The Pirates of Somalia

by Jay Bahadur

  Perhaps because of tales such as this, the pirates—after having successfully avoided the patrols of state-of-the-art warships—later found themselves hunted on land by their own friends and relatives. “Everyone is trying to call them, trying to ask them for money. So they go and lock themselves inside a house and turn off their phones,” said Hersi. “Maybe they come out after ten days, when they have to, but then they’ll go right back in. Everyone is chasing them.”

  When they could not stay holed up any longer, the pirates turned their attention to women. With their new-found wealth, they were able to afford to marry younger and more attractive wives; the ten Victoria attackers, said Hersi, had already married, and not for the first time. “They used to only have one wife, have a normal life, live in daylight, all that stuff. Once they become pirates they don’t go back to their wives,” he said. Their lives with their new wives, however, did not typically lead to matrimonial bliss. “They might each have twenty thousand dollars left, and they finish that in two weeks. After that, they start to sell everything back. Then, the women are history. The marriages run until the money runs out.”

  The short-term marriages Hersi was describing, known in Islamic jurisprudence as nikah misyar, or “travellers’ marriage,” are not unique to Somalia, but are widely used by Sunni Muslims as a loophole to circumvent Islam’s circumscription of casual sex. Unlike nikah, or traditional marriage, misyar does not carry the corresponding burdens of financial responsibility, co-habitation, or inheritance, and divorce can be pronounced simply by verbal agreement. Hersi was not the first Somali adult I had heard sermonize about the pernicious effects of travellers’ marriages on Somali society; the practice is becoming increasingly common amongst the youth population as a whole, eliciting the inevitable warnings about the corruption of Somali culture.

  “Before, you would come to the girl’s family and ask for their daughter, and then give them money, or, if it’s a traditional bush family, some camels … But these pirates take them from their families. They come by in their Land Cruisers, the girls jump inside and they go get married in a hotel and fuck like crazy. They give them jewellery, introduce them as their wives, and then one month later, everything is done … Then they go back to their old wives.”

  Once the attackers had had ample shore leave (or honeymooning, as the case may have been), they were required to report back to the ship in order to take their turn guarding the hostages. However, each had the option of hiring someone (usually a relative) to take his place on the ship for the duration of its captivity—much like buying one’s way out of a draft—in which case he would return only when the ransom was being delivered. In total, twenty pirates remained stationed on the Victoria at all times, taking turns guarding the hostages in four-hour shifts.

  Hersi’s obnoxiously loud cellphone chimed to life, cutting in on our conversation. After a brusque exchange in Somali—of which I picked out one sentence: “What’s happened to my car?”—Hersi turned back to me.

  “That was the guy in Eyl who’s looking after my Land Cruiser,” he said. “I’m getting ready to sell it to one of the pirate boys.” Then, smiling broadly, “It’s an old one … it cost me only six thousand dollars in Dubai. He’s giving me ten thousand dollars for it. Cool, huh?”

  As he was finishing his sentence, Hersi’s phone rang again. This time it was his sister, informing him of the repair estimate for his Land Cruiser; evidently, something was wrong with its radiator. Hersi frowned, hanging up, before seamlessly continuing his previous train of thought.

  “Imagine these young guys … twentysomething years old, no food, no life, with a wife to support. When you’re hungry, you’ll do whatever job you can get. Many of the pirates used to be police. I know five of them personally; [Mohamed Abdi]—the one who first boarded the ship—was a lieutenant in [former Puntland president] Adde Muse’s time, when he was twenty-five. Then they stopped getting paid. In Abdullahi Yusuf’s time, things were different. Whatever money he had, he would pay the soldiers first. Puntland was tough … security was good; there were no guns in the street, no shootings. Then Adde came along … he didn’t give a shit who lived and who died. So that’s when these guys turned to piracy. If they got good money, they would become police officers again,” he said.

  If nothing else, this anecdote lent support to the theory that the near collapse of Puntland’s governmental institutions in 2008—particularly the security forces—had contributed significantly to the piracy outbreak. Hersi, however, was not short on explanations. “The problem is that they have no education at all,” he said. “They take human beings hostage, and for them it’s a joke. Only when you’re educated do you see that it’s a serious crime, that it’s real.”

