The Pirates of Somalia

by Jay Bahadur

  More soldiers were lounging around the entrance to Mohamad’s house. Our driver honked, causing a handful of them to jump to attention and rush to swing open the spiked iron gate. It was past nine o’clock, but multiple Land Cruisers were parked in the driveway and the courtyard was still bustling with activity. Until the last few days, the newly elected president of Puntland had lived here, before moving into the official residence inside the government compound.

  I was sleepily ushered through the house and into its only functioning office, where Mohamad sat behind a desk covered by stacks of paper and a laptop. His frame, short and stocky, was the antithesis of the lanky and imperious figure that typified most Somalis. In the pale-green hue cast by the room’s only light source, I could not make out the details of his face, not that it made a difference; I had never so much as seen a photograph of the man who was to protect me for the next month and a half. We shook hands and exchanged quick pleasantries.

  Soon Abdi and I were back in the dark meandering city corridors, twisting down nameless streets where I saw nothing and remembered nothing, and pulled to a stop in front of a modest-sized residence with a blue gate. We passed through a courtyard and past a set of swinging metal doors into the house. As the SPU set up camp in the courtyard, Abdi showed me down a hall to my room. I tossed down the sports bag carrying my computer, notebooks, and malaria medication next to the bed.

  I had scarcely pulled the mosquito netting over the bed before I was asleep.

  * * *

  I was to spend the next six weeks living in Garowe, a rapidly expanding city at the very heart of the pirates’ tribal homeland. My local partner, Mohamad, was the son of the newly elected president, Abdirahman Farole, a fact that made me privy to backroom political dealings, stories, gossip, and daily impressions of life that went beyond the perceptions of reporters flying in to take snapshots of the gang behind the latest tanker hijacking. During this first trip to Puntland, I was shocked to encounter no other foreigners until my final day in the country, when, long-bearded and bedraggled, I briefly met with an Australian television crew hours before flying out of Bossaso. For an outsider, my access to the region was truly unique.

  Contrary to the oft-recycled one-liners found in most news reports, Somalia is not a country in anarchy. Indeed, to even speak of Somalia as a uniform entity is a mischaracterization, because in the wake of the civil war the country has broken down into a number of autonomous enclaves. Founded in 1998 as a tribal sanctuary for the hundreds of thousands of Darod clanspeople fleeing massacres in the south, Puntland State of Somalia comprises approximately 1.3 million people, one-quarter to one-third of Somalia’s total land mass (depending on whom you talk to), and almost half of its coastline. Straddling the shipping bottleneck of the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, it was the natural candidate to become the epicentre of the recent outbreak of Somali piracy.

  In writing this book, I had the difficult task of bringing a fresh perspective to a topic that continues to inundate the pages of news publications around the world. Pirates make good copy: there is something about them that animates the romantic imagination. But reports of daring hijackings in the international section of the newspaper are the print equivalents of the talking heads on the evening news; their polarizing effect may attract people to an issue, but they do not tell the whole story. Descriptions of hijackings are a black-and-white sketch that I intend to render in colour.

  The Pirates of Somalia is about the pirates’ lives both inside and outside of attack skiffs: how they spend their money, their houses, the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the women they consort with, their drug of choice—in short, what makes them human beings, not simply the AK-47-toting thugs who appear in feature articles. Of course, this book is also about what they do—the occupation that has made them the scourge of every major seafaring nation. Over the course of my visits to Puntland, from January to March and June to July of 2009—as well as subsequent trips to London, Romania, Nairobi, and Mombasa—I spoke not only to pirates, but also to government officials, former hostages, scholars, soldiers, and jailors. Through this panorama of perspectives, I hope to tell the full story of the most nefarious of modern-day buccaneers—the pirates of Puntland.

  1

  Boyah

  BOYAH IS A PIRATE.

  He was one of the “old boys,” an original pirate, quietly pursuing his trade in the waters of his coastal hometown of Eyl years before it galvanized the world’s imagination as an infamous pirate haven in mid-2008. Abdullahi Abshir, known as Boyah—who claimed to have hijacked more than twenty-five ships—looked down on the recent poseurs, the headline-grabbers who had bathed in the international media spotlight, and it showed; he exuded a self-assured superiority.

