The Pirates of Somalia

by Jay Bahadur

  An hour and a half on, heaps of discarded khat stalks joined cigarette butts in mounting piles next to half-drained teacups. Attention turned to the TV as a procession of images of Somalia’s past leaders began to scroll across the screen. Abdirahman and Mohamed excitedly named each one for me as his photo appeared. Momman sat in silence, watching the television and chewing ponderously.

  Enough time had passed for the khat to take effect, so I decided to ask Momman some questions. The tale he began to recount was by now familiar to my ears. “Boyah and I used to fish together,” he said. “At first, we operated together in the same group, but later we split into different ones. There were a lot of independent groups … around fifteen of them. We used to only go after illegal fishing ships,” he explained. It wasn’t until 1999, according to Momman, that Boyah attacked his first commercial ship. “We started attacking them when we realized we couldn’t fight against fishing ships anymore,” owing to the improved state of their armament. “Commercial ships go into our waters, and they don’t pay any fees.”

  Momman’s success soon elevated him, as with Boyah, to the position of financier: “I was the one who bought everything for the missions,” he explained, sometimes for his own group, but also for others. “We helped each other out.”

  Boyah had taken credit for hijacking dozens of ships, but when asked for his own tally, Momman hesitated. “I can’t tell you that,” he said, “it’s a secret.” He paused, musing. “I got a lot of good ones.”

  I decided to change tack. Boyah told me that his favourite ship was the Golden Nori, I said, referring to the Japanese chemical tanker he had steered into Bossaso port, What’s yours? The attempt met defeat against Momman’s hard eyes.

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” he answered. “I’m ashamed of what I did.”

  I pressed further, desperate for any scraps of information he could give me about the ships: the nationalities of the crew, their cargos or destinations.

  “No, I won’t give you any of those details,” Momman said, “because you’ll be able to figure out the names of the ships later on.”

  “He’s not stupid,” Omar interjected.

  Momman invariably hijacked any question aimed at illuminating his buccaneering past and steered it back to the topic of his redemption. “I want to have a good career, and not have it ruined by my past deeds,” he said. “I want to be another man.” He gave April 20 as marking the beginning of this new life, which he insisted was before the redemption movement had come into fashion. “I renounced piracy before the Sheikh [Abdulkhadar] started taking people to mosque and making them swear off piracy. I made the decision on my own.

  “I know it’s bad to be a pirate, but at least pirates never kill anyone,” he said. “What warships do, especially the Indian ones, is really bad. When they run into a pirate boat, they will kill them, or take their food and fuel and abandon them until they eat one another.” He added, in a disgusted tone, “It would be better to just kill them.” Even in the international media, the Indian navy had earned a reputation for heavy-handedness; perhaps most infamous was the November 2008 incident in which the Indians blew a Thai fishing ship out of the water with all hands on board, later claiming they had mistaken it for a pirate mothership.

  “The Americans, they are the nicest ones,” Momman said. “The rest of them just want to do their job—they don’t care who dies.”

  Momman’s warm feelings towards the Americans had come from personal experience, like the time they responded to the SOS of a ship he had hijacked—the name of which Momman naturally refused to disclose. “About forty minutes after we boarded the ship, the Americans appeared and started shooting at us,” he said. Like Boyah, Momman could recall with surprising accuracy the designations of the warships hemming him in: B135, B132, 125, 128. “The numbers kept changing” as ships arrived and retreated, he said.

  “The Americans were talking at us through the ship’s loudspeakers, but we just ignored them and moved the ship to Eyl. They were warning us to leave the ship within twenty-four hours, or they would attack,” he said, smiling. “Twenty-four hours later, they repeated the same message.”

  Gunfire from the American ships raked the cliffs overlooking the beach at Eyl. “Then they shot at the fishing boats on the beach,” said Momman, “because they thought they were going to bring us supplies. They fired near to the boats as they tried to approach us from shore. They stopped them from bringing us food.” It was then, according to Momman, that the ship’s owners requested that the Americans back off, paving the way for a painless ransom negotiation.

