by Jay Bahadur
The attacks most frequently took the form of “marine muggings,” during which the brigands would board the vessel and steal money and everything else of easily transportable value before quickly departing. Like muggings, they sometimes turned violent, as was the case in the very first recorded act of modern piracy in Somalia—an incident that marked the closest the Somali pirates have come to the seventeenth-century stereotype of bloodthirsty buccaneers.
On January 12, 1991, the cargo ship Naviluck was boarded by three boatloads of armed pirates off the Puntland coast near the town of Hafun while en route from Mombasa to Jeddah. The pirates took three of the vessel’s Filipino crewmen ashore and summarily executed them, before forcing the remaining crew to jump overboard and setting the Naviluck ablaze. Only by the grace of a passing trawler were the floundering victims of this “plank walking” saved from the fate of their three comrades.
Not all hijackings were carried out by these sorts of water-borne thugs; some had a veneer of legality. The hodgepodge of rebel groups, militias, and warlords that had inherited chunks of the Somali state (along with the remnants of its navy) began to arrest foreign fishing vessels and extort “fines” for their release. In Puntland, one of the men given this assignment was Abdiwahid Mahamed Hersi, known as Joaar, the owner of a small-scale lobster fishing company who had once employed, as one of his divers, none other than the young Boyah. In 1993, as the civil war continued to rage in the south, Abdullahi Yusuf instructed Joaar to end illegal fishing by foreign fleets off SSDF-controlled territory. In response to this command, Joaar told me, he hired a boat at $200 per day and recruited thirty young men to serve as his marines (I was unable to discover if Boyah was amongst them). According to Joaar’s reckoning, he and his men stopped a total of nine Pakistani dhows, bringing them to Bossaso and ransoming three of them back to their home government (there are even rumours, which Joaar denies, that he and his colleagues hijacked a ship out of Mombasa harbour by smuggling a pistol on board in the bottom of a fruit basket). His actions had the desired effect, or so he believed. “Our seas became very clean at that time,” Joaar said.
Though he had originally planned to create a full-fledged coast guard, Joaar found himself unable to complete the task. Illegal fishing ships, he said, were under the protection of southern warlords, who took exception to the harassment of their clients. “People were calling my home phone and threatening me,” he explained, a fact that helped convince him to shelve his long-term plans.
Acting as he was under orders from the SSDF—the authority in de facto control of the territory at the time—Joaar’s exploits are perhaps better described as semi-legitimate privateering rather than outright piracy. In either case, the man some call “the father of piracy” has since put his hijacking past behind him, though he has remained true to his maritime calling: Joaar is currently the director general of the Puntland Ministry of Fisheries, a position he has held since 2004.
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In 1995, two years after the commissioning of Joaar’s improvised coast guard, Boyah, Garaad Mohammed (another of Eyl’s early pirate leaders), and other Eyl fishermen unleashed their own vigilante brigade upon the seas. At least, 1995 is the starting date Boyah gave me; Stig Jarle Hansen, a Norwegian Puntland specialist who has conducted his own interviews with Boyah, reported him as claiming that “professional piracy” had begun in 1994, but that his group had been engaged in struggles with foreign trawlers as early as 1992. (Momman, one of Boyah’s former lieutenants, later told me that the group had begun operations back in 1991.)5. The public record lends some credence to Hansen’s version of events, showing a sharp rise in both pirate attacks and hijackings in 1994, though the total number of hijackings (four) remained very low.6
Boyah and his colleagues were the original models for the oft-invoked media image of the fisherman-pirate locked in a one-sided struggle against the forces of foreign exploitation. They certainly cultivated this impression; if Boyah is to be believed, his operations were directed solely against foreign fishing trawlers, though this claim could easily have been influenced by the desire to justify his actions to the outside world. His tactics were still relatively basic; Boyah repeatedly denied to me that he or his men had ever used motherships, saying they stayed relatively close to shore in their fishing skiffs. Hansen’s research attests to this limited range; from 1991 to 1995, almost half of all pirate attacks occurred in Puntland waters, while fewer than one-sixth took place on the high seas.7
In 2003, Somali piracy underwent a metamorphosis, thanks to the vision of a complete outsider: Mohamed Abdi Hassan, known as Afweyne (“Big Mouth”), a former civil servant from the distant central coastal town of Harardheere. Drawing on his fellow Habir Gedir clan members (a branch of the Hawiye), Afweyne formed the Somali Marines, an organization that transformed his hometown and its southern neighbour Hobyo—which had hitherto spawned relatively little pirate activity—into the centre of the pirate world.
