The Pirates of Somalia

by Jay Bahadur

  It had been a day well spent.

  * * *

  Two days later, we returned to the same spot, arms weighted down with even bulkier bags of khat—and thus with a commensurately larger pirate gathering in tow. Boyah, when we picked him up on the side of the road, let us know that he had had a rough night. “I was terribly sick with a kidney problem,” he said. “I thought I was going to die, so I said goodbye to my kids. But I’m feeling much better today.” He hopped into the 4×4 and waited patiently for us to get under way.

  Two other cars joined us, bringing the total gathering of pirates to seven: Boyah, Momman, Ali Ghedi, Mohammad Duale (I have changed his name), Ahmed Jadob, and two others to whom I was not properly introduced. Much like last time, we rolled out the dirins and flopped down, propped up on our elbows. Pulling two bundles of the wilting leaves out of the bag, Boyah offered me my pick. I hesitated for a moment before I remembered an earlier crash course in khat quality given to me by the Colonel. Quickly scanning the bundle, I chose the bunch with the greatest abundance of red-tinged stems. Boyah smiled, laughed, and slapped my leg playfully, uttering some words of praise. He was still wearing the Blue Jays shirt, evidenced by the powder-blue collar poking out from under his cotton overshirt.

  The reason these men were so willing to talk to me went beyond the complimentary khat. When I had last seen him, four months ago, Boyah had been on a personal quest to atone for his past misdeeds. Now, it seemed, his feelings of remorse had spread to his former colleagues: each of the men around me claimed to have renounced piracy, never to return to his former trade—and they wanted people to know it. “It wasn’t good, either for us or our country,” explained Boyah. “It’s cursed money—it only made our lives worse. So we quit. We don’t want to get a bad name in foreign countries.”

  When I suggested that the recent proliferation of warships off the Somali coast had provided an equally compelling reason to turn in one’s rocket-propelled grenades and grappling ladder, I was met with a round of scornful laughter. “Don’t think that we’re scared,” said Boyah. “Piracy is just not good for us. We’re quitting so that Somalia can get its nice name back. Seven months ago … French and US forces were killing us, and we didn’t stop then.”

  As had been the case two days ago, my companions fell into relaxed conversation, hardly conscious of my presence. For people who had never set foot outside Somalia and had access to no more than a few local TV stations, Boyah and his entourage were surprisingly worldly: Momman and Ali Ghedi engaged in an animated debate about whether France or Brazil boasted the most beautiful women.

  There was a lull in the conversation, and Ali, having just learned that I had fired a Kalashnikov for the first time two days ago, turned and brazenly challenged me to a shooting contest.

  “Laag?” For money? I asked, showing off one of the few Somali words I knew.

  “Yes, for money,” he replied, with a crooked grin. I gestured to the backgammon board I had brought along with me, and asked him if he would match my wager on the gun with his own wager on the dice. He meekly demurred.

  * * *

  Since giving up the piracy trade, Boyah and his men had put their time to good use. Garaad, whose dealings with SomCan had begun some months earlier, had spread his career ambitions to his former colleagues—or so my sources said; the rumours were that Boyah’s gang had also recently entered a partnership with the SomCan Coast Guard. But I soon discovered that the rumours were out of date. “We used to work with them, but that’s all over,” said Boyah. “What they wanted and what we needed were totally different.” What Boyah’s men had needed, apparently, was a fresh start.

  “We want to start our own coast guard,” he said. “In fact, we’ve already started.” Their efforts to date, however, had not extended much beyond signing up the men presently lounging around me. “We’re hoping the Puntland government will give us the job,” said Boyah. “Once they do, we’ll get the ships and weapons we need from them.” Until then, it seemed, Boyah’s coast guard would remain landlocked. His confidence, nonetheless, was unshaken.

  “We know how to fight with pirates,” he said. “You can’t teach us anything about hijacking ships.” But immediately his bellicose tone softened: “Of course, we would never kill anyone, even the pirates. There are other ways—peaceful ways—we can get them to release the ships. Before you shoot someone, you can talk to him. If we were in charge, no one would ever have to pay any ransoms, nor would anyone ever die on those ships. We would work it out some way.” Despite my pressing, Boyah and his colleagues would not be more specific about what their method would entail.