  It was close to four o’clock in the afternoon, nearing Dahabshiil’s closing hour. I was two weeks in arrears with Said’s and Abdirashid’s wages (twenty dollars each per day), and I had promised them earlier that I would make a cash run before the day’s end. I now spotted them wandering around the corner of the house, peering expectantly in my direction. Not wishing to give them any further cause to despise Hersi, I decided to take a break from the khat; for his part, Hersi was also delighted by my decision to fetch some cash. We agreed to reconvene in half an hour.

  * * *

  As soon as I returned with the money, Hersi picked up where he had left off, beginning a lecture on the Puntland government’s total inability to tackle the piracy issue. “At the beginning of this game, maybe fourteen or fifteen months ago, Puntland tried twice to attack Eyl with their military forces,” he said. “They came to the town with technicals and almost sixty soldiers, but when they arrived there were three hundred twenty-year-olds with anti-aircraft guns waiting for them. The soldiers came running back.”

  The incident to which Hersi was referring, Haji’s abortive invasion of Eyl, had unfolded much as he described. After their boss had absconded with his $20,000 payoff, the Puntland soldiers had been wise to withdraw; not only would the pirates have defended themselves, but their clan militias—indeed, anyone in the town who owned a gun—would have come to their defence, and the streets of Eyl would have turned into an urban battleground.

  “The second thing,” continued Hersi, “is that the soldiers are related to the pirates. Farole couldn’t attack Eyl. His soldiers would say to themselves, ‘How can we kill our cousins?’ ” There was no better illustration of the problem gnawing at the root of President Farole’s attempts to combat piracy. Unlike the army of a mature state, Puntland’s security forces (as is the case across Somalia) are not seen by the local population as a neutral entity, but through the lens of clan. Military action is viewed either as a declaration of war by one clan on another, or as an attempt to turn cousin against cousin; in both cases, it is ineffective. Only inter-clan mediation, not a strong central state, has prevented Puntland from Balkanizing into a collection of warring enclaves.

  As the sky darkened, we slowly began to collect the discarded khat pulp and empty cigarette packs. Hersi seized the opportunity to remind me of my earlier promise. “Hey, man,” Hersi said, “it looks like the repairs to my car are going to cost $140, a bit more than I thought. Can I borrow that much?” As I only had hundred-dollar bills in my possession, I opted to round down his request, and went inside to retrieve one of the crisp bills I had just picked up at Dahabshiil. I handed it to him and he thanked me, promising to pay it back within a few days.

  A few moments later, he presented a slightly stranger petition. “Hey, Jay, you know those pants you were wearing when I came in?” he asked.

  “You mean my jeans?”

  “Yeah. They were really nice, man,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Can I have them, man? I’m going back to the coast soon and I need a really good pair of jeans, to protect me from the wind.”

  Having but three pairs of trousers in my travel ensemble, I was sadly forced to refuse his request, and suggested that he take five dollars out of the hundred I had giv
en him and buy a pair of knock-off jeans at the market.

  He sighed. “Those won’t be nearly as good.”

  Under the watchful escort of Said and Abdirashid, Hersi made his way out of the compound, soon to rejoin his comrades on the beaches of Eyl. A few weeks after our interview, on July 18, Hersi’s khat-fuelled vigil finally came to an end with the long-awaited delivery of the ransom money for the Victoria. It must have been a bitter-sweet moment—the final ransom turned out to be only $1.8 million, far short of Hersi’s $3 million prediction.

  At the beginning of September, several months after I had last spoken to Hersi, the monsoons came to a close and pirate season opened again in full force, with almost two dozen hijackings occurring before the year was out. If only one of those many ships had need of an interpreter, perhaps Hersi finally got his big break.