A capitalist at heart, Afweyne was the first to realize the potential of piracy as a business, and went about raising venture funds for his pirate operations as if he were launching a Wall Street IPO. One repentant potential investor recalled Afweyne’s sales pitch: “He asked me to invest USD 2,000, as he was gathering money for his new business venture. He was begging … [but] I did not invest and I regret it so much today.”8
Like any conscientious employer, Afweyne sought to provide the very best training for his employees. Though the old boys of Eyl belonged to the rival Majerteen clan, Afweyne was not one to allow tribalism to get in the way of business, and he personally recruited the most locally renowned pirates—including Boyah and Garaad Mohammed—to work as instructors. The Eyl veterans did not limit their role to that of mere consultants but travelled up and down the coast, organizing and even participating in pirate operations. Even in 2007–2008, after most of the Eyl pirate leaders had returned to Puntland—attracted by the easy hunting offered in the Gulf of Aden—piracy remained the incestuous province of the Majerteen and Habir Gedir clans. Boyah, during our numerous conversations, was not shy about discussing the Eyl–Harardheere connection, readily speaking about “joint operations” between the two groups; one such collaborative effort was the hijacking of the MV Faina, the tank-laden Ukrainian transport ship that first splashed Somali piracy across international headlines. Boyah was upfront about Afweyne’s business acumen: “Afweyne hand picked his pirate group,” he later testified, “carefully designed it to keep costs low, profits high and to maximize efficiency.”9
In contrast to previous groups, the Somali Marines were extremely well organized, employing a military-style hierarchy with titles such as fleet admiral, admiral, vice admiral, and head of financial operations (Afweyne himself).10 They exhibited an operational sophistication that matched their corporate professionalism, employing motherships that extended their attack radius hundreds of kilometres from the coast.
Around the same time, other professionally organized groups began to appear. Garaad Mohammed was not content to remain as Afweyne’s underling, but formed his own organization, the National Volunteer Coast Guard (NVCG), in the major southern port of Kismaayo.11 Not only were groups like the NVCG and the Somali Marines more sophisticated in an operational sense, their creative names—which cast them as the defenders of Somali waters against the imperialist incursions of foreign vessels—showed that their PR acumen was keeping pace.
But though their official raison d’être might have been to prevent the theft of Somalia’s fish, the Somali Marines showed no shame in attacking those whose intentions were quite the opposite. From 2005 to 2007, the gang targeted World Food Programme (WFP) transports delivering vital food aid to the famine-stricken population of southern Somalia, attacking five vessels and hijacking at least two. Perhaps Afweyne was aware of his potential vulnerability to accusations of hypocrisy; following the seizure of the MV Semlow in June 2005, he claimed the vessel’s 850-tonne cargo of rice in the name of the people of Harardheere, accusin
g the international community of neglecting the region.12 The threat to WFP vessels did not disappear until late 2007, when the French navy began to escort the shipments to port.
As for Afweyne, he has since entered a comfortable semi-retirement, handing over many of the day-to-day operations of the family business to his son Abdulkhadar. Afweyne is perhaps one of the few men to fit the media stereotype of a cash-flush pirate kingpin, having allegedly converted his pirate earnings into a business empire stretching from India to Kenya. He has even enjoyed the dubious distinction of a state reception from eccentric Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who had revealed a quixotic affection for the Somali pirates during his seventy-five-minute rant at the 2009 UN General Assembly world leaders’ summit.
