by Ross Kemp
PART 4
Djibouti
15. The Pirate of Puntland
While I had been in south-east Asia, piracy off the coast of Somalia had gone off the scale. During my time on HMS Northumberland a delicate kind of ceasefire had existed. The warships of Operation Atalanta had refrained from storming hijacked ships; in return, the pirates had held back from killing their hostages. But since then things had changed, and they’d changed for the worse.
The Maersk Alabama was a 17,000-tonne American cargo ship. It was attacked by four pirates in the April of 2009, but things did not go quite according to their plan. When the pirates boarded, the captain, Richard Phillips, instructed all his crew to lock themselves in their cabins. He then offered himself to the pirates as a hostage, with the proviso that the Alabama was set free. The pirates put Phillips on one of the merchant vessel’s bright-orange lifeboats, then sailed it to within 30 miles of the Somali coast under the constant surveillance of US warships and helicopters.
FBI hostage negotiators flew to the scene and opened up lines of communication. The pirates demanded a ransom of $2 million in return for the captain’s life. The captain tried to escape by jumping into the sea. The pirates easily recaptured him – though one of them sustained an injury to his hand – and started making threats against his life. They were surrounded by the might of the American navy, including the missile cruiser USS Bainbridge, but that didn’t seem to dampen their enthusiasm.
Days passed. The pirates ran out of food and water. They accepted supplies from the Americans, and as a result a small boat made several trips between the pirates and the Bainbridge. On one of these trips the pirate with the wounded hand asked for medical assistance. He was, in effect, surrendering, and he was taken back to the American warship.
That left three of them, and Captain Phillips.
Unbeknown to the pirates, a team of US Navy Seals had parachuted into the sea with inflatable boats before being picked up by the Bainbridge. Their orders, direct from President Obama, were to use force only if Captain Phillips’ life appeared to be in imminent danger. Four days after their original attack the pirates, having run out of fuel, accepted a towline from the Bainbridge. That evening, however, the Seals observed a tracer bullet coming from the pirates’ boat. Tracers are generally only fired in order to give the user an idea of the trajectory on which they should fire live rounds. It didn’t exactly ease the tension, and the Seals used night-vision devices to see what was happening. One of the pirates, they observed, had his assault rifle pointed at the back of Captain Phillips; what was more, the Seals had a clear line of fire at all three targets.
The Seals received the order to fire. Three pirates. Three shots. That was all they needed, even though the lifeboat was being trailed at the end of a 100-foot line and presented a moving target for the sharpshooters. The pirates died instantly and the Seals rescued Captain Phillips.
The Maersk Alabama was the first American ship to be pirated since the Second Barbary War nearly 200 years previously, and the reaction to the death of the pirates on the Somali mainland showed the problems involved with using military force to combat piracy. A pirate holding a Greek ship went on the record as saying, ‘Every country will be treated the way it treats us. In the future, America will be the one crying…’
Intervention by special forces led to the pirates being killed and Captain Phillips being rescued. But the good guys don’t always win, no matter how highly trained they are; violence doesn’t always go according to plan. This was well illustrated by an incident that occurred at practically the same time as the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama. This was the pirating of the French yacht Tanit. The Tanit’s skipper was a 28-year-old man by the name of Florent Lemacon, and on board were four other passengers, including his wife and three-year-old son.
Lemacon was making his way down the Gulf of Aden to the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania. He’d been warned about the dangers, but had made the decision not to heed the advice – by all accounts he was a free spirit, determined not to allow criminal elements to stop him from going where and doing what he wanted. Good on him, I guess. They took certain precautions, such as sailing with their lights dimmed to avoid detection by pirates. They even sent a message from the middle of the ocean which read, ‘We are in the middle of the piracy zone… the danger is there, and has indeed become greater over the past months, but the ocean is vast. The pirates must not be allowed to destroy our dream.’
