by Jay Bahadur
* * *
Like a tattered quilt that has been patched too many times, the international legal framework governing piracy is worn and inadequate, with legislative stitching like Resolution 1816 and the Merchant Shipping Act barely keeping it from coming apart at the seams. Still, given an array of imperfect solutions, the “dumping ground” option may be the best choice for the present. For all the flaws of its legal system, Kenya is a relatively stable, democratic country. It possesses a large and vibrant Somali community that can lend its support to detainees during the trial process, provide links to their families, and aid in their possible integration into Kenyan society following their release.
In September 2010, hopes for a permanent Kenyan solution were dealt a setback. After months-long wrangling over what the Kenyan government deemed to be unsatisfactory financial assistance from the international community, Kenya barred its prison doors to future waves of captured pirates. Two months later, a senior Kenyan judge issued a controversial ruling ordering the release of the approximately sixty suspected pirates brought into custody prior to the passage of the Merchant Shipping Act.
Spurred by Kenya’s increasing unreliability as a partner, Western countries have since begun to take justice into their own hands. In the first trial of its kind in almost two centuries, on November 29, 2010, a Virginia judge sentenced one pirate to thirty years for his involvement in a (clearly confused) assault on a US warship; five of his colleagues will face possible life imprisonment when they are sentenced in March. At around the same time, Germany announced that it was to try ten pirates captured in an attack on the German cargo vessel MV Taipan, and the following month both Spain and Belgium revealed their intentions to follow suit. In December, the Netherlands became the first European country to prosecute pirates who had not been involved in an attack on its own nationals, agreeing to try five Somalis captured by the HNLMS Amsterdam following an attack on a South African yacht. In January 2011, South Korea joined the fray; following a commando raid on the commandeered oil supertanker MV Samho Jewelry—the first of its kind on a vessel whose crew had not retreated to a secure area—the Koreans flew five surviving pirates back to Seoul, where they were charged with attempted murder (soon after, Somali pirates began appearing as characters on Korean television shows). At present, these à la carte prosecutions seem more piecemeal reactions to specific incidents, rather than a true indication of the “global diversification” of pirate justice. Whether a consistent alternative to the Kenyan solution will be necessary will depend on the outcome of its government’s ongoing feud with the international community.
With all these prosecutions, there is the danger that the defendants’ rights surrounding issues like family access, evidentiary rules, and reintegration following acquittal or release may not be adequately protected. While Nyawinda’s Guantanamo Bay parallels may be alarmist or extreme, a similar kind of legal purgatory could be created by current practices. James Gathii, for instance, warns that the “huge militarization of combating piracy is likely to create large numbers of suspected pirates being held in undisclosed locations inconsistently with their rights to process under international law.”15 The creation of international tribunals composed of representatives from a cross-section of countries—Somalia included—would go a long way towards ensuring that suspected pirates receive a fair trial.16
Some of them, after all, may just have been fishing.
11
Into the Pirates’ Lair
THERE WAS A TIME WHEN THE PIRATES’ OFT-INVOKED FISHING defence was more than mere self-exculpating propaganda. The defence originated in Eyl, among the fishermen-pirate pioneers of the 1990s, born out of just indignation over the abuses of foreign fishing vessels. Since then, what was once a justification has become a rationalization. Successive waves of pirates, attuned to the international media sympathy the fishing story generates, continue to rail about the plunder of Somalia’s waters, while pushing over 1,500 kilometres into the Indian Ocean in search of ever-increasing ransoms.
In the middle of June 2009, halfway through my second visit to Puntland, I finally found my way to where it had all begun: the infamous “pirate haven” of Eyl, the small fishing village that had launched a new breed of pirate into the modern world. We left Garowe at quarter past six in the morning, the sun hanging distorted and brilliant on the horizon. Colonel Omar, dressed in jungle combat fatigues, turned to me and locked my eyes in a menacing stare. “I am in command during this trip,” he said. “You take orders from me. Understand?” I nodded.