  In defiance of Boyah’s optimism were the two ships currently being held hostage at Eyl, their hijackers unreceptive to his efforts at moral suasion. For these men, Boyah had a simple explanation. “They still have the old system in their heads, and they don’t want to let it go. Plus, they’ve already spent so much money while waiting for the ransom. If they leave it now without being paid, there are thousands of people they owe money to who will kill them. Maybe when they get off they’ll change their minds, and not return to piracy.”

  For all his talk of persuasion, Boyah believed that a military solution would be just as effective. “If a warship attacked them, they would run, just like we would have,” said Boyah. “These people are not Al-Qaeda; they just want money. They don’t kill people.”

  On land, Boyah claimed that his group was already making a difference. Under the guidance of preeminent Muslim scholar (and Puntland’s unofficial grand mufti) Sheikh Abdulkhadar Nur Farah, Boyah’s gang of reformed pirates had taken on a role similar to the ex-convicts who speak to high school student assemblies; along with Sheikh Farah, Boyah and his men would drag groups of misguided youth to mosque, where they would make them swear on the Koran to live piracy-free for the rest of their days. According to Boyah, his group had helped reform seven hundred pirates and would-be pirates from around Puntland (though the BBC, which had run the story three weeks earlier, reported the number of rehabilitated pirates at around two hundred).12 Altruism was probably not Boyah’s sole motive, however; in exchange for their efforts, the Puntland government had granted Boyah and his associates full legal amnesty for their past crimes.

  Their services as coast guards, on the other hand, were not being so eagerly sought. President Farole was on his own quest to rehabilitate Puntland’s damaged international reputation, and commissioning an ex-pirate brigade, composed of his own clan members, as his coast guard would not serve the image he was seeking. Though their redemption movement had been used as PR fodder by the Puntland government—as evidence of measures the new administration was taking to combat piracy—Farole had no plans to unleash Boyah and company once more onto the sea.

  * * *

  Up to this point, Boyah had been the only member of the gathering to answer my questions, while the others nodded along complacently as he talked. “Boyah speaks for all of us,” Momman responded, when I commented on this fact. In an attempt to engage with someone other than Boyah, I directed my questions to Ahmed, who was atypically dressed in a glaringly bright yellow soccer jersey. Beyond his attire, Ahmed also stuck out in another way: he was from the Hawiye clan, whereas all the others assembled were Darod. Originally from the southern city of Baidoa, he had emigrated to Eyl in 2002 and become a successful fisherman. Despite the historical animosity between the Hawiye and the Darod—which came to a head with the brutal clan pogroms of the early 1990s—history seemed to have been forgotten amongst this group of friends. “We pirates have no clans,” said Boyah. “We fight together as Somalis.”

  At my urging, Ahmed began to relate his story. “I was happy with my life,” he said. “One day, we were fishing some distance away from shore when we were attacked by some big fishing ships, who stole all our fish.” This event was repeated, he said, at least ten times. “They had big guns, and we would be forced to jump overboard. Sometimes, they would destroy our boats and we would have to swim all the way
back to shore.” According to Ahmed, the culprits were most often Thai or Korean fishing vessels. In what was by now a common story, Ahmed had banded together with similarly aggrieved fishermen along the length of the Puntland coast and beyond to fight illegal fishing.

  Groups like these resembled troops of revolutionaries more than criminal gangs, yet Western media sources invariably associated Somali pirates with a glamorous lifestyle akin to that of gangster rap stars, replete with lavish parties, mansions, luxury cars, drugs, alcohol, and beautiful women. But other than their habitual khat binges, little evidence of this stereotype was to be seen in the sedate, stoic (and now resurgently pious) figures of Boyah and his men. Each of them, as far as I had been able to discover, had but one wife. So what was to be said for the stories of “pirate wenches”?

