The Pirates of Somalia

by Jay Bahadur

  As Fod’Adde proceeded to draw out his panegyric over the course of several minutes, I was once more made conscious of being under the wing of the Farole family. With the Omars seated on either side of me, it was apparent that much of Fod’Adde’s monologue was being tailored for the ears of the president’s son and cousin.

  Sycophancy aside, the security situation had improved since the days of the previous administration. President Hersi had discontinued the pay of the security forces and civil service in early 2008, a decision that unquestionably contributed to the rise of piracy towards the end of the year. When Farole took power in January 2009, he immediately reinstated civil payrolls and began to reorganize the Darawish, Puntland’s security forces. Even in the three-month interval between my first and second visits to the region, the improvements to security had been remarkable: soldiers positioned at regular checkpoints throughout the city checked every passing vehicle, tinted windows had been prohibited, and there had been a successful campaign to get guns off the streets. At night, security patrols swept through the city and the surrounding desert, combing them for pirates and weapons smugglers.

  The change, based on the stories I had heard, had been monumental. Garowe in late 2008 had been, by all accounts, practically run by pirates, with opulent weddings attended by processions of 4×4s and khat-fuelled festivities a common sight. It was an assessment that Fod’Adde corroborated.

  “Once they got the ransom money the pirates would come to Garowe,” he said. “Then they’d get drunk, start gunfights in the street, things like that. Things very much against our culture.”

  On what did they spend their money? I asked.

  “Ladies,” Fod’Adde instantly replied. “They ruin families by stealing women away from their husbands. The women can smell the money … A lot of the women come from Somaliland, Djibouti, and other places in Somalia, so they bring a lot of diseases.”

  The view that outside women were somehow tainted—which seemed to be based solely on raw clan prejudice—was shared by many of Garowe’s leading citizens; at the beginning of Farole’s anti-piracy campaign, one cleric strongly warned his Friday congregation against the spread of HIV/AIDS in the community, as “prostitutes from everywhere” had been drawn to Puntland by the pirates’ money.4

  Piracy, nonetheless, represented a massive injection of foreign exchange into the Puntland economy, and it was hard to imagine that there had been no positive trickle-down effects. Fod’Adde shook his head vigorously. “That money is haram [religiously forbidden],” he said. “As Muslims, we believe that money earned in that manner can never do any good … not for the economy or anything else. The moment they get it, they waste it on women, drugs, khat … haram money never stays in one’s pocket for long.”

  Nor could the new houses springing up atop the carcass of the former airport, providing a boost to Garowe’s already booming construction industry, convince him that pirate dollars would bring any benefits. “The pirates had all this money, but no experience with business,” he said. “So they pay the workers five hundred dollars per day, when normally they might be paid fifty. And so the workers themselves start chewing khat all the time, and they get used to the high pay and now are no longer happy to take regular jobs. You know, the more money you get paid, the lazier you get.”

  In any case, said Fod’Adde, the reports of pirate construction sprees had been grossly overstated. “That’s not the way that most of them spend their money,” he said. “I’d say that only one in a hundred actually builds a house. As for the houses that they do build, they can’t rent them and no one buys them, because they’re haram. So the pirates are stuck with them.”

  At this point, my interpreter Omar could not resist interrupting with his own anecdote. “Even the cars they buy are haram,” he said. “If we see one driving by, my dad says, ‘Don’t buy that one. It’s a haram car … a pirate car.’ ”

  As proof of the curse of pirate cash, Fod’Adde brought up the case of Kadiye, a famed pirate leader who had recently returned from a Kenyan hospital after reportedly breaking both legs when he crashed his 4×4. Kadiye’s house, a sprawling structure by the side of the road at the northern outskirts of Garowe, suggested an eviscerated corpse, the whitewash of its outer walls terminating around gaping holes of exposed brick. “Look at Kadiye. He earned about three million dollars, but he didn’t have any plan,” Fod’Adde said. “He spent seventy thousand dollars on that house, but couldn’t finish it. He blew all his money on girls, and now he doesn’t have one cent left.”