Our convoy consisted of two Land Cruisers, the first holding me, the two Omars, and Mahamoud, our driver. The second contained the cavalry: Said and Abdirashid (my two Special Police Unit guards) and three Puntland government soldiers (including Ombaali, the former pirate), led by a grizzled veteran named Yusuf, whose fingers on one hand had been partially shot off. A few kilometres outside of Garowe we stopped at a squalid roadside restaurant to stock up on water bottles and quickly eat a dubious breakfast of sukaar, a goat stew that I managed to hold down for only a few hours on the road.
After about a quarter hour of speeding along the deserted highway, our driver abruptly slowed and struck off-road, creeping down the steep embankment. I was uncertain what reference point on the uniform landscape had identified the turnoff, but after a few minutes across open terrain we joined the path running eastward to Eyl. There was nothing but empty land ahead and empty sky above, and a twin set of sandy tire tracks leading into the Wild West.
The constant passage of pirate vehicles over the last few years had worn multiple tracks into the ground that continually diverged from the main path, weaving around obstacles before rejoining it several hundred paces down the road. In spite of the frequent traffic, the behaviour of the local herd animals resembled that of wild-life on a game reserve. Herds of grazing sheep and goats, caught on their haunches with hooves tangled in the upper reaches of bushes, careened wildly into the bush as we passed. Even the camels were more vigilant, watching us from a distance with wary eyes, while their solitary human guardians, staffs in hand, waved friendly greetings. Occasionally the igloo-shaped dome of a mudul, the traditional bush hut of the Somali nomad, poked through the shrubbery.
Our two vehicles descended into valleys and mounted plateaus, the vegetation changing as quickly as the terrain. We passed under the outspread canopies of thick-trunked trees hanging over the desiccated beds of dry rivers, then onto powdery red sand cutting through a virtual desert of ground-hugging shrubs and acacia trees, our four-wheel drives fishtailing through every high-speed turn.
We stopped for lunch in Hasballe, a bush town situated at roughly the halfway point of our journey. The corridor running from Garowe to Eyl is almost exclusively populated by the Isse Mahamoud, and Hasballe is home to Nugaal region’s clan chief, or islaan. He had recently inherited this title from his father, who was rumoured to have lived over a hundred years and had been so influential that his standing threat to curse errant hunters had single-handedly rescued the threatened local population of dik-diks from extinction. It is said that two men who had insulted his name were swallowed up by the earth.
We were ushered into an amalgam of a mudul and a pavilion, constructed around a single living tree. It was covered with the traditional woven grass mats of the Somali nomads and lined with aluminum panels onto which rudimentary algebraic equations had been scratched. The gathering quickly turned into a family reunion, friends and relatives shaking hands and hugging over plates of spaghetti and cups of shah. My entire party was of the same sub-clan as the inhabitants of Hasballe, which meant that virtually everyone present was at least second or third cousins.
Colonel Omar introduced me to the townspeople as “the son of Levish,” a local man renowned for his light skin. The Colonel had taught me to recognize the Somali question “Which clan are you?” and to respond with Reer Jarafle, the name of his own sub-clan, five levels deep on the Somali clan tree. I performed the routine repeatedly, like a
jester, to great acclaim; it invariably provoked hearty peals of laughter from the assembled crowd. So amused was he by his joke that from time to time the Colonel would elbow me, winking and exclaiming, “Eh, Levish? What clan do you belong to?”
As we were preparing to leave Hasballe, an old man approached the car window. “Please don’t kill the pirates,” he pleaded. “You need to give them jobs.”
From the townspeople in Hasballe, we had learned that the islaan was currently residing in his bush hut, some distance down the road. My interpreter Omar made it clear that passing by without stopping was not an option. “It would be the ultimate show of disrespect,” he said.
