The Pirates of Somalia

by Jay Bahadur

  “They had some problems in Eyl,” said Levenescu. “There was trouble between the pirates and the government, or other pirates … I don’t know.” Given the anti-pirate hostility I had witnessed from the local people while in Eyl—as well as the recent Puntland government crackdown—the pirates’ anxiety was hardly surprising.

  The pirates treated him and his shipmates with decency, if not kindness, Levenescu asserted, and never resorted to physical violence against any crew member. All things considered, he was content with the lot that he and his shipmates drew. “The group that captured us was a good one,” he said. “In the south, the pirates are terrible. They do much more violent things to intimidate the shipping company into paying.” Levenescu’s (somewhat accurate) generalization stemmed from the brutal treatment of the crew of the Hansa Stavanger, whom the pirates subjected to mock executions in order to pressure the Hansa’s owners into paying a higher ransom.

  Levenescu had few quarrels with his captors, and recalled that the only woman in the crew, Sarchizian, was treated with more respect than any other crew member. “They would sometimes call her name seductively, but nothing more than that,” said Levenescu. Of the Victoria’s complement, in fact, it was the Romanians who had the more lascivious inclinations. “We asked them to bring some women on board,” said Levenescu, sheepishly. “They said no.”

  I laughed, and mentioned my own difficulties in dealing with the Victoria gang, partly owing to the fact that they had believed me to be a CIA operative. He nodded understandingly, “Yes, they are stupid. They are very stupid.”

  But Levenescu dashed my solipsistic assumption that the Victoria had fled from Eyl, during my second night in the town, because Computer feared my meddling in his plans. By the time I reached Eyl, forty-four days into the Victoria’s captivity, the vessel’s vital supplies—fuel, water, and food—were critically low. She was completely out of fresh water, and the ship’s desalinator functioned effectively only in the open ocean, away from the algae blooms and other contaminants present close to shore. What I had thought of as the gang’s flight from Eyl was merely a water harvesting trip, down the southern coast and back.

  The ship