The Pirates of Somalia

by Jay Bahadur

  * * *

  The peaceful election of Abdirahman Farole—a PhD candidate from Melbourne’s La Trobe University—in January 2009 was regarded as something of a landmark in Puntland politics; he was only the second civilian Somali leader, along with Somaliland founder Mohamed Egal, since the assassination of Somali Republic president Abdirashid Ali Shermarke in 1969. During his political campaign, Farole promised to get tough on piracy, a stance he has reiterated in media interviews since his election. Hoping to tease out the specifics of his plan, I spoke with him at the presidential compound in the centre of Garowe.

  Farole, meaning “fused toes,” was a nickname that the president had inherited from his great-grandfather. In his mid-sixties, Farole was diminutive, but the intensity of his almost-feline eyes commanded an authority that his body did not; they seemed to swallow anyone meeting his gaze. The president was an erudite man, fluent in English, Arabic, and Italian, and his first sentence to me inaugurated a half-hour lecture on the history of Somalia’s current tribulations; finally, I managed to steer the conversation towards the topic of the Puntland Coast Guard.

  “We are nowhere near being able to establish a functioning coast guard,” Farole began bluntly. “This force must be professionally trained and equipped with speedboats, telecommunications, and GPS technology, heavy weapons, and a continual supply of fuel,” he said, at a cost that the Puntland government was unable to shoulder. With his administration struggling to keep up with monthly army wages of $30, financing the monthly coast guard salary of $300 (a necessary wage, said the president, for a highly skilled job requiring long periods spent absent from families) for a hundreds-strong force would be impossible without international financial assistance.

  “Money will also be needed to reward marines who successfully capture pirate vessels,” said Farole, adding that additional funds would be required to satisfy traditional Somali clan law, or heer, which requires compensation to be paid to the families of soldiers killed in action. Hearing the president speak, it was clear that he anticipated much blood being spilt—for him, a resolute and dogged fight against piracy would be a war, with casualties unavoidable. “Unless you truly get the will and commitment of the people behind you,” said Farole, “you cannot win any war.”

  Winning a war also requires a command of logistics, an area in which the president admitted Puntland was notably deficient. The region possesses close to half of Somalia’s thirty-three-hundred-kilometre coastline, yet communications, radar, and satellite centres in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden—which would provide intelligence and coordination to the coast guard—are yet to be established. Additionally, mechanisms are still required to integrate the Puntland Coast Guard with the institutions of NATO, the European Union, the International Maritime Bureau, and individual foreign navies.

  The president had little faith in the ability of a private security firm to overcome these formidable challenges. When I asked about SomCan’s future role as coast guard, his response was guardedly noncommittal—but not optimistic. “I don’t believe they will be effective for this difficult task,” he said. “Because they didn’t do anything in the past.” For the moment, at least, the president was not looking to hand over SomCan’s job to anyone else once the company’s present contract expired.

  “We are not prepared to create a coast guard without international help,” Farole said, adding that the fight against the pirates would be in the hands of Puntland’s regular ground troops, deployed from their Bossaso garrison. For Farole, however, international concerns over piracy were of secondary importance to those closer to home. “Measures need to go beyond preventing piracy against commercial ships,” he said. “Piracy is [the international community’s] problem—well, it’s ours too—but what is specifically our problem is illegal fishing.” Until illegal fishing was curtailed, the president was adamant that the ministry’s days as a licence printing press were over: “We are not planning to issue any fishing licences before we have full control of our seas.”

  The Puntland government’s dream of gaining sovereignty over its seas remains distant. Puntland currently relies almost entirely on foreign warships to provide ersatz coast guard services in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean (only the day before I spoke with the president, the French navy had handed over nine Somali captives to Puntland officials—a far more tempered response than the overzealous Operation Thalathine). But operating an international armada at a cost of tens of millions per month is not sustainable; eventually, a locally owned coast guard, one free of Hart’s and SomCan’s unsavoury legacy of profiteering, will be required to safeguard Somalia’s dangerous waters.