  It had taken five days to arrange this meeting. Pirates are hard to track down, constantly moving around and changing phone numbers, and are generally not reachable before twelve or one in the afternoon. Days earlier, frustrated and eager to begin interviewing, I had naively suggested approaching some suspected pirates on the streets of Garowe. Habitually munching on narcotic leaves of khat, they are easy enough to spot, their gleaming Toyota four-wheel-drives slicing paths around beaten-up wheelbarrows and pushcarts on Garowe’s eroded streets. My Somali hosts laughed derisively, explaining that to do so would invite kidnapping, robbery, or, at the very least, unwanted surveillance. In Somalia, everything is done through connections, be they clan, family, or friend, and these networks are expansive and interminable; you have to know one another, and it seems sometimes that everyone does. Warsame,1 my guide and interpreter, had been on and off the phone for the better part of a week, attempting to coax his personal network into producing Boyah. Eventually it responded, and Boyah presented himself.

  I was being taken to a mutually agreed meeting place in the passenger side of an aging white station wagon, cruising out of Garowe on the city’s sole paved road. Along this stretch, the concrete had endured remarkably well, with few of the jarring potholes that routinely force cars onto the shoulder from Garowe to Galkayo. Said and Abdirashid perched attentively in the back seat, and in the rear-view mirror was a sleek new Land Cruiser, a shining symbol of the recent money pouring into Garowe. It carried Boyah, Colonel Omar Abdullahi Farole (the cousin of my host Mohamad Farole), and Warsame. Other than our two vehicles, the road was empty, stretching unencumbered through a stony desert dotted with greenish shrubs. The thought that I was being taken to be executed in a deserted field—the unfortunate product of the BBC’s Africa news section and too many Las Vegas mob movies—rattled around in my head for a few seconds.

  We arrived at our destination, a virtually abandoned roadside farm fifteen kilometres outside of Garowe. Boyah had recently contracted tuberculosis, and Warsame insisted that we meet him in an open space. As we stepped out of our respective vehicles, I caught my first glimpse of Boyah. He looked to be in his early forties, immensely tall and with an air of menace about him; the brief, calculating glance with which he scanned me left the distinct impression that he was capable of chatting amiably or robbing me with the same equanimity. He was wearing a ma’awis, a traditional sarong-like robe of a clan elder, and an imaamad, a decorative shawl, was slung over his left shoulder. On his feet was a pair of spit-shined ebony leather sandals.

  Boyah turned immediately and loped down the dirt path leading towards the farm, Colonel Omar following paces behind him. Threading his way through the mishmash of tomato plants and lemon trees that constituted this eclectic farm, Boyah wove back and forth along the path, like a bird looking for a roosting spot. Finally, he settled on a site in a cool, shady clearing, where an overhead thatching of branches had created an almost cave-like atmosphere. He squatted in the centre of the clearing and began to toy with a dhiil—a wooden vat used by nomads to store milk—that someone had left on top of a nearby stack of wood. His mobile phone resting in his right hand, Boyah remained singularly focused on the oblong container in front of him, twirling it on the hardened dirt lik
e a solo game of spin-the-bottle.

  Other than the farm’s owner and his wife, no one was remotely close by, yet the Special Police Unit officers took up positions at either ends of the clearing with an amusing military officiousness. The meeting place filled with the rest of our party, and I decided it was time to force Boyah to acknowledge my presence. I walked up to him and greeted him with the standard Salaam álaykum, and was not surprised when Boyah and those around him responded with startled laughter before quickly offering the formulaic response: Álaykum salaam. Somalis were routinely astonished when I demonstrated the slightest knowledge of their culture or language—even a phrase that they shared with the entire Islamic world.