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As a boil festers before it bursts, the 2003–2006 Eyl–Harardheere alliance represented an incubation period for the Somali pirates, a time during which they gradually accumulated capital and experience, continually reinvesting their ransom money in ongoing operations. By the 2008 explosion of piracy in the Gulf of Aden, the pirate business model had already been tried and tested, and sufficient cash was available from previous ransoms to provide gainful employment for the countless volunteers lining up on the beaches of Eyl.
For the poorly educated, locally born youth, the security sector, both public and private, had been the steadiest source of formal sector jobs. It came as a shock, then, when in April 2008 the Puntland government ran out of money to pay its security forces. Many members of the police and army naturally sought alternative employment, and there was hardly a more lucrative career than piracy for a young man possessing nothing but a gun and a desperate disregard for his own life.
Scant other opportunities were available. Puntland’s almost non-existent factories provide only a handful of manufacturing jobs, and the already negligible seafood export industry had been suffering on account of both illegal foreign fishing and the decline of lobster stocks. Day labour in Puntland’s rapidly expanding cities was one of the only avenues of steady employment open to the estimated 70 per cent of Puntlanders under the age of thirty. While much of the population (65 per cent, according to the Puntland government), remains nomadic, living a traditional pastoral lifestyle outside the formal economy, the increasing numbers of nomads flocking to urban centres in recent years have not found much to occupy their time other than the drug khat.
There is legitimate money to be made in Somalia. But the most lucrative business opportunities—livestock export, the transport and telecommunications industries, as well as jobs in government and the civil service—are monopolized by educated Somali expats, who speak English and Arabic and often split their time between Somalia and their adoptive homelands. The result has been a gross socioeconomic gap between those who were able to escape the civil war and those who were forced to remain in Somalia and suffer the brunt of the violence. For the masses of unemployed and resentful local youth, piracy was a quick way to achieve the respect and standard of living that the circumstances of their birth had denied them.
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Before the presence of the massive naval flotillas that now jam Somali coastal waters, the risks were fewer, but the payouts were also relatively paltry. One of the Somali Marines’ most noteworthy prizes in the early days was the MV Feisty Gas, a Hong Kong–flagged liquid petroleum tanker captured in April 2005. In exchange for her release, the Marines received a mere $315,000, likely about one-tenth the sum they might have received five years down the line. Since then, ransom amounts have crept steadily higher, with each new precedent exerting an upward pressure on future payments. At the time of writing, the highest recorded ransom had reached a staggering $9.5 million, paid in November 2010 to free the oil supertanker Samho Dream.
Later generations of pirates owed their extravagant multimillion-dollar ransoms to the negotiating abilities of the pioneers. Indeed, the triumvirate of Afweyne, Boyah, and Garaad Mohammed could be compared to the hard-nosed leaders of a newly formed labour union—though in their struggle for higher wages they admittedly employed stronger-arm tactics than typically seen in collective bargaining. The lucrative ransoms for which they fought predictably attracted a new influx of independent groups to the industry—what I refer to as the “third wave” of piracy in Puntland. Many of these pirates were opportunists without histories in fishing, often disaffected inland youth. Yet their recent entry into the field did not stop them from telling any apologist reporter who would listen that persecution by foreign fishing fleets had driven them to their desperate course.
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Harardheere’s piracy dominance temporarily came to an end in 2006, when the Islamic Courts Union—an Islamist political movement—seized control of the south of the country and cracked down on pirate operations, claiming that the practice violated Islamic law. This paved the way for piracy to relocate to the next logical locale: back to Puntland, the gateway to the Gulf of Aden. From 2007 to 2008, Eyl was the undisputed capital of the Somali pirate empire, until the establishment of the heavily patrolled maritime safety corridor in the Gulf of Aden allowed Harardheere to reclaim the title in late 2009.