  * * *

  On June 30, 2009, SomCan’s contract with the Puntland government expired, and—not surprisingly—was not renewed. During the last few months of its tenure, SomCan—perhaps still hoping to prove its worth to the new administration—continued to hunt illegal fishing ships with furious resolve. On March 12, the company’s boat headed out of Bossaso harbour on patrol, and on March 31 it caught up with two ships fishing illegally near Hafun. After escorting them back to Bossaso and impounding them, the SomCan owners were greeted with an irate reaction from the Ministry of Fisheries, which produced copies of two licences that it had recently issued to the vessels (which were subsequently released). Apparently, just a few months after Farole had assured me of his government’s intention to scrap the corrupt fishing licensing schemes of past Puntland administrations, the arbitrary issuing of licences had seamlessly resumed.

  These developments were not welcomed by Said Orey, a fact he made clear on the porch of my Garowe residence shortly before the expiration of SomCan’s contract. “We are entitled to collect 49 per cent of the proceeds of all fishing licences sold by the Puntland government, but the fishing ministry won’t even tell us it’s selling them,” he said, looking disgusted. “It’s clear that people from the Ministry of Fisheries are working with illegal fishing interests.”

  A few days later, over lunch at the house of a mutual friend, I asked Director General Joaar about the ministry’s renewed interest in the licence-printing business. “Yes, we started selling licences again—with the permission of the president—for forty-five-day periods,” he admitted. “But only six have been sold so far.”

  When I brought up SomCan’s contractual right to almost half the revenue from the licences, Joaar waved his hand dismissively.

  “Said Orey is himself a pirate,” he declared. “Our office still hasn’t received a copy of that contract. It was a deal that was completely under the table.”

  SomCan and the Ministry of Fisheries butted heads for a second time towards the end of May, after the company attacked and arrested three more foreign fishing vessels in the vicinity of Bargaal. These vessels, according to Orey, were entirely different from the two arrested in the March incident, but Joaar insisted that two of the three were the exact same ships SomCan had erroneously captured two months earlier. “This time, I told them: ‘If you think you can capture those ships, go ahead and try—because they have security on board,’ ” said Joaar. This security had been provided by the Puntland government after the vessel’s previous run-in with SomCan, as Joaar freely admitted. “If we give them licences,” he explained, “we are responsible for what happens to them.”

  The SomCan patrol ship had nonetheless confronted the vessels, and, after they refused to surrender, opened fire. Responding to the fishing vessels’ distress calls, the Spanish warship Numancia, the flagship of the European Union fleet, arrived and attempted to mediate the situation. After receiving confirmation from unidentified onshore ministry officials—relayed through the Numancia—that the ships were legally licensed, SomCan disengaged and left the scene. Following the episode, Orey told me, he received a personal rebuke from the office of the president.

  At best, these incidents revealed a buffoonish lack of coordination between the Puntland government and its supposed official coast guard; at worst, an endemic state of vena
lity and double-dealing within the Puntland Ministry of Fisheries that had been granted President Farole’s blessing. In any case, the ministry’s—and Joaar’s—antipathy towards SomCan seemed somewhat self-defeating: without a coast guard backing it up, one wonders why any foreign fishing vessel would ever bother to buy a Puntland licence. But the potential loss of revenue did not seem to dampen Joaar’s sense of triumph over his adversaries.

  “SomCan is finished,” he said, wiping his hands together. “No more.”

  * * *

  SomCan’s demise, however, did not bring an end to the Puntland government’s dalliances with private security contractors. In November 2010, Puntland entered into a deal with Saracen International, a South African private security firm with no clear address, to “train and mentor” a “Puntland Marine Force.”12 Even by the standards of the murky Hart and SomCan deals, Puntland’s agreement with Saracen had all the transparency of a muddy lake. The firm—whose Ugandan subsidiary has been fingered by the UN Security Council for training rebel paramilitary forces in the Congo—is headed by Lafras Lutingh, a former officer in the Civil Cooperation Bureau, a notorious apartheid-era internal security force.13 Several months after the announcement of the Puntland deal, Saracen was revealed to be covertly backed by Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater (now Xe Services), the much-maligned military contractor implicated in the 2007 deaths of fourteen Iraqi civilians. Saracen is currently in the process of training a one-thousand-strong anti-piracy militia in Puntland, equipped with 120 pickup trucks, four armoured vehicles, and six patrol aircraft.14 The funding for this ambitious program, Somali officials initially announced, would come from an unnamed Middle Eastern country (later revealed to be the United Arab Emirates) with a vested commercial interest in keeping the Gulf of Aden shipping lane pirate-free.