  We seated ourselves on some nearby logs and I began the interview. As I forced out my first question through Warsame, I hesitated to use the word “pirate” to describe Boyah. The closest Somali translation of the word is burcad badeed, which literally means “ocean robber,” a political statement I was anxious to avoid. In much the same way that revolutionaries straddle the semantic fence separating “freedom fighters” from “terrorists,” Boyah and his brothers-in-arms did not like to call themselves “pirates” in their native tongue. In an alliterative display of defiance, they referred to themselves as badaadinta badah, “saviours of the sea,” a term that is most often translated in the English-speaking media as “coast guard.” Boyah joked that he was the “chief of the coast guard,” a title he invoked with pride. To him, his actions had been in protection of his sea, the native waters he had known his whole life; his hijackings, a legitimate form of taxation levied in absentia on behalf of a defunct government that he represented in spirit, if not in law.

  His story was typical of many coastal dwellers who had turned to piracy since the onset of the civil war almost twenty years ago. In 1994, he still worked as an artisanal lobster diver in Eyl—“one of the best,” he said. Looking at his rakish figure, I believed him; it was easy to imagine his lanky form navigating the deepest oceanic crags in the reefs below. Since then, the lobster population off the coast of Eyl has been devastated by foreign fishing fleets—mostly Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean ships, Boyah said. Using steel-pronged drag fishing nets, these foreign trawlers did not bother with nimble explorations of the reefs: they uprooted them, netting the future livelihood of the nearby coastal people along with the day’s catch. Through their rapacious destruction of the reefs, foreign drag-fishers wiped out the lobster breeding grounds. Today, according to Boyah, there are no more lobsters to be found in the waters off Eyl.2

  So he began to fish a different species, lashing out at those who could out-compete him on the ocean floor, but who were no match for him on its surface. From 1995 to 1997, Boyah and others captured three foreign fishing vessels, keeping the catch and ransoming the crew. By 1997, the foreign fishing fleets had become more challenging prey, entering into protection contracts with local warlords that made armed guards and anti-aircraft guns regular fixtures on the decks of their ships. So, like all successful hunters, Boyah and his men adapted to their changing environment, and began going after commercial shipping vessels. They soon attracted others to their cause.

  “There are about five hundred pirates operating around Eyl. I am their chairman,” he said, claiming to head up a “Central Committee” composed of the bosses of thirty-five other groups. The position of chairman, however, did not imbue Boyah with the autocratic powers of a traditional gang leader. Rather, Eyl’s pirate groups functioned as a kind of loose confederation, in which Boyah was a key organizer, recruiter, financier, and mission commander. But would-be applicants for the position of pirate (Eyl Division) had to come to him, he claimed. The interview was not too gruelling—Boyah’s sole criteria for a recruit were that he own a gun and be “a hero, and accept death”—qualities that grace the CVs of many desperate local youth. Turnover in Boyah’s core group was low; when I asked if his men ever used their new-found wealth to leave Somalia, he laughed and shook his head.

  “The only way they leave is when they die.” He smiled and added offhandedly that a member of his band had departed the previous night, dying in his sleep of undisclosed reasons. “You were supposed to meet him,” Boyah told me.

  What makes for an attractive target? I asked. Boyah’s standards were not very exacting. He told me that he and his men did not discriminate, but would go after any ship hapless enough to wander into their sights. And despite their ostensible purpose of protecting Somali national waters, during the heat of the chase they paid no regard to international boundaries, pursuing their target until they caught it or it escaped them. Boyah separated his seafaring prey into the broad dichotomy of commercial and tourist ships. The commercial ships, identifiable by the cranes visible on their decks, were much slower and easier to capture. Boyah had gone after too many of these to remember: “a lot” was his most precise estimate.

  He claimed to employ different tactics for different ships, but the basic strategy was crude in its simplicity. In attack groups spread amongst several small and speedy skiffs, Boyah and his men approached their target on all sides, swarming like a water-borne wolf pack. They brandished their weapons in an attempt to frighten the ship’s crew into stopping, and even fired into the air. If these scare tactics did not work, and if the target ship was capable of outperforming their outboard motors, the chase ended there. But if they managed to pull even with their target, they tossed hooked rope ladders onto the decks and boarded the ship. Instances of the crew fighting back were rare, and rarely effective, and the whole process, from spotting to capturing, took at most thirty minutes. Boyah guessed that only 20 per cent to 30 per cent of attempted hijackings met with success, for which he blamed speedy prey, technical problems, and foreign naval or domestic intervention.