  “There are some women like that … the drug addicts, the bad ones,” said Boyah. “The ones interested in money.” These pirate women, according to Boyah, were not local, but came from outside Puntland. Indeed, a roadhouse on the outskirts of Garowe—one that I had passed many times—had reportedly served in the past as a major transit hub for transporting women to Puntland’s coastal areas. But in Boyah’s estimation, the women were more than able to find their own way. “They follow the money,” he said.

  Mohammad turned to Boyah with a quizzical look. “I haven’t even seen the women you’re talking about,” he said.

  The same incredulity greeted my question about pirates and alcohol consumption, and generated a round of unmistakably hostile murmurs and head shakes.

  “We’re Muslims, so we don’t do that,” came the answer.

  “Some of them do—the young guys.” Boyah clarified. “They try it because it’s something new that they haven’t experienced before.”

  Such may have been the case on board a Russian-crewed hostage vessel, on which the pirates reportedly drank the ship’s entire store of vodka, stunning even the Russians with their debauchery. When I brought up this rumour, I again witnessed a round of shaking heads.

  “No, no. They drank a little bit, but not to that extent,” said Boyah. “They had a job to do. If they had gotten drunk, do you think they would have done it? Anyone who gets drunk, they kick off the ship.”

  Colonel Omar, lying on his back apart from the main circle, suddenly chimed in with his own version of events. “There was one boat with a lot of alcohol on board,” he said. “So the pirates threw it all into the sea, and when the crew asked for it, they told them that they had drunk it all.” Mohammad nodded his assent to the Colonel’s account.

  We continued chewing our khat as the sky grew dark, faces fading into the twilight until only the glowing points of cigarettes marked their locations. Abruptly, the Colonel roused himself from his nearby reverie and declared that the time had come to leave—the heightened risk of kidnapping made my presence a security liability at nighttime, even at a location as remote and isolated as this farm.

  As we rolled up the dirins and collected our garbage—to be dumped by the side of the main road—Boyah admonished me to tell the story of him and his men exactly as they had given it to me. “Something good has to come back to us from all of this,” he said.

  By the time we had pulled back onto the road it was fully dark. The white outline of the pirates’ Mark II station wagon was visible ahead of us, growing closer as Omar gunned our Land Cruiser towards it. The needle on the speedometer pushed past 140 kilometres per hour before we overtook the Mark II, passing it with a few fist-widths to spare. If this was the typical driving style on this unlit, steeply embanked roadway, the stripped chassis and blackened wrecks I routinely saw by the side of the road needed no explanation. We left the Mark II behind as we barrelled towards the lights of Garowe.

  7

  The Land of Punt

  IT WAS JUNE, AND GAROWE WAS IN THE MIDST OF THE HAGAA, the second of Puntland’s two dry seasons. It had been a month since rain last fell, and it would be three months before the next rain would come. The bridge over the Nugaal River spanned a vast, rocky emptiness; further down its course, the last vestiges of the wet season had dried to isolated, listless pools. In the evenings, the haunting refrains of Allahu akbar drifted from the muezzins over a ruddy landscape strewn with rusted cans, broken glass, and camel tracks. Garbage carpeted the streets; at an improvised dump at the outskirts of town, thousands of plastic bags caught in thorny shrubs formed a vast artificial garden.

  Since the collapse of the central state, the city has sprawled outwards, unchecked; over the last two decades Garowe’s population has multiplied eightfold, swelled by the influx of Darod clanspeople fleeing the violence in the south. Virtually ignored under the dictatorship of Mohamed Siad Barre, the returning migrants inherited no infrastructure, financial base, or skilled bureaucracy, and were forced to build a functioning polity out of an empty desert.

  With a paltry $20 million annual budget that often fails to include items as basic as civil service salaries, it comes as no surprise that Puntland officials at all levels have been accused of systematically accepting bribes and payouts from pirate gangs in exchange for turning a blind eye. My own impression, however, was that there were few local officials actually worth bribing. State power was extremely decentralized and diffuse, and the military forces were highly immobile and mostly confined to garrisons in the large cities. In the smaller towns the government had virtually no presence, and certainly no armed force capable of matching firepower with even the smallest of pirate gangs.