  The Puntland government, it seems, is yet to learn the lesson of the last decade. Far from being an impartial government actor, the coast guard operated as a business enterprise, generating its own revenues through the sordid sale of fishing permits to private clients. Instead of preventing violent confrontations between the locals and foreign fishing fleets, the coast guard took sides, posting armed guards on the decks of a select group of foreign vessels. In doing so, it accentuated the grievances that were driving the local fishermen to commit feats of piracy.

  After doing its bit to accelerate the rise of piracy in Puntland, in 2005 the SomCan Coast Guard itself took a turn at hijacking. When the company subsequently dispersed, many of its former employees, trained to combat piracy, themselves joined the burgeoning ranks of pirates sweeping into the Gulf of Aden. In early 2009, SomCan completed the circuit, actively recruiting so-called “reformed pirates” into its ranks.

  First in line was one of Eyl’s most notorious sons, the infamous Garaad Mohammed.

  5

  Garaad

  IN THE EVER-SHIFTING WORLD OF PIRATES, COAST GUARDS, AND fishermen, the movement amongst the three professions has never been in only one direction. As some coast guards have transitioned to piracy, so have some pirates made the shift into coast-guarding. Of this latter trend, there is no better example than Garaad Mohammed.

  Like many pirate pioneers, Garaad grew up as a fisherman in Eyl, joining his comrades in the struggle against illegal fishing. Beginning in 2003, Garaad, along with Boyah and the other Eyl veterans, travelled south to Harardheere to provide training to Afweyne’s Somali Marines. Garaad’s bloodline made him an ideal inter-clan go-between; his father belonged to the Isse Mahamoud of Eyl, but his mother was born Habir Gedir, the same sub-clan as Afweyne and the other Harardheere pirates.

  Shortly after he began joint operations with the Marines, Garaad founded his own group, the National Volunteer Coast Guard (NVCG), an organization based in the southern city of Kismaayo that specialized in targeting small boats and fishing vessels. But even after the formation of the NVCG, Garaad’s affiliation with Afweyne and the Harardheere gangs did not end, and he continued to finance gangs operating out of central and northern Somalia.

  On April 8, 2009, four of Garaad’s henchmen, operating from the commandeered Taiwanese fishing vessel Win Far 161, attacked the MV Maersk Alabama several hundred kilometres off the central Somali coast as she was steaming towards Mombasa. In what was the first piracy of a US-registered vessel in two centuries, the hijackers boarded the vessel and took Captain Richard Phillips and two other American citizens hostage on the bridge. As the leader of the attackers attempted to locate the rest of the crew, he was ambushed in the darkened engine room by the Alabama’s chief engineer, Mike Perry, who, though armed only with a knife, managed to overpower him. After the leader was released in a bungled attempt to exchange him for Captain Phillips, all four hijackers fled in the Alabama’s cramped lifeboat, taking Phillips along with them.

  The destroyer USS Bainbridge was the first US warship to arrive at the scene, as if guided by the spirit of her namesake, Commodore William Bainbridge, a nineteenth-century naval officer who had played a pivotal role in the war against the Barbary pirates of northern Africa. A tense hostage standoff with the lifeboat ensued. Over the next three days, the increasingly jittery pirates—whom Phillips nicknamed “The Leader,” “Musso,” “Tall Guy,” and “Young Guy”—subjected him to sadistic psychological torture, the details of which Phillips related in a book about the incident, A Captain’s Duty:

  “When we kill you, we’re going to put you in an unclean place,” the Leader said. “That’s where I’m taking you now.”