  13

  The Cadet and the Chief

  IT WAS A FROZEN MID-DECEMBER DAY IN THE BLACK SEA PORT OF Constanţa, Romania. Trudging down to the harbour with Teddy, my Romanian translator, we were caught in a crossfire of icy blasts of ocean wind sweeping across the jutting peninsula and through the deserted streets of the Old Town. A statue of the poet Ovid dominated the central square, surveying with marble eyes the same place where, two thousand years ago, he had spent his final days lamenting the cruel fate that had seen him banished to this backward outpost at the very margins of the Roman Empire. My first impression was not much different from Ovid’s; after the bustling cosmopolitan streets of Bucharest, some 250 kilometres away, Constanţa’s grey tones and empty streets conveyed the feeling of a declining province. But first impressions were misleading: the city is a bustling mercantile centre—the fourth-largest port in Europe, and the biggest on the Black Sea.

  Little about Constanţa, on this cold and sombre day, reminded me of the sunny desert plains of Somalia. Yet the two places were connected more intimately than one would expect, by way of the international shipping routes linking the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, and finally the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. Indeed, the city’s tenuous connection to Somalia had brought me here, in pursuit of the story of the MV Victoria. For Constanţa was home to seven of the eleven crew members held hostage aboard the vessel for seventy-five days.

  In an American-style Italian restaurant, a welcome oasis from the bitter cold, I met with a young man I will call Matei Levenescu. We had never met, but I felt an oddly personal connection to him. Six months earlier, I had stood less than a kilometre away from him, separated by an unbridgeable stretch of hostile water lying between the Victoria and the beach at Eyl. For utterly different reasons, we had both ended up in a country that neither of us would have expected to visit in our lifetimes, viewing it from entirely divergent perspectives—I, desperately trying to get to where he was; he, wishing he were anywhere else on earth.

  Spurning my invitation to order food, Levenescu contented himself with a Pepsi, which he proceeded to nurse over the course of the hour. In his early twenties, Levenescu was slender and thin-lipped, with eyes that told me he would likely command a ship of his own one day. Still a cadet, he was in the third year of a four-year program at Constanţa Maritime University, soon to complete his studies and become a full-time seafarer. His assignment aboard the Victoria, like the cooperative education programs offered by North American universities, had been intended to furnish on-the-job training. Levenescu ended up with far more first-hand experience than he had bargained for.

  Almost as soon as we sat down, Levenescu launched into a straightforward warning about the dangers of overly detailed media coverage of pirate operations. “You have to be careful what you write,” he said. “The pirates can easily go on the Internet and learn how to adapt their operations based on your reports.” In a manner oddly patronizing for his age, Levenescu lectured me on the potential harm of publicly revealing the size of ransom payments. Such open reporting, he feared, would only increase the pirates’ leverage at the bargaining table.

  “That’s what happened to the Hansa,” he said, referring to the MV Hansa Stavanger, another German-owned freighter held concurrently with the Victoria, further south at Harardheere. The crew of the Hansa suffered through an agonizing four-month ransom negotiation, during which the pirates continually revised their demands upwards. At one point the negotiators on both sides had agreed on $2.5 million, only to see the pirates inflate their asking price once more. Whether this double-dealing was the result of the media creating an environment of perfect information within the “ransom market,” as Levenescu suspected, is uncertain. (A ransom of $2.75 million was finally agreed, and the Hansa was released on August 2, 2009.)

  * * *

  Levenescu was lying in his cabin when the attack came. He immediately knew something was wrong when he heard the knocking of the propeller, indicating that the vessel was attempting to turn at top speed. When he heard the pirates on the deck above, Levenescu and seven of his crewmates, all save Captain Petru Constantin Tinu and two seamen, went back into their cabins and locked themselves in.

  The attack did not come as a complete surprise, Levenescu told me, since there had been an attempted hijacking in the area only seven hours earlier. Levenescu knew this because it had been his duty to monitor international piracy bulletins and report potential trouble spots to the captain. Before entering “Pirate Alley,” moreover, the crew had implemented a series of counter-piracy measures ordered by the vessel’s German owners: positioning high-powered water hoses, welding metal plates to the windows on the first and second levels, and blocking the stairwells leading up to the bridge. None of these precautions, however, made much difference to a ship as slow and sluggish as the Victoria.

