehension at the formation of clan polities around them. With the Isaaq-inhabited self-declared Republic of Somaliland to their western flank and the Hawiye poised to extend their control from Mogadishu to much of south-central Somalia, the fear was that without a unified front the Darod would be at a disadvantage in the clan-centred scramble for Somalia’s territories.

  In May 1998, a conference of Harti clan elders in Garowe proclaimed the creation of Puntland State of Somalia, with Abdullahi Yusuf as its first president.3 Unlike Somaliland, Puntland did not seek outright independence, but officially maintained its intention to join a future federal Somali state (albeit on its own terms). However, the international community has yet to officially recognize Puntland’s status as a semi-autonomous region, and its relations with both the internationally recognized Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and Somaliland have been tense, and at times openly hostile.

  For six years following the Garowe conference, Yusuf ruled Puntland as his personal fiefdom. When a 2001 election produced a victory for Yusuf’s challenger, Jama Ali Jama, Yusuf did not bother to contest the results; he declared war, defeating Jama over the course of a six-month conflict. It was a rare outbreak of violence in a region that, since its founding, had remained largely insulated from the ongoing instability in southern Somalia.

  In 2004, Yusuf headed south to take over the reins of the recently formed Somali TFG, handing over Puntland (after a three-month interim) to former general Mohamud Muse Hersi—a man known by the nickname of Adde Muse, or “White Moses.” Hersi remained in power until January 2009, when Abdirahman Farole, an academic who had spent most of the previous twenty years in Melbourne, captured 74 per cent of the vote in an indirect presidential election held by Puntland’s “parliament”—a collection of clan elders appointed from the region’s seven districts. During and following the election
, Farole took a hard-line stance against the buccaneers plying the region’s waters, whom he viewed as a black mark on Puntland’s international reputation: “The pirates are spoiling our society,” he announced to the press following his victory. “We will crush them.”4

  It was a promise he has found difficult to fulfil.

  * * *

  By the time Farole assumed office in early 2009, sea banditry had become Puntland’s only claim to recognition on the international stage. Yet piracy had existed as a Somalia-wide phenomenon since the outbreak of the civil war. As the central government collapsed on land, its ability to control its seas declined commensurately, and a varied assortment of militiamen, fishermen, and dregs of the Somali army all seized advantage. Like darts striking a map, pirate attacks occurred up and down the length of the Somali coast, indifferent to geographical location. These early operations were sporadic, opportunistic, and unsophisticated—little more than groups of gunmen floating in four-metre skiffs a few kilometres away from the shore, waiting for wayward vessels to stray too close. The use of far-ranging “motherships” (fishing dhows or other larger vessels employed as floating bases of operations) was not yet common, and these nascent pirates did not typically venture far beyond the hundred or so miles constituting the traditional sphere of Somali fishermen—well short of international shipping lanes. By consequence, their victims were typically fishing trawlers, whose search for lobster and demersal (bottom-dwelling) fish required them to come close to shore.