  The captured ship was then steered to a friendly port—in Boyah’s case, Eyl—where guards and interpreters were brought from the shore to look after the hostages during the ransom negotiation. Once the ransom was secured—often routed through banks in London and Dubai and parachuted like a special-delivery care package directly onto the deck of the ship—it was split amongst all the concerned parties. Half the money went to the attackers, the men who actually captured the ship. A third went to the operation’s investors: those who fronted the money for the ships, fuel, tracking equipment, and weapons. The remaining sixth went to everyone else: the guards ferried from shore to watch over the hostage crew, the suppliers of food and water, the translators (occasionally high school students on their summer break), and even the poor and disabled in the local community, who received some as charity. Such largesse, Boyah told me, had made his merry band into Robin Hood figures amongst the residents of Eyl.

  I asked Boyah where his men obtained the training to operate their ships and equipment.

  “Their training,” he facetiously quipped, “has come from famine.” But this epigram, however pithy, did not contain the whole truth. Beginning in 1999, the government of Puntland had launched a series of ill-fated attempts to establish an (official) regional coast guard, efforts that each ended with the dissolution of the contracting company and the dismissal of its employees. The origin of the new generation of Somali pirates—better trained, more efficiently organized, and possessing superior equipment—can be traced in part to these failed coast-guarding experiments; with few other opportunities for their skills, many ex-coast-guard recruits turned to piracy. When pressed, Boyah confirmed that some of his own men had past histories in the Puntland Coast Guard, having joined his group after their salaries went unpaid.

  Boyah’s testimony revealed another detail of the interwoven dynamic between pirates, coast guards, and fishermen. Far from being a neutral state actor, the Puntland Coast Guard of the late 1990s and early 2000s worked as a private militia for the protection of commercial trawlers in possession of “fishing licences”—informal documents arbitrarily sold by various government bureaucrats for personal profit. The Puntland Coast Guard thus further alienated local fishermen, and indee
d escalated at times into open confrontation with them. Boyah recounted that in 2001 his men seized several fishing vessels “licensed” by then-president Abdullahi Yusuf and protected by his coast guard force. Almost a decade before the fierce acceleration in pirate hijackings hit the Gulf of Aden, the conditions for the coming storm were already recognizable.

  * * *

  Boyah’s moral compass seemed to be divided between sea and shore; he warned me, half-jokingly, not to run into him in a boat, but, despite my earlier misgivings, assured me that he was quite harmless on land. “We’re not murderers,” he said. “We’ve never killed anyone, we just attack ships.”

  He insisted that he knew what he was doing was wrong, and, as evidence of his sincerity, relayed how he had just appeared on the local news radio station, Radio Garowe, to call a temporary ceasefire on all pirate activity. Though I was sceptical that he wielded the authority necessary to enforce his decree amongst the wide range of decentralized groups operating over a coastline stretching almost sixteen hundred kilometres, Boyah stressed that the decision had been made by the Central Committee—and woe to those who defied its orders. “We will deal with them,” Boyah promised. “We will work with the government forces to capture them and bring them to jail.”

  Subsequent events quickly proved that Boyah’s radio statement was just so much background radiation. Just days after his announced ceasefire, a pirate gang in the Gulf of Aden committed the first commercial hijacking of 2009, capturing a German liquid petroleum tanker along with her thirteen crew members. The Central Committee has wreaked no vengeance on those responsible.

  Boyah himself had not gone on a mission for over two months, for which he had a two-pronged explanation: “I got sick, and became rich.” His fortune made, Boyah’s call to end hijackings came from a position of luxury that most others did not enjoy. I questioned Boyah on whether his ceasefire had been at least partially motivated by the NATO task force recently deployed to deal with him and his colleagues.