The Pirates of Somalia

by Jay Bahadur

  Throughout the interview, Ombaali had sat squirming in his chair, his manner suggesting more the subject of a police interrogation than a friendly exchange. By the forty-minute mark I had clearly nearly exhausted his limited supply of patience, and he began to grumble about being late for an appointment. I squeezed in one final question: With hours of idle time and few diversions, how did he and his fellow guards get along with their hostages?

  “We gave them the best treatment,” he said. “We never stole anything from them, even their cellphones.”

  “But what if you had not received any ransom money?” I asked.

  Ombaali leaned back in his chair and calmly replied, “Then we would have killed them all.”

  * * *

  The decision to kill, thankfully, was not in Ombaali’s hands, but in those of his fishermen bosses—the long-serving generals of the Central Committee, most of whom, years earlier, had begun the struggle against foreign incursions into their fishing waters. Since the foreign destruction of Somali fisheries is commonly cited as the impetus for piracy, it may be surprising to discover that fishing has never played much of a role in Somalia, either as a means of sustenance or as a sector in the formal economy.4 In fact, prior to the 1970s virtually no Somalis engaged in fishing as a livelihood, and it was traditionally viewed as a somewhat ignoble occupation.

  Like any good Marxist dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre sought to re-engineer his country’s society and patterns of life. Aiming to reduce the population’s overreliance on livestock, Siad Barre attempted to alter cultural attitudes about the value of fish, even going so far as to broadcast daily educational jingles over the radio exhorting nomads to “eat fish and make profit from it.”5 Natural disaster afforded him a more direct means of getting his message across; following severe droughts in 1974 and 1986, Siad Barre forcibly resettled tens of thousands of nomads into coastal towns, which soon developed into fishing communities.

  In 1999, in response to persistent complaints from these communities about foreign fishing, Puntland president Abdullahi Yusuf brought in the British private security firm Hart Security to supply coast guard services to the nascent state. Yusuf did not contract Hart directly, but instead used an umbrella organization of local businessmen, the rapidly formed Puntland International Development Corporation. One of these intermediaries was Khalif Isse Mudan, a hotel proprietor and major shareholder in Golis Telecom, Puntland’s largest mobile phone company. In February 2009, I met with Mudan in the office of the hotel he owned on the outskirts of Bossaso.

  Working as partners, said Mudan, the Puntland government provided the coast guard’s single ship and weaponry, with Hart Security responsible for the selection and training of its marine force. For the task of patrolling the sixteen-hundred-kilometre coastline of Puntland, Hart was given one twenty-metre trawler and a multi-clan force of seventy local men, armed with two aging ZU-23 Soviet anti-aircraft guns—weaponry on a par with that which the more prudent foreign fishing trawlers had begun to carry.

  Hart Security’s principal duty was to prevent illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing in Puntland waters, and its operations were funded by selling official government fishing licences, issued through the Puntland Ministry of Fisheries, Ports, and Marine Transport. The licensing revenues were collected by Hart and split almost evenly with the government, the latter taking a 51 per cent share. “They were like joint venture investors,” explained Mudan. For a fragile natural resource like the fisheries, a for-profit approach to licensing had obvious implications; the success of Hart’s operation was defined not by the tranquillity of the waters it patrolled, but by the profits it generated, which in turn depended on the number of licences issued. The Ministry of Fisheries lent only a thin veneer of lawfulness to the process, as it had no policy in place to regulate the issuing of licences—nor any reliable marine research on which to base such a policy.

  Despite Hart’s support for foreign fishing companies, Mudan insisted that neither the firm nor its clients had entered into confrontations with local fishermen. “It was a very smooth operation,” he assured me. Only five or six licences had been sold to short-range trawlers, and these had strict restrictions that prevented them from coming in contact with locals. “The trawlers weren’t allowed to use very small-mesh nets,” said Mudan, “or to come within less than ten miles of the shore.”