  As I prepared to leave, Fod’Adde seamlessly resumed his earlier extolling of the present government’s efforts to combat piracy: “Some of the pirates have been killed, some have no money left, and some have gone overseas. But we’re always looking around for them, and if we catch any we send them to the prison in Bossaso.

  “We don’t even see them anymore. We ask ourselves, were they ghosts or human beings?” he said, laughing.

  * * *

  Bossaso prison lies a kilometre down a bumpy path jutting off the main road at the southern outskirts of the city. The square fortress-like structure with outer walls of pale yellow stands alone in an empty expanse, with nothing in the vicinity but stony rubble and the distant outline of the Karkaar Mountains. At opposing corners of the building stand two monolithic guard towers, whose sentries shout out demands for identification from the occupants of any vehicle passing within range of their assault rifles. Like runway markers, lines of carefully placed stones trace out the correct approach vector to the prison’s imposing blue gateway.

  Built with UN Development Programme money, this is one of two prisons serving a population of 1.3 million; the other, 250 kilometres south in the town of Qardho, is not yet operational. (There are also two rundown jails, located in Garowe and Galkayo.) With an incarcerated population of about one person per 5,000 (in the United States, the figure is one in 120), the fact that Puntland is not overrun by criminal gangs might seem inexplicable. The simple answer is that clan law (heer), not the rule of law, rules in Puntland. The state-administered justice system is, in a way, a last recourse in the event that clan mechanisms of dispute resolution fail.5 Almost half the inmates of Bossaso prison are pirates, a consequence of the Puntland government’s desire to demonstrate to the international community that it is serious about cracking down on piracy. It is unclear, however, under which law the men were charged; Puntland is still technically operating under the decades-old criminal code of the defunct Somali Republic, which lacks specific provisions for criminalizing piracy. Though Puntland’s Islamic clerics have interpreted vague proscriptions in sharia law against the setting up of trade-disrupting “roadblocks” as applying to sea piracy, such an approach is hardly a substitute for a modern juridical process.

  When I visited, Bossaso prison, meant for a capacity of 150, was jammed to the point of putrefaction with 275 ragged men. They were crammed into a half-dozen cells lining a central courtyard that doubled as an exercise yard. Beyond the chain-link fence surrounding the enclosure, the smell of urine saturated the July air. On the far side of the yard was the prison’s approximation of a mental health ward, an orange tarp spread over a few barrels, underneath which a solitary man was shackled to the ground by his ankle. The man introduced himself as Dr. Osman, a “human rights victim” who had once lived in Virginia. A few moments later, a prison administrator introduced Dr. Osman as “a madman” who had been jailed for his own good after falsely claiming to be an Al-Shabaab agent.

  At mealtimes, guards spooned helpings of gruel into the prisoners’ cupped shirts, or, if they lacked an intact garment, directly into their hands. On alternating days, half the prison population was let out into the yard to exercise. The atmosphere I observed was reminiscent of a school playground: some inmates congregated in corners, chatting and drinking milky tea out of plastic water bottles, while others kicked soccer balls across the crumbling concrete or launched basketballs at half-detached hoops. Their less fortunate colleague
s pressed up against their cell bars, looking on begrudgingly. On the walls above the courtyard guards perched like eagles, rifles laid flat across their squatting legs.

  My first of two visits to the prison had taken place on a very special day: a presidential visit by Abdirahman Farole. I had been accompanying the president for over a week as he travelled north from Garowe to Bossaso on his first domestic tour since his election. In each town and hamlet along the way, cheering throngs had welcomed him with joyous ululations, waving fronds and banging furiously on empty oil canisters. As his gold bulletproofed Land Cruiser pulled through the outer gate, he was greeted with even greater jubilation by the prison population, and for good cause: in celebration of his inauguration, about sixty minor offenders were to receive presidential pardons—a necessary measure to free up much-needed space in the overcrowded prison for more serious criminals.