Unfortunately, the pirates didn’t see it quite the same way. Tanit was 400 miles off the coast of Somalia when it was boarded by pirates with AK-47s and held to ransom. Unfortunately for the Lemacons, they didn’t have the might of an international shipping organization behind them, nor a precious cargo – at least not in monetary terms. Negotiations with the pirates broke down. On this occasion there was no suitcase full of used notes parachuted onto the deck. Instead, there was a troop of French special forces, dispatched to do what special forces do.
The commandos stormed the yacht and were engaged by the gun-toting pirates. A firefight took place, and two of the pirates were killed. But the yacht’s skipper was caught in the crossfire and took a bullet in the head. Whether it came from a pirate’s gun or from one of the French SF weapons isn’t public knowledge. The net result was the same, though: Florent Lemacon died instantly, widowing a wife and orphaning a child.
The significance of these two events wasn’t lost on me. During my stay on HMS Northumberland the Royal Marines had been unable to board the pirated Saldanha for fear that the pirates, who so far had avoided killing their hostages, would change tack. The Somali pirates certainly had the weaponry to cause a great deal of death and destruction, and if the situation on the mainland was anything to go by, they were ruthless enough to do so should they decide to. The question was this: now that foreign governments had started to retaliate, would the pirates escalate the situation? Was the body count about to start rising?
My time on Northumberland had been interesting but ultimately frustrating. I still felt there was more to learn about the situation in Somalia, that there was more of a story to tell. Of course, nothing had changed on the mainland – setting foot on Somali soil was still so hazardous as to make it a no-go area for Western film crews. We could, however, go back to Djibouti, the neighbouring country where we had disembarked from Northumberland. Which was handy, because we had an in with a fixer who was about to put a cherry on the top of the cake of our investigation.
His name wasn’t Jacques, but that’s what I’ll call him. He was a good-looking Frenchman who ran a diving school in that tiny country. My impression was that he was a man with connections – a good pair of eyes and a brain full of local knowledge that he would share with anyone for a fee. He knew everyone, and everyone knew Jacques. Djibouti is now a military port, and while we were there a Japanese warship arrived. The commander sought Jacques out and asked if he could help him go hunting for big game. Perhaps he had mistaken Djibouti for the Serengeti.
Jacques’ face was a picture. ‘You are mad!’ he said. ‘You want to kill things? There’s nothing to kill here. I can take you diving, but you cannot kill anything.’ The commander was sent packing, disappointed that he wasn’t able to decorate the bridge of his ship with a rhino’s head; but happily Jacques was of more use to us in the hunt for our quarry. He knew people who knew people, and thought he could fix us up with a genuine Somali pirate. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.
Jacques specialized in getting people in and out of Somalia, and said that he could, in principle, get us into the piratical region of Puntland. Like everyone else we talked to, though, he qualified his statement by saying we only had a 50-50 chance of getting out alive. Camera teams, he told us, were especially at risk. If you went into Somalia as a fixer or a problem solver and got killed, chances were there would be repercussions from your murder from whoever was hiring you. But camera teams don’t go into that country at anyone’s behest. Nobody in Somalia is
going to protect them. If we wanted to meet Jacques’ pirate in Somalia, the only way of doing it would be to fly into a provincial Puntland airport and conduct the interview on the tarmac. That might be all right, but Jacques also told us that if we chose that option, we’d have to make sure our plane’s engines were constantly turning over. Great for a quick getaway if everything went pear-shaped; impossible for our camera crew to record anything satisfactory above the sound of the engines.
We couldn’t travel to meet Jacques’ pirate for all these reasons. But maybe he could fix it so that the pirate could come to us. Only time would tell. Meanwhile we had another stroke of good luck.