  According to Mudan, Hart focused its patrols in the waters from Hafun to Hobyo, a stretch of about six hundred kilometres in which most illegal fishing occurred. But even this reduced range consisted of a length of coastline greater than that running from Boston to New York, which Hart patrolled with one lone ship. In order to facilitate this immense job, the company set up observation posts in towns along the coast, from which it received daily reports via high-frequency radio, informing its forces of any suspicious ships fishing in the vicinity.

  Hart’s effectiveness was severely limited by the sheer territory its sole ship was tasked with patrolling. However, the company managed to arrest a number of foreign fishing vessels, most notably the Spanish fishing ship Alabacora Quatro, whose owner Hart successfully sued in a UK court, winning an undisclosed settlement.

  Hart’s patrols rarely brought its ship into contact with any pirates; the company’s only significant encounter occurred in 2000, when the cargo vessel Mad Express was hijacked after experiencing technical problems near Bargaal. According to Hart chief Lord Richard Westbury, a former SAS officer, the pirates’ level of sophistication was far below what they have demonstrated in recent years. “Basically, the pirates jumped off the ship. One injured his ankle,” Westbury related in a January 2009 interview. “They certainly had no skills to operate in the way they are currently operating.”6

  * * *

  Hart’s operations in Puntland continued until 2002, when the company was unwillingly squeezed out of the business by the sudden arrival of the Somali-Canadian Coast Guard (SomCan), a private security firm headed by a former Toronto taxi driver named Abdiweli Ali Taar. The circumstances under which SomCan ousted Hart were decidedly suspicious. After the Puntland presidential election of 2001, which resulted in the victory of challenger Jama Ali Jama, the incumbent Abdullahi Yusuf attempted to oust Jama in a military coup. During the ensuing civil conflict from 2001 to 2002, the Ali Taar family—who belonged to the same Omar Mahamoud sub-clan as Yusuf—supported the former warlord in his fight against Jama. When Yusuf prevailed, the Ali Taars began operations in Puntland’s waters. The brief civil war had also played itself out within the ranks of Hart’s multi-clan coast guard force, which split into opposing factions; when fighting broke out near Hart’s bases of operation, the firm packed up and set sail for the United Kingdom.7

  A few days after speaking with Mudan, I met with two of SomCan’s top executives, Said Orey and Abdirahman Ali Taar (elder brother of Abdiweli), on the patio of the same hotel. Joining us was Captain Abdirashid Abdirahim Ishmael, the commander of SomCan’s marine forces.

  Said Orey was quick to provide me with his no doubt partial explanation for Hart’s hurried exit from Somalia. “Hart Security failed in its task,” he claimed. “They weren’t interested in the job. Hart failed to bring in sufficient equipment to properly protect the coast, and so people wanted a local company to do the job.”

  Though run by Somalis, the company did not represent much of a break from the past, being yet another private venture. SomCan seamlessly continued Hart’s coast guard fishing licence business model, on an even greater scale. During its glory days, from 2002 to 2005, SomCan boasted an armada of six patrol boats and a force of four hundred marines, and claimed to have identified and arrested a total of thirty illegal fishing vessels. During this period, the company was heavily involved in selling fishing permits, with a quarterly licence fetching about $50,000. These revenues were supposed to be channelled through the Ministry of Fisheries, but the company was alleged to have often bypassed the ministry and sold fishing licences directly to foreign concessions.

 
“Some licences were coming from the ministry,” Mudan had told me a few days earlier, “and some were issued by SomCan itself. I saw one of them, in Dubai. And it was not issued by the ministry; it was signed by Abdiweli Ali Taar.”

  Puntland specialist Stig Jarle Hansen, who has conducted extensive research into the use of private security in the region, agreed. “As I understand it, Abdiweli Ali Taar was authorized to sell licences,” he told me. “They were sold through networks, but SomCan was in the end responsible.”