  The president did not disappoint; after delivering a speech to an assembly of prisoners, his soldiers, arms overflowing with stacks of bills, doled out release grants to the pardoned men, each of whom received one million shillings (this grant, worth about thirty dollars, was enough to buy about a day and a half’s worth of khat in the local suq).

  As the president’s inspection tour moved towards the prison’s living quarters, three pirate inmates were brought out to me in the outer courtyard, where we sat down on a set of flimsy plastic lawn chairs. Two wore striped tracksuits, the other, slacks and a blue dress shirt; all three appeared to be in a state of robust health that defied the conditions in which they lived. I soon learned that one of the men, Jamal, was Boyah’s younger brother. Like his sibling, Jamal seemed to have a natural inclination towards leadership; seating himself directly across from me, he proceeded to field the majority of my questions. His two colleagues sat calmly smoking on either side of him, occasionally blurting out angry responses. Within a few minutes, a crowd of soldiers and prison officials had gathered around us, and the bodies pressing against my back forced me to hunch over my notebook.

  “What we were doing wasn’t illegal,” Jamal began. “We were chasing after illegal fishing ships. We were defending our seas.” Like Boyah, the three claimed to have been lobster divers in Eyl. They had habitually sold their catch to Somali middlemen in Bossaso, they said, who had paid them up to twenty-five dollars per kilogram. One month before, the trio had been caught by the French navy in an act of piracy, and were later handed over to the Puntland authorities.

  “We were all sentenced to life in prison without even being given a lawyer,” said Jamal. “We want a retrial.”

  The length of their sentences seemed unbelievable, and I asked my interpreter to confirm that I had understood correctly. It seemed a gross injustice for Jamal to languish in prison while Boyah—who had publicly admitted to hijacking dozens of ships—was free to chew khat with Puntland soldiers.

  Shifting tacks, I asked Jamal about the former Puntland Coast Guard’s involvement with illegal fishing, but he ignored the question and continued as if he were reading from a press release: “As fishermen, we were victims of every kind of ship crossing this planet: Western, Asian, whatever.”

  I repeated the question, but the result was the same.

  “They dump toxins in our waters, and no one cares,” he said. “Hopefully, the new government has some new ideas, and we can talk to them about what’s going on and the problems we have.” It was a strange attitude for men whose life sentences meant that their future problems would presumably be contained within these four walls.

  Neither Jamal nor his colleagues would shed any light on the circumstances of their capture, not even the type of ship they had been pursuing when they were caught. But Jamal’s next statement suggested that the gang had not been as focused on illegal fishing as he had initially indicated. “Fishing boats are hard to capture, they have more sophisticated defences,” he said. “But the cargo ships are from the same countries and they are the same people. Our enemies are the ones doing the illegal fishing, but we’ll take anything we can get. We don’t discriminate.”

  Jamal’s attack group had consisted of nine men, a typical pirate hunting party. The gang had employed two skiffs: one, a transport, carried the fuel, food, and water, while the other, speedier boat carried their rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launcher. When a suitable target was sighted, the entire team would transfer to the attack shuttle for the chase.

  As I began my next question, the president and his entourage emerged from the inner compound and started to make their way slowly towards the outer gate. Without a word to me, the three rose in unison and rushed to intercept him. The president’s security stood idly by as they inserted themselves in his path, performing slight bows as they lined up before him; he responded by shaking each of their hands warmly, almost as if they were prospective supporters on the campaign trail. I could understand nothing of their verbal exchange, but I knew that any hope for a pardon they may have held was dashed when the president turned and continued towards his waiting Land Cruiser.