Three-quarters of an hour later we turned off the road and crossed a lush plain of green grass, towards a mudul no different in size from the others I had seen along the road, amidst a herd of grazing camels. One of the islaan’s wives informed us that he was napping and would be out shortly. Wiping the sleep from his eyes, the islaan soon emerged dressed in the simple nomad’s attire of a shawl and ma’awis and exchanged warm greetings with the two Omars, as I stood awkwardly by. Just when I was starting to think that he had not noticed my presence, the islaan turned to me with an expectant glance.
“Do you have anything to say to him?” Omar asked me.
For the first time in my life, I found myself completely tongue-tied, frozen under the spell of pomp that Omar had lent to the meeting.
Mercifully, Omar stepped in. “He thanks you for welcoming him to the homeland of the Isse Mahamoud,” he said, relaying my phantom message.
“I thank you for coming to visit us,” the islaan replied in Somali. “Foreigners are always welcome here.” Omar stood between the two of us, hands solemnly folded in front of him as he translated. I requested to take a photo with him, but the islaan demurred.
“I will gladly take a photo with you, but not here. Wait until I am in Garowe, when I’m dressed properly.”
The last stretch of the journey took us across a sparse plateau where the only sign of human presence was a curious sequence of pipes punctuating the road every few kilometres, from which arrow-straight dirt trails jutted at right angles into the distance—the long-abandoned boreholes and service roads set up during Conoco’s oil exploration in the 1980s, before the company declared force majeure and departed Somalia in the wake of the civil war. Colonel Omar pointed out a landing strip, now little more than open bushland, which British forces had used to transport supplies during a nineteenth-century siege of Eyl. From this escarpment, said the Colonel, colonialist forces had unleashed their bombardments on the town below. As if in silent testament to his statement, we passed by a crumbling graveyard containing the remains of Somalis killed during the anti-colonial struggle.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon when we finally reached the outskirts of Eyl. It had taken us seven hours to cross 220 kilometres.
* * *
The town of Eyl is a historic place. Long before it became known to the world in 2008 as the infamous “pirate haven,” it had served as a base for an equally notorious character, anti-colonial freedom fighter Muhammad Abdullah Hassan, nicknamed the “Mad Mullah” by his British adversaries. A warrior-poet in the purest sense, the beauty of Hassan’s verses attracted a diverse following to his Dervish movement, which for twenty years successfully held off British colonial expansion into the Somali interior (notwithstanding their common association with dancing and whirling, the Dervishes also knew how to fight). Despite considerable brutality towards his own people, Hassan remains a nationalist hero to Somalis and a point of pride for the people of Eyl. His residence-cum-fortress still stands on a summit overlooking the town, built with camel milk mixed into the mortar in order to render it invulnerable to attack. Hassan reputedly severed the hands of the structure’s Yemeni architect after its completion, to ensure that it would be the last he ever built. The architect’s descendants, it is said, still live in Eyl.
Today, Eyl can boast of another prominent son, President Abdirahman Farole, who was born and grew up in the town. Along with Garowe, Eyl is one of the principal strongholds of President Farole’s Isse Mahamoud sub-clan, a fact that made the area a virtual no-go zone for the previous Osman Mahamoud–dominated administration and thereby allowed the town to flourish as an autonomous base of pirate operations.
Eyl is actually two distinct towns separated by several kilometres. The first, Eyl Dawad, meaning “lookout,” is the seat of local government. By far the more populous of the two settlements, Dawad contains roughly ten thousand people, living in a collection of box-like buildings grafted onto the sloping wall of a yawning gorge carved by the Nugaal River. Halfway up the slope a natural spring bubbles forth, creating a localized jungle of towering trees along the course of a canal running down to the riverbed below.
Moving quickly through Dawad, we proceeded along a craggy path hugging the northern wall of the defile, a track whose name in English translates as “rocks, wait until I pass before you fall.” At rare intervals the dirt and rubble gave way to ten-metre stretches of concrete, the beginnings of some abortive NGO project to pave the entire roadway. It was the onset of Puntland’s second dry season, the hagaa, and much of the river had dried to solitary pools of water, but a verdant belt of vegetation along the bank still marked its course. A single goat was drinking from one of these oases, not even bothering to look up as we passed.