Colonel Abshir was born in the Bari region of northern Somalia. Having passed through the Somali Military Academy, where he studied tanks, army fighting and military leadership, he became a lieutenant colonel and a high-ranking intelligence officer in the government of Siad Barré – the last Somali administration to be officially recognized by the international community. Some people branded Barré’s regime a dictatorship; I could only imagine what an intelligence officer in such a regime had got up to. Barré was removed from power in a coup and died in Kenya in 1995, but former members of his government remained influential in Somali society, and Colonel Abshir was one of them. He was now part of the Puntland Private Security Consultation Organization. As such, he knew a thing or two about the pirates of Puntland. We had arranged to meet him in Djibouti, to get an insight into Somali piracy from someone on the inside.
It was a hot, dusty afternoon. Impossibly hot – the kind of heat that you know will do you damage if you stay out in it too long. We met in a room at Jacques’ diving school.
As we sat down together in the blistering heat, Colonel Abshir told me of his hopes for his country. ‘I was born in an independent Somalia,’ he said. ‘There was a central government that was governing the whole country. My only wish is to see a proper Somali central government, a government with proper institutions that safeguards law and order and wipes out the current situations of sea piracy, terrorism and other problems, and provides a proper, lasting solution for Somalia. My ambition is to have a peaceful life. For the remaining days of my life, I would like to live in Somalia with a government that offers me and my family the opportunity to get education, employment and guaranteed security for the future. I wish to have a government that is good to its neighbouring countries and the entire world. God willing, that will happen one day.’
God willing indeed. But the gulf between the Somalia of Colonel Abshir’s ambitions and the one that currently existed seemed to me to be almost insurmountably wide.
I wanted to talk to the colonel about what I’d heard regarding the reasons for piracy in Somalia – the toxic waste, the illegal fishing. His answer was not quite what I expected. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there is dumping of material such as nuclear waste, industrial waste, illegal fishing in our waters and other problems. However, the simple, ordinary pirate boy has no knowledge of these. It is not, as they claim, that they are patriotic and defending the fishes in our sea or against waste and other illegal activities. These illiterate pirates have no knowledge of what nuclear or industrial waste is. These pirates are employees, and are put to work by some individuals.’
The colonel’s point was enlightening. I didn’t have much doubt that the dumping of toxic waste and the illegal fishing of Somali waters had been at least a catalyst for the piracy that currently existed, but what he seemed to be saying was that it had now evolved into something more businesslike.
What of Eyl, that lawless pirate town to which the MV Saldanha had been taken. ‘Eyl is the garage of hijacked ships,’ he agreed. ‘The pirate will take the kidnapped ship to Eyl because in there he will find his friends, plenty of other sea pirates who are also armed and live in Eyl.’
I asked him how he expected the use of force in the cases of the Maersk Alabama and the Tanit to affect piracy in the region. ‘From now on,’ he told me, ‘I think that if a French or American national is taken hostage, they won’t ask for a ransom. They will either give them back or treat them in the same way that their friends were treated.’
Treating them in the same way, of course, meant shooting them. I couldn’t help but think that this was a more likely outcome than simply letting them go.
Abshir smiled as he spoke. It was difficult to judge quite what he thought about all this. ‘The pirates,’ he told me, ‘are like a family, regardless of where they come from. They share a common interest.’
And family, as we know, look after their own.
Colonel Abshir revealed to me the Somali pirates were not working entirely on their own – some of them were getting outside help. ‘We know that there are some nationals from Sudan, Asmara, Mombasa that are helping pirates, teaching them techniques.’ (Sudan! Perhaps my slip of the tongue when I was pontificating for the chiefs of Ajegunle hadn’t been so wide of the mark…) In fact, the problem went deeper than that. ‘During the war between the two Yemens, which North Yemen won, there were many military officers from the south who were sacked from their jobs. These officers were disarmed and suffered demoralization. They were later given some small fishing boats. They used to fish in the Somali water and had a good working relationship with other Somali fishermen. We know that they are now involved in the piracy in Somalia. I have concrete evidence of a case in which some Yemeni fishermen from the former marine force of Yemen actually hijacked a ship and sold it to the Somali pirates.’