  Unlike Hart, SomCan required foreign fishing companies to obtain a Somali agent to represent them. Once the companies—mostly Korean, Thai, or Japanese concerns—had established ties with a Somali businessman, local government militiamen would be placed on their ships to provide protection, particularly from hostile local fishermen. In many cases, the fishing companies also hired additional security through their Somali agents. “SomCan was keeping the security of their own licensed ships, instead of keeping the security of the sea,” explained Abdiwahid Mahamed Hersi “Joaar,” the long-serving director general of the Puntland Ministry of Fisheries.

  SomCan’s tripartite role as law enforcer, trade commissioner, and independent contractor enabled the company to establish what could be described as a maritime protection racket. From 2002 to 2005, the coast guard served directly as an agent for the Thai concession Sirichai Fisheries, guaranteeing the company’s security in Somali waters and protecting it from local fishermen-cum-pirates, even to the point of posting its own armed guards on the decks of Sirichai’s ships. Sirichai’s relationship with SomCan was literally skin tight; according to Noel Choong, director of the International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Centre, Sirichai went so far as to provide uniforms for the coast guard troops.8

  If there was any conflict of interest in a government coast guard protecting a private client, it was lost on Orey. “Yes, we were the agent for Sirichai,” he said. “It was always the best company at following the rules and regulations.”

  SomCan’s penchant for defending a select group of foreign fishing ships ran directly counter to the coast guard’s raison d’être and brought it into conflict with local fishermen. For this reason, said Orey, the Ministry of Fisheries kept a close eye on the activities of licensed ships. “There were always inspectors from the Ministry of Fisheries on-board ship, whose duty it was to check if they were using legal equipment, and to protect local fishing boats from them,” he said. “Sometimes these ships would overrun small fishing boats, and the inspector’s job was to stop them, to keep them away from the locals.”

  Despite these measures, confrontations were common. According to Hansen, SomCan actively defended both foreign and domestic “licensed” fishing vessels from local fishermen. “Local fishermen were often unable to obtain the proper permits,” he said, “and were forcibly prevented from fishing by the coast guard.” Exacerbating the problem was the fact that SomCan-licensed ships would routinely come within close range of the shore. “They were coming two miles from the shore. Several times they destroyed nets,” Mudan had told me. “Foreign fishing ships came very close to the shore and local fishermen started firing on them. SomCan responded.”

  SomCan’s first coast-guarding stint came to an inglorious end in March 2005, when its employees hijacked a fishing trawler operated by Sirichai Fisheries, the company’s own client. In another incident that blurred the distinction between coast guards and pirates, three SomCan guards on board the fishing trawler Sirichainava 12 seized control of the vessel, demanding an $800,000 ransom for its release. Their actions provoked a quick and decisive response; within hours, a joint British and American strike team freed the ship and took the renegades into custody. The US Navy subsequently transported them to Oman, after which they were brought to Thailand and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for piracy. (The hijackers served only a few years of their prison term; in 2007, President Hersi arranged their release under unknown circumstances.)

  What had prompted their ill-advised gamble was not completely clear. One report suggested that the hijacking was provoked by the non-payment of the guards’ monthly $200 salary. Orey insisted that the men had been paid in full, but had simply gotten greedy.

  In either case, the hijacking was an utter disaster for SomCan, costing the company its job with the Puntland government—at least temporarily.

  * * *

  SomCan received a second chance three years later. Two years after the company’s dismissal, in 2007, the Saudi private security firm Al-Habiibi briefly assumed coast guard duties in Puntland, but was fired in February 2008 for refusing an order to liberate the hijacked Russian tugboat Svitzer Korsakov. Then-president General Mohamud Muse Hersi turned back to SomCan, which was more willing than Al-Habiibi to serve as pirate hunters.

  From between the pages of his daily planner, Orey produced a folded copy of SomCan’s current employment contract, signed with Hersi’s government in July 2008. As had been the case with Hart, all licensing and fine revenues were to be split 51 per cent–49 per cent, with the Puntland government responsible for supplying the coast guard’s ships, weapons, and equipment.