  “What does that mean?”

  They explained that they knew about this shallow reef where the water was stagnant. It wasn’t part of a tide pool that came in and washed the bay every twelve hours. Any body dropped there would rot and bloat and stink to high heaven.

  “Very bad place,” Musso said.

  I couldn’t hold it any longer. I felt a rush of wetness on my pant leg. They were letting me piss myself like a goddamn animal.

  The rage just welled up in me. I felt degraded. I was screaming at the pirates, just cursing them and telling them they were going to die.1

  For three of the four men, Phillips’s morbid prediction came true. On April 12, believing Phillips’s life to be in immediate danger, Commander Frank Castellano ordered the Bainbridge forces into action, upon which Navy SEAL snipers killed the three hijackers remaining on the lifeboat. The Leader, Abdiweli Muse (a Puntlander from Galkayo), who had been on board the Bainbridge conducting ransom negotiations when the rescue took place, suddenly found his bargaining position shot to bits. He was taken to New York to stand trial, and in February 2011 was sentenced to almost thirty-four years in prison.

  Following the Alabama attack, Garaad vowed revenge against the Americans, and ordered his organization to retaliate. Two days later, a boatload of Garaad’s men sighted the MV Liberty Sun, a US-flagged vessel carrying food aid destined for Somalia, which they proceeded to pursue and blast with rocket-propelled grenades; fortunately, neither the vessel nor her crew were harmed. In a subsequent phone interview with the Agence France-Presse, Garaad made it clear that the motive for the attack was anything but financial. “We were not after a ransom,” he said. “We … assigned a team with special equipment to chase and destroy any ship flying the American flag in retaliation for the brutal killing of our friends.”2

  In February 2009, two months before the Alabama hijacking, I had sat across a table from Garaad on the patio of a Bossaso hotel, listening to him discuss his plans to join the Puntland Coast Guard.

  * * *

  I had been trying to get in touch with him for weeks, but Garaad had exhibited a tendency to disappear for long stretches of time once the initial contact was made. My interpreter Warsame and I had been supposed to meet him the previous day, but after preliminary discussions in the morning, Garaad turned off his phone and we didn’t hear back from him. “He’s off chewing khat somewhere,” Warsame suggested. The next day, Garaad called us with his explanation: “I was busy.”

  After agre
eing to meet us at four o’clock, his phone was off again. It was twenty minutes past four, and I was starting to get worried. I had heard disturbing reports of Garaad’s lack of regard for conventional notions of politeness; one of my hosts, Abdirizak, recounted how Garaad had stood him up for a 10 a.m. meeting two days in a row. When one of our party informed Warsame and me that he had recently spotted Garaad near the khat market, chewing with some friends, it seemed that today’s rendezvous was destined to share a similar fate. “Forget it,” said Warsame, “he’s not coming. He won’t move for the rest of the afternoon.” Soon afterwards, we got a call; despite the hypnotic powers of the khat, Garaad was on his way to the hotel. “His phone must have been off to avoid the people calling him for money,” our friend suggested.

  At about twenty-five minutes past four, Garaad showed up at the gated entrance to the hotel, and Warsame and I joined him on the restaurant patio. With his freshly ironed dress shirt, pressed slacks, and clean, cropped hair, Garaad blended right in with the crowd of Somali businessmen staying at the hotel. In contrast to his impeccable outfit, his face looked ragged and exhausted for someone in his mid-thirties, his eyes scratched raw by the constant rubbing of his fingers—a textbook case of khat withdrawal. Like Boyah, his face was slightly emaciated, and Warsame suggested afterwards that, like Boyah, he may have also been suffering from tuberculosis—perhaps indicative of a pirate-specific strain of the disease making the rounds. Also like Boyah, the indifference he showed towards me bordered on disdain. He shook my hand with a limp and lifeless motion, barely glancing in my direction. Throughout our meeting, he continually checked his phone, peering around as if hoping for someone to come and take him to the real interview.