From what the colonel was saying, the problem of piracy off the coast of Somalia was more multi-layered than I had previously thought. There were the fishermen; there were the people who controlled the fishermen; there were foreigners who had been attracted to the region because of unrest in their own countries. I wondered if Abshir had any idea of the number of pirates currently operating in his country. ‘Our organization,’ he told me, ‘has registered the number of pirates to be nearly 3,000.’ This figure included both those who had actually taken part in acts of piracy as well as those who were dealers and investors. Amazingly, Colonel Abshir claimed to know exactly who they all were. ‘We have registered all of them and have photographs of most of them. We also have details of their names, ethnic origins, names of their mothers and their places of birth and nationality. We monitor their activities and know their current situations – where they are and if they have left the country.’
If this was true, it was astonishing. In Nigeria and Batam the pirates were shadowy and secretive. In Somalia, apparently, the authorities had their numbers, but because of the disastrous situation in that country, they were powerless to act. ‘I can’t give their names at the moment,’ Abshir said, ‘because they are too powerful.’
I could understand that the colonel might not want to give us the names of those people he knew to be involved in piracy. That could be dangerous for his health. But I did want to know what was happening to the massive quantities of money that were being earned as ransoms for the merchant vessels taken to Eyl. ‘The team on the ship share the money,’ he told me, ‘and the biggest share goes to the boss.’ And these bosses, he said, were very, very wealthy men. ‘Millionaires. Millionaires! ’
The big question was this: how do you stop someone from becoming a pirate? ‘If all the warships in the world were gathered together in the Somali sea,’ he suggested, ‘it’s still not a solution.’ My time on Northumberland suggested he was right. And he predicted that if things continued on their current trajectory, the situation could only get worse. ‘If the international community chooses not to do anything, it is possible that these movements of piracy, terrorism, smugglers, illegal armies, drug traffickers and human rights abuses could lead to worse international security situations. Everything that is possible will happen. There could be explosions. They could explode oil tankers. They could even kill people on captured ships because the pirates now have enough money and are very rich. They might not need any more money. That is possible.’
And did the colonel have
any suggestions as to how the international community could help?
‘Only if they could approach the small regional administration of Puntland, offer to recruit and train one to two thousand soldiers from the Somalis in Puntland, offer proper equipment, install intelligence systems and also offer financial assistance to Puntland. I strongly believe that the budget of all that will be less than what they are now spending on a half-day. If they could make a network and launch one very successful operation against these pirates, I am sure they would be wiped out.’
Not the worst idea I’d ever heard. But as the colonel spoke I couldn’t help remembering that the international community had tried to intervene in Somalia before. The result of that intervention had been the disastrous Battle of Mogadishu. I didn’t doubt that Abshir’s belief that piracy needed to be tackled on land, not at sea, was on the money. But having been bitten once, I can’t help thinking that the international community is likely to be twice shy…
Colonel Abshir’s take on Somalian piracy had been bleak but honest. However, I was about to get a much more personal view of the situation. Because finally, after months of searching, the call finally came in. By ways and means that I can’t fully reveal, our contacts had come good. A meet had been arranged and we were about to come face to face with a genuine Somali pirate, one of the reckless individuals who wreak such havoc in the Gulf of Aden, commanding ransoms of millions of pounds, and striking genuine fear into the hearts of any ships’ crews passing through that busy and important waterway.
We were told to leave the city of Djibouti and travel by boat to a secret location – a small island just off the coast and not far from Somali waters. It was early in the morning, but already the heat was intense. The waters round the island were crystalline and blue – like something out of a holiday brochure. I wouldn’t recommend taking your holidays round here, though, for fear of encountering someone like the man I was here to meet. We stood on the sandy shore of that island, not knowing what to expect or even if our man was actually going to turn up for sure. After my experiences in Nigeria I was more than prepared to be disappointed yet again. Pirates, I had learned, had a way of promising one thing and doing another. Reliability was not their strong point.