If one parallel could be drawn between the pirates of Puntland and those of Western storybooks, it is the tales of buried booty. Omar pointed to the opposite side of the gorge, high above us. “The townspeople say that there is pirate money hidden in those hills,” he said.
After a quarter hour crawling up and down this roller coaster of a road, we sighted the Indian Ocean for the first time, a slice of brilliant blue framed by the gorge’s gaping mouth. After a final bumpy downhill stretch, we passed under an unmarked, dilapidated arch flanked by an empty guardhouse and into Eyl Badey, or “seaside.” Reggae-inspired Somali tunes blasting from our speakers, we sped past houses of thatched branches and grasses, orange tarp fused with the odd piece of cardboard or corrugated metal to provide skeletal support to the walls. Even the whitewashed cement of the more upscale buildings was chipped and faded. Dented oil drums, pieces of refuse, and loose building materials were strewn haphazardly in the streets. A few fishing nets were stretched to dry in the sun.
If Eyl was awash in pirate cash, its inhabitants were certainly hiding it well. As a pirate haven, it was a profound disappointment; conspicuously absent were the opulent mansions, wild parties, and drug-fuelled binges that the international media coverage had led me to expect. The town was a fraction of Dawad’s size and seemed even poorer—not much more than a shanty village on the edge of the water. Beyond the village lay an expansive beach of white sand running kilometres in either direction, onto which spilled a small settlement built by refugees from the south, their dwellings little more than pens cobbled together out of driftwood. Lining the edge of the beach for several hundred metres was Eyl’s most imposing structure, a Soviet-built fish processing centre now crumbling into disrepair. Five-metre fishing skiffs lay idle in the sand, rendered useless by the overpowering winds of the hagaa, while refrigerated trucks that had once transported the day’s catch to Garowe and other inland markets were now broken-down heaps ensconced in tarps and cinder blocks, their tires shredded.
For some, however, Eyl’s economy was thriving. Floating beyond the surf, in plain sight, was the MV Victoria, a German-owned freighter hijacked on May 5 while transporting rice to the Saudi port of Jeddah. The recent onset of the monsoons had heralded the end of “pirate season,” and the Victoria was the sole remaining hostage vessel of the fleet that had once jammed Eyl’s harbour. Another ship was being held a few kilometres down the coast in an inlet known as Illig, or “Tooth”; its jittery hijackers had reportedly moved it there on account of hostility from the local people.
We turned northwards and within two minutes were out of Eyl on a
path running along the beach towards a large walled house rising out of the dunes. A vacation home for the Farole family, the compound had also been an abortive experiment in fisheries development; the seaward-most building in the compound was in fact a small-scale seafood processing plant, its breeding tanks and refrigeration units now empty. Before the project could get off the ground, much of its infrastructure had been destroyed by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, a fate also suffered by Eyl’s fishing industry as a whole. Since then the compound had been virtually abandoned; the wires that had once led from the generator to the main residence were severed, and a nearby well lay in ruins. Sand deposited by the wind in sweeping dunes had half reclaimed the compound, spilling over the wall and into the courtyard.
* * *
Following a quick late-afternoon nap, I was taken back into town to meet the village elders. As we sipped shah around a listing wooden table in the centre of town, Omar introduced me to Abdirizak, a stout man with a crooked smile and yellowing teeth, whose official position was something resembling a town sheriff. Beside him was a lanky man with gold-rimmed glasses, Abdul, another of the town’s leading citizens, who I was told spent much of his time combing the hills for diamonds and precious metals. The exotic sweetness of the tea cascading over my tongue, against the backdrop of the setting sun, brought me a feeling of tranquillity I had not experienced in a long while.
“Look around you,” Abdirizak said. “We have nothing. Do you even see any two-storey houses? There is no pirate money here; it all goes to Garowe.”
“This is not a pirate town,” Abdul added. “It is safe and peaceful here; even foreigners, like you, can walk around at midnight with no problems.”