  In all likelihood, they would not have to wait too much longer for an early parole. If their relatives and friends did not manage to get them released through clan or political influence, their places in the prison would sooner or later be claimed by a future wave of offenders, part of the ongoing game of musical cells in the Puntland justice system. It was a problem that the Puntland government itself was aware of. “Every time a suspect is apprehended for a crime, there is a whole clan behind him, paying bribes, lying to officials,” President Farole announced in a November 2010 public address. “The question is: who should be arrested then if the clans keep interfering on behalf of criminal suspects. Should only the people from outside [of Puntland] be arrested?”6

  Even if the government were to release all non-pirate inmates, Puntland simply lacks the capacity to handle a steady stream of detainees from the international naval forces. With no domestic victims, piracy is clearly not a matter suited to inter-clan mediation, and, short of international seafarers’ unions agreeing to abide by Somali customary law, Puntland will remain unable to carry its share of the burden without international assistance.

  * * *

  In the case of Boyah and company, of course, the response of the Puntland justice system had been to grant them total amnesty for their past crimes.

  One afternoon, as I was chewing khat with Joaar, the director general of the Puntland Ministry of Fisheries (and Boyah’s former employer in the lobster business), the subject of Boyah and Garaad’s coast guard project came up. “Boyah and Garaad should be behind bars,” Joaar declared, around a pulpy mouthful. “The idea of them serving as our coast guard is an insult.” Boyah, said Joaar, had tried to meet with him on multiple occasions, but Joaar had refused because he feared that the two might be photographed together.

  “Boyah called me just the other day to ask me why I was fighting against him,” he said. “I told him: ‘I want to eliminate you and all others like you’ … The young guys can be rehabilitated, but the big criminals—the ones we call in Italian the grande pesce [big fish]—should be locked up.”

  Yet Boyah, Garaad, and other well-known pirate leaders still walked free. I once asked a Puntland government insider why Bossaso prison was overflowing with rank-and-file pirates, while the leaders remain on the outside. “The Puntland government can’t arrest people based on rumours,” he answered. “Also, because of clan loyalty, no witnesses would come forward. It’s like having to make a case against a mafia boss.” This explanation was somewhat disingenuous; mafia bosses generally do not publicly admit to their crimes, as Boyah had on multiple occasions.

  Some, predictably, have imputed more insidious motives to the Farole government’s unwillingness to prosecute past (and present) pirate kingpins, namely that the president himself has been receiving handouts from the very leaders he ostensibly condemns. Since his election, the accusations against Farole have ranged from complicity to profiteering, and even to direct involvement in piracy. My own aff
iliation with the president’s son, Mohamad Farole, has been cited as evidence in the mounting case against him; Mohamad’s presence at my meetings with pirates had been referenced in multiple online articles aimed at incriminating him, and, by extension, his father.

  Some of the strongest indictments have come from the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia, in language surprisingly impolitic for a United Nations body. Warning that the new administration was “nudging Puntland in the direction of becoming a criminal state,” the group’s March 2010 report cited evidence from unnamed firsthand sources that “senior Puntland officials, including President Farole and members of his Cabinet, notably the Minister of the Interior, General Abdullahi Ahmed Jama ‘Ilkajir’ … and the Minister for Internal Security, General Abdillahi Sa’iid Samatar, have received proceeds from piracy and/or kidnapping.”7

  Hoping to shed some light on these claims, I spoke with Matt Bryden, the monitoring group’s Nairobi-based coordinator. Though Bryden refused to reveal the group’s sources, he was adamant that there was little reason to doubt their credibility. “We had a wealth of evidence, both direct and indirect, from eyewitnesses to direct monetary transactions, to testimony from captured pirates themselves,” he said. “We saw signed statements from convicted pirates who did not appear to have been coerced and who stood by these statements when we interviewed them. We had sources who were in the room when cash was delivered, and sources party to telephone calls where cash payments were being discussed.”

  During a videotaped interview with local news agency Garowe Online in late 2008, Boyah had claimed that 30 per cent of all ransom money went into the pockets of Puntland officials—a statistic he had denied to me multiple times since (possibly out of concern for embarrassing his newly powerful co-clansman, President Farole). It was a notion that Bryden endorsed. “Did [Boyah] pay 30 per cent to local leaders in Eyl? I would think not,” he said. “It is reasonable to assume that what Boyah was referring to was the payments he made to senior officials.”