  Reminded of these glory days, Momman began to speak more freely of his past life, sounding almost nostalgic. “We used to take a lot of dry food with us, extra sugar, a little flour. Enough for seven days. We would cook on board,” he said.

  “It was never that hard to climb up onto the deck—it depends on how high up the ship is, how fast it’s going, but usually it’s very easy. Personally, I’ve never seen the crew fighting back. Most people would go and lock themselves inside, some would come out with their hands out, saying, ‘What do you guys want?’ ”

  And was the crew ever afraid?

  “Definitely, they would freak out. But we tried to calm them down, saying, ‘We’re not going to hurt you if you take our orders.’ We would tell them, ‘You’ll be all right … we’re not here to kill you.’ We never had to kill anyone.”

  Momman lamented that things had gotten much more dangerous since those days. Many of his former colleagues had disappeared without a trace in recent times. “Some of my friends are still missing,” he said. “About two months ago, some of them washed up dead on the coast, near Garacad,” presumably either drowned or killed by the international naval forces. “The families of the missing boys are really upset about it; they don’t know where they are or whether they’re dead or alive,” said Momman. “It’s starting to create a lot of anger. Who knows what their families will do.

  “Also, some of these young boys have gotten twenty years in Bossaso jail,” he said. “That angers their families too, but at least when they are in Somalia they can go visit them.”

  * * *

  It is not only foreign navies that are responsible for dead Somalis in the surf, but possibly the pirates themselves. The stretch of the Gulf of Aden linking northern Somalia and Yemen is one of the world’s busiest human smuggling routes; often when travelling from Garowe to Bossaso, I would see dozens of Oromo migrants alongside the road, staffs in hand, walking the hundreds of kilometres from the highlands of Ethiopia to Bossaso under the burning sun. Many I later observed camped in huddles outside the Bossaso compound of the UN High Commission for Refugees, but many others undoubtedly joined the thousands of Somalis making the risky dash for Yemen each year.

  Tragically, those who smuggle them often do not complete the job, forcing migrants into the water kilometres from shore in order to avoid Yemeni coastal patrols; according to the UN’s Mixed Migration Task Force, 1–7 per cent of those making the journey from 2007 to 2009 died in the attempt.1 Pirate groups, other UN agencies have claimed, are directly involved in human trafficking. It makes sense: pirates already use Yemeni ports to obtain smuggled weapons, and pirate organizations could use their equipment and smuggling networks to achieve a perverse economy of scale by bridging the piracy and human smuggling “industries.”

  Momman agreed, but made it clear that his generation had never been involved in such activities. “The pirates operating now are definitely doing that,” he said, “but it wasn’t going on earlier.” According to him, the going rate for a trip to Yemen was $200 for a spot in a “small boat”—holding about thirty people—and $100 for a place in a more crowded “big boat”—one carrying eighty to a hundred people. The business had a dual purpose that went beyond the money: the pirates, said Momman, used the migrants as a cover to conceal their activities from both the Puntland government and international naval forces. Unlike piracy, transporting people is not a cri
me, at least until an attempt is made to enter a foreign state illegally.

  “They don’t want the government to see that they are pirates,” he explained. “They drop off [the migrants] and then go about their pirating.” The idea was not completely far-fetched. During President Farole’s impromptu raid on pirates in the village of Marero, his soldiers captured documents conclusively linking the gang to human smuggling.

  Whether pirate gangs are amongst the many smuggling groups guilty of murdering their charges is unknown. But Momman doubted it: “They always deliver the people on time.”

  * * *

  The desire to trace the poorly marked money trail always led my interviews to one central question: How do pirates spend their cash? Judging from Momman’s response, it was the wrong question to ask.

  “I told you before,” he said, “this house is not mine, it’s my wife’s. I never used any piracy money to live on—it’s haram to do so. We used that money to fund new pirate operations and to buy weapons. That’s all. We don’t build houses with it.” Indeed, the like-minded devotion by other pirate headmen to continual capital reinvestment had allowed piracy to develop into a self-sustaining industry.