  The deck officer and second mate, Ruxandra Sarchizian, spotted the pirates at only six kilometres’ distance (the Victoria’s radar was blind to the attack craft until it was three kilometres away). “There were nine of them in one ten-metre-long boat,” Levenescu recalled. “They came up fast on our port side, moving at twenty knots.” Equipped with two 350-horsepower outboard motors, the craft was carrying about five hundred litres of gasoline—not nearly enough fuel, it must be noted, to get them back to Somalia (Hussein Hersi may not have been exaggerating when he spoke of his cousins’ suicidal “capture or die” philosophy).

  Even though the Victoria had been travelling in the Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor and was in the vicinity of two NATO frigates, Mohamed Abdi and his team boarded the vessel unmolested. When asked how the pirates could have pulled off their assault practically under the gunnels of two warships, Levenescu rolled his eyes. “They’re useless,” he scoffed. “There was a warship, a Turkish one, fifty miles away when we were attacked. But at the same time, a Turkish cargo ship was also calling for help, and so it chose to help them instead.”1

  Sarchizian raised the warship on radio, but instead of mobilizing a response, the Turks plied her with aimless questions. “What colour is the boat, what speed is it going at, how many pirates, how many guns, what kind of guns, … all this shit, you know? Help us! Finally, when the pirates were about fifteen cables away, they said a chopper would arrive in thirty-five minutes,” said Levenescu. When it arrived, the helicopter circled two or three times overhead as the pirates nervously tracked it with their rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launchers. “The warships, they don’t prevent anything,” Levenescu said, with a contempt he extended to the international safety corridor. “That corridor is hell,” he said. “It just makes the pirates’ job easier, because they know where all the ships will be going. ‘Okay,’ they say, ‘Let’s fish!’ ”2

  The sea was calm, and with the Victoria’s thirteen-knot top speed and two-metre freeboard, the pirates had been able to board her with ease; the entire hijacking, from sighting to capture, took less than forty minutes. Once on deck, the pirates fired several rounds from their Kalashnikovs into the air in an attempt to intimidate the crew into surrendering. As the rest of the crew huddled on the lower decks, the captain and two seam
en barricaded themselves in the bridge. Using a four-metre aluminum ladder, the attackers climbed from level to level until they reached the command deck. One pirate advanced with his weapon raised, shooting a bullet through the bridge’s glass housing and into the ceiling. Before he could decide to switch to living targets, Captain Tinu opened the door to the bridge and pushed the man’s weapon down, agreeing to surrender the ship.

  Once in control of the Victoria, the pirates ordered the crew to hoist their attack boat aboard using the vessel’s deck cranes. Lacking the proper cables with which to secure the boat to the crane, the ropes snapped and it fell back into the sea. As the crew looked on in terrified anticipation, the pirates’ reaction was remarkably cheery. “No problem,” they said. “We’ll just buy another one.”

  And what happened after that? Levenescu shot me a bemused look. “We go to Somalia,” he replied in English. For two days the crew stayed confined to the ten-metre-square bridge as the ship made its way to Eyl. Arriving towards the end of “pirate season,” they joined a fellowship of three hostage ships already moored in the harbour; for the next seventy-five days the crew watched other commandeered vessels come and go, until, finally, only the Victoria remained.

  After the first two days, the crew was moved to the captain’s and owner’s quarters, where they spent the rest of their imprisonment in a world consisting of the two cabins, the ship’s mess, and the corridor linking them. The pirates, conversely, came and went freely, rotating between ship and shore in two- or three-week shifts.

  * * *

  Frequent shore leave was a necessary pressure release valve to prevent tempers on the ship from flaring. Supply boats went to and from the shore two or three times per day, though this ferry service was later reduced to one evening transport as the hagaa season wore on and its winds became increasingly merciless.3 The pirates came and went with the transports, but there was an average of twenty on board at all times. Those not native to the Eyl area rarely left the ship, but the Romanian hostages observed that even the group’s Eyl residents were decidedly apprehensive about taking shore leave.4