  Yet, in spite of the logistical difficulties it faces—not to mention the suspicions about its own complicity—the Puntland government appears bent on proving to the world that it alone is capable of neutralizing the pirates on land.

  * * *

  Officially, the government of Puntland has advocated a strict policy of non-negotiation with pirates since the very beginning of the crisis. Former president Mohamud Muse Hersi, though himself accused of receiving ransom kickbacks, blamed the piracy problem on the willingness of international shippers to accede to the hijackers’ demands. “Can you reward a thief who mugged you?” said Hersi in an interview. “This money makes them stronger and encourages them to carry out more operations. We should never give in to their blackmailing.”1

  Hersi’s words were not empty. Where his government was given permission to act, it did not hesitate to confront the pirates head-on. In April 2008, for example, one hundred Puntland soldiers in several armoured boats stormed the UAE cargo ship Al Khaleej near Bossaso, capturing seven pirates, who were eventually sentenced to life in prison. Two soldiers and three hijackers sustained injuries, but the hostages were unharmed. A similar incident occurred in October of the same year, when (as described in Chapter 4) the Panamanian-flagged MV Wail was freed by the Puntland Coast Guard. In both cases, the ships had been contracted by local businessmen and were carrying consignments destined for Puntland.

  Judging from the Puntland government’s press statements, it is more than willing to send its security forces to storm every ship being held in its waters. The decision to employ force, however, lies with the vessels’ owners, most of whom have no interest in authorizing a potential bloodbath on the decks of their ships.

  Abdirahman Farole, who took over from Hersi as president in January 2009, was even more outwardly committed to cracking down on piracy, describing the practice as a black mark on Puntland’s international reputation. Three months after his election, Farole launched a grassroots counter-piracy program spearheaded by Sheikh Abdulkhadar Nur Farah. In what was described as an “educational and spiritual campaign” to discourage new recruits, the government offered total amnesty to any former pirate agreeing to give up the trade.2

  In the mosques, Muslim clerics decried the litany of social ills that piracy had supposedly introduced to the local community: alcohol, khat, sexually transmitted diseases, adultery, and fornication. To kick off the campaign, Puntland security forces conducted a highly publicized raid on two houses in Garowe, confiscating four as
sault rifles, 327 bottles of Ethiopian gin, five mobile phones, and approximately $900 in cash.3 Spectators cheered as soldiers hauled away suspected pirates.

  Farole’s religious campaign has not been an isolated media exercise. Since coming to power, he has tried his best to promote his administration as a fresh break from the one previous, which was widely perceived by international observers as weak and ineffectual. The media wing of the Puntland government has issued a constant stream of press releases detailing raids, arrests, and imprisonments of active pirates—part of a sustained publicity campaign to market the administration abroad as a reliable ally in the war on piracy.

  At home, Farole has relied on a network of local police commissioners and office holders to carry out his campaigns. One of these instrumental figures was Garowe’s long-serving mayor, Abdulkhadar Osman Fod’Adde.

  * * *

  Garowe’s mayoral office was situated in a rundown complex at the centre of town. A bare flagpole stood by the entrance to a crumbling courtyard; on the steps of the building, a small congregation of clan elders lounged in their ma’awises, idly discussing the matters of the day. Inside, the scene was markedly different: Abdulkhadar Fod’Adde sat behind a heavy cherry desk in a tidy and orderly office, dressed in a trim suit and tie. The two Omars had accompanied me, and I took a seat between them across the desk, the Colonel on my right, Kalashnikov slung over a shoulder, and Omar Farole to my left, serving as my interpreter.

  “I worked for the previous government for two and a half years,” Fod’Adde began. “It was the worst job I’ve ever had. That was a really bad government to work with; this one is much better. Security was really bad, especially last December,” he continued. “There were a lot of pirates, and we couldn’t do anything about it … we weren’t given enough money. Under this government, there are fewer pirates, we have more money, and security is a lot better. We can see things getting better and better every day, and that encourages us to work hard at our jobs.”