  The fleeting Somali dusk had come and gone, and the strips of sky poking through the bars of the windows were now a deep navy blue. Colonel Omar roused himself from the couch and headed off to meet some visiting Kenyan documentary makers being hosted by the Farole family. The hours of continual chewing had taken their toll on me: gut rot was gnawing at my stomach lining and an indefinable pain was pounding my brain, but my body was taut with nervous energy, my jaw clenched. Omar and I were also scheduled to meet with the Colonel’s Kenyan journalists, and his phone chimed every few minutes with the Colonel’s insistent reminders. After about the seventh call within a quarter hour, I decided that the interview had reached its natural conclusion.

  I picked up my half-finished bundle of khat and tossed it gently into Momman’s dwindling pile. He protested; take it, please, I said, and he accepted.

  Throughout the interview, Mohamed and Abdirahman had been content to let Momman act as their mouthpiece, perhaps because their own mouths had been too jammed with khat leaves to be of any service to them. As I was about to leave, Mohamed, who up until now had been fairly reticent, timidly requested permission to ask me a question: What, he hesitantly inquired, do people in the West think about pirates? “They think about people with eye patches,” I replied, wondering in what mangled form my meaning would reach Mohamed’s brain. The romantic stereotype of the swashbuckling pirate was so foreign to the Somalis’ self-image that my many previous attempts to convey it had been met only with bemused glances.

  As I got up to depart, blood rushing into my numbed legs, I asked permission to take a photo of Momman and his two colleagues. Maya, no, he said, waving away my camera. I reminded him that I had videotaped Momman, Boyah, and the other pirates during our recent khat picnic together. “I couldn’t do anything about that,” he answered. “Here, I can.”

  Memory would have to suffice. My last image of Momman, as his wife led us out the door, was of him reclining against a bolster, teacup in one hand, khat stalk in the other, staring pensively into the carpet.

  9

  The Policemen of the Sea

  MOMMAN’S ANIMOSITY TOWARDS THE INTERNATIONAL NAVAL coalitions policing Somali waters was shared by many of his peers. Boyah, for one, still spoke with anger about the six men he lost, plucked into the sky by French navy helicopters and transported half a world away to face eventual trial in a Parisian courthouse. Yet he was quick to express his contempt for the international naval forces. “Sometimes, we capture vessels when warships are right around us,” Boyah had told me during our first meeting. “We don’t care about them. They’re not going to stop us.”

  Though it is tempting to write off Boyah’s remarks as empty bluster, the facts are harder to dismiss: the deployment of three multinational naval task forces beginning in late 2008 has done little to halt pirate attacks. Conversely, from 2008 to 2010 the number of hijackings continued to rise, and the trend had not abated as this book went to press.

  When the Somali pirates exploded onto the scene following the end of the summer monsoon season in 2008, the world was caught unprepared. The only naval presence in the region was Combined Task Force 150 (CTF-150), a multinational coalition built around the US Fifth Fleet whose primary function was counter-terrorism. Following the sharp increase in the pirate threat, counter-piracy was hastily tacked onto CTF-150’s mandate, though clearly only as a stopgap solution.

  In October 2008, NATO finally announced plans to deploy a seven-warship task force by the year’s end. Two months later, the European Union added its own flotilla to Somalia’s increasingly congested waterways, EU Naval Force Somalia (EUNAVFOR, also designated “Atalanta”). And in January 2009, the United States proclaimed the creation of Combined Task Force 151 (CTF-151), a multinational fleet tasked with taking over counter-piracy operations from CTF-150. Independently operating navies from countries as diverse as China, India, Iran, Russia, and Malaysia also joined the fray, with the clear priority of defending their own nationals and flag vessels. As individual warships have come and gone at the behest of their home governments, the combined strength of the international coalition has varied between twenty-five and forty vessels, at an estimated annual cost of $1–$1.5 billion.

  For many countries, the piracy crisis provided an ideal opportunity to flex naval muscles: Operation Atalanta was the very first maritime mission under the EU flag, China’s deployment of three warships was its first overseas mission since 1949, and Germany’s and Japan’s respective contributions to Atalanta and CTF-151 exemplified the two nations’ gradual movement away from five decades of dogmatic pacifism. The Somali pirates seemed to be an enemy that the whole world could agree on.

  Yet these three fleets, the collective product of an unprecedented level of international naval cooperation, have been unable to stop a motley assortment of half-starved brigands armed with aging assault rifles and the odd grenade launcher. Many find it incomprehensible that, despite bristling with state-of-the-art weaponry and detection systems, Western warships have allowed the pirates to continue to hijack ships with seeming impunity.

  Such an attitude fails to appreciate the sheer size of the area that international forces must cover. From the time the crew of a targeted vessel spots the oncoming hijackers and sends out a distress call, a nearby warship generally has a window of fifteen to forty minutes in which to respond before the pirates manage to board the vessel. Assuming the ship is outfitted with a helicopter (which has a maximum speed of about 320 kilometres per hour) ready for immediate launch, it must be within about eighty kilometres of the scene of attack in order to have a realistic shot at mounting a successful rescue operation. Yet Somali pirate attacks have occurred along an east–west axis 3,000 kilometres wide, from the depths of the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea, and along a north–south axis ranging the 3,700 kilometres from Oman to Madagascar—an ocean surface area two-thirds the size of the United States. For the crews of the warships in the combined international naval effort, struggling to contain an estimated 1,500–2,000 pirates operating in small groups of six to twelve, hunting pirates must seem like playing a losing game of Whac-a-Mole. In fairness, controlling such a vast area is not quite as hopeless as I have made it out to be; pirate attacks tend to cluster around shipping lanes, and by patrolling these routes warships greatly improve their odds of disrupting pirate operations. But it is generally accepted that no purely military solution exists to the problem of Somali piracy—at least none that is both economically and politically feasible.

  * * *

  When EUNAVFOR warships sailed into the Gulf of Aden in December 2008, they came with a plan. In cooperation with the other naval forces, NAVFOR established the Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor (IRTC), a heavily patrolled safe zone running 650 kilometres along the Yemeni side of the Gulf of Aden. In conjunction with
regularly scheduled convoy escorts, the IRTC was immediately effective in restoring some order to the stretch of water that wary mariners had nicknamed “Pirate Alley.” But though the statistics show that the IRTC was initially effective in reducing the success rate of pirate attacks, the absolute number of hijackings steadily rose. In 2008, there were 134 attacks, mostly concentrated in the Gulf of Aden, resulting in 49 documented hijackings. In 2009, the number of attacks increased to 228, with 68 successful hijackings. The next year saw 74 hijackings for 243 attacks, and as of February the figures for 2011 stood at 14 hijackings for 40 attacks—on pace to exceed the 2010 total.1

  These numbers reveal a small drop in the hijacking success rate (37 per cent to 30 per cent) from 2008 to 2009,2 corresponding to the increased naval presence towards the end of 2008 and the creation of the IRTC. Though the hijacking success rate has remained between 30 and 35 per cent since 2009, the economic incentive—as measured by ransom amounts—has been steadily increasing. In 2008, the average pirate ransom fell in the range of $1.25–$1.5 million, which grew to $2–$2.5 million in 2009 and to $3–$4 million in 2010, highlighted by the record $9.5 million bounty paid to release MV Samho Dream, a South Korean oil tanker commandeered in April (the vessel earned her hijackers more than three times the amount garnered by the headline-grabbing supertanker Sirius Star merely a year earlier.) In 2008, the pirates earned a total of $25–$35 million, a figure that shot up to $70–$90 million the following year. Yet in 2010, as average ransoms spiralled upwards, ransom revenues surprisingly fell slightly, to $65–$85 million. With the number of hijackings continuing to rise, this seemingly paradoxical drop in earnings was explained by lengthening periods of captivity, as avaricious pirate bosses began to drag out negotiations for months longer in the hope of securing themselves premium ransoms. As a consequence, the majority of vessels hijacked in 2010 were not ransomed until well into 2011.