  In recent days, the pirates had been presenting a challenge not seen during SomCan’s previous coast-guarding tour, but Orey was confident that his company was ready. “It is over the last eight months that we have done our best work,” he said. In October 2008, for example, SomCan had mounted a successful operation to liberate the hijacked MV Wail, a Panamanian-registered bulk carrier containing a consignment of cement owned by a local Somali businessman. Captain Ishmael, who led the rescue operation, described how the SomCan flagship, flanked by its two speedboats, had surrounded the pirates and dispatched a negotiator to discuss the situation. As the speedboat carrying SomCan’s envoy approached the hijacked transport, the pirates opened fire, killing the craft’s operator. In the ensuing firefight, SomCan marines captured ten of the hijackers, sustaining one injury and minor damage to their ship.

  SomCan’s other encounters with pirates had been less bloody, and even more successful. Orey cited three naval assaults against hijacked fishing ships held near Hafun, which in each case resulted in the bandits abandoning the vessel and melting before SomCan’s onslaught. The objects of these rescues were all local Somali or Yemeni vessels, which, according to Orey, the pirates had intended to use as long-range motherships.

  Despite these successes, Orey was quick to acknowledge that SomCan had a long way to go. Although the company possessed three cast-off patrol boats obtained from the Japanese coast guard—as well as two speedboats—the cost of fuel usually limited it to deploying only a third of its “fleet.”9 The company operated no coastal radar tracking stations and did not employ satellite surveillance; the only intelligence it received was conveyed by radio or telephone. SomCan was, in effect, a “Dial-a-Coast-Guard,” whose counter-piracy activities were limited to after-the-fact responses: either commando-style raids on captive vessels, or, if given timely tip-offs, anticipatory assaults on land.

  Even setting aside the difficulties in response time, the SomCan patrol ship’s armament rendered it run-of-the-mill competition for many of the illegal fishing vessels it was routinely tasked with observing and intercepting. A few weeks earlier, Orey had been personally supervising a routine patrol from Bossaso to Hafun. As the SomCan ship was returning to port, it came across four foreign fishing vessels in close proximity to one another, each armed with an anti-aircraft gun, which Orey sardonically described as “almost the exact same kind as ours. They saw the anti-aircraft guns on our deck,” he said, “and that was enough. They opened fire.” Outmatched, the SomCan crew had few options. “Of course we fled,” said Orey, “there was no way we were ready to fight them.” Fortunately, no one was injured or killed in the engagement.10 But the incident illustrated that SomCan was in need of a more lethal deterrent than the “Coast Guard” lettering on its ships before it would be able to administer justice in Somalia’s anarchic waters.

  * * *


  After the dissolutions of Hart and SomCan in 2002 and 2005, respectively, their employees melted like a tide into the coastline. As Ombaali’s testimony suggests, some of them discovered that their nautical training had practical applications at the opposite end of the employment spectrum from law enforcement. In an October 2008 report by the British think tank Chatham House, Captain Colin Darch, skipper of the hijacked Russian tugboat Svitzer Korsakov, related that several of the vessel’s captors had previously belonged to the Puntland Coast Guard. “One pirate called Ahmed told us he had been in the coast guard,” he said, “and only Ahmed and one or two others who had also been coast guards understood our engines.” 11

  The involvement of ex-Puntland Coast Guard marines in piracy is hardly surprising. The skills and experience possessed by former coast guards—trained to a European standard in sharpshooting, maritime navigation, and boarding and seizure operations—made them perfect employees for the new businesses springing up around the Gulf of Aden. The Somali pirates who burst onto the scene in 2007 and 2008 were organized to a level attested by the immediacy of their success, and by the millions of dollars that were literally airlifted their way. Long-range motherships and advanced navigation systems like GPS and radar made it possible for them to carry out deep-water operations. These technologies—as well as larger investments in fuel and weapons—extended the pirates’ attack radius hundreds of kilometres from the coast. During the extended hunting trips into the wilderness of international waters that characterized this new wave of pirates, a former coast guard’s knowledge of GPS systems, radar, and the more complex engines on board the motherships would be an invaluable asset.