International recognition of the problem was sluggish. Though mariners in Somali waters had for years been keeping their eyes nervously glued to their radar displays, the triple intrigue of arms, oil, and Americans was needed for the Somali pirates to make international news headlines. The galvanizing event was the September 2008 seizure of the Ukrainian transport ship Faina, which combined the mystique of high-seas buccaneers and international weapons trafficking: in contravention of a UN embargo, the Faina was carrying Soviet-era tanks destined for southern Sudan, likely with the full knowledge of the Kenyan government. Two months later came the daring hijacking of the MV Sirius Star, a Saudi supertanker carrying $100 million in crude oil; seized a shocking eight hundred and fifty kilometres southeast of Somalia, the incident marked the furthest the Somali pirates had ventured out to sea at the time. Finally, in April 2009, pirates attacked the Maersk Alabama, the first American cargo vessel to be hijacked in two centuries. A tense three-day standoff with an American warship, worthy of a Hollywood script, ended with three Navy SEAL sniper bullets to the hijackers’ heads and the lone survivor brought back to face US justice in a New York courtroom. The Alabama incident catapulted Somali sea piracy to the attention of the American public, and convinced editors around the world that the pirates were worthy of their front pages.
This trinity of hijackings that seized the imagination of the average news consumer were the brainchildren of the founding fathers of Somali piracy: the Faina was a joint operation between Boyah’s and Garaad Mohammed’s gangs and the Somali Marines, the Sirius Star hijacking was carried out by Afweyne’s group alone, and the Alabama attack was publicly claimed by Garaad.13
The Somali pirates had come of age.
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The basic characteristics that made Puntland an ideal spawning ground for pirates had existed since its founding in 1998. Why, then, did it take ten years for piracy to develop into the present epidemic? Four main causes explain the rise of piracy in Puntland: geopolitics, environmental factors, economic adversity, and breakdown of governance (two other principal factors, illegal fishing and toxic dumping, and the Puntland Coast Guard, will be discussed in Chapter 4).
In geopolitical terms, two factors lent Puntland a comparative advantage in the piracy “industry”: its location and its relative (but tenuous) stability. The benefit of its geography is readily apparent: situated right at the intersection of the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden, Puntland straddles one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. More than 20,000 commercial vessels, or about 10 per cent of global shipping, transit through the Gulf of Aden each year.
Second, Puntland’s isolation from the ongoing civil war in the south as well as its semi-functioning government ensured that pirate organizers would be left in relative peace to plan and carry out their operations. Piracy is not so much organized crime as it is a
business, characterized by extremely efficient capital flows, low start-up costs, and few entry barriers. Pirates, almost as much as businessmen, require a certain level of order and predictability for their enterprises to prosper (and to avoid getting ripped off by actual organized crime networks). Roger Middleton, a Horn of Africa expert with the London-based think tank Chatham House, summed it up eloquently for me: “Puntland was the perfect area for pirates to operate because it’s just stable enough, but also ungoverned enough. You don’t have the chronic instability you have further south … There’s too great a chance of getting caught in the crossfire and too many competing interests to pay off.”
The link between political stability and the frequency of pirate attacks has some convincing empirical support; when Puntland descended into violence, piracy was the first business to suffer. In 1992, for instance, the year when Abdullahi Yusuf was locked in a fierce conflict to prevent the Islamist organization al-Ittihad al-Islami from establishing a Puntland foothold, piracy completely disappeared from the region. In 1994–1995, after Yusuf had triumphed and relative peace was restored, the frequency of pirate attacks began to creep up once more.14
The theory holds for Harardheere and Hobyo as well, which are located in another autonomous region—Galmudug—insulated from the chaotic south. Galmudug, with an administration far weaker than even Puntland’s, was perhaps an even more ideal business environment for pirate entrepreneurs—a fact that the astute Afweyne was able to capitalize on.
Somaliland, in contrast, possesses a Gulf of Aden coastline comparable to Puntland’s, yet the few pirates originating from the region have been swiftly arrested and incarcerated by the local authorities. The difference is due to Somaliland’s greater political stability, a product of its robust history of democracy and inter-clan consensus. Its central government can exert control over its territory in a way that Puntland’s leaders, who must navigate a much more fractured clan landscape, cannot. In the south, in short, the pirates had to fear other criminals; in Somaliland, the danger came from a more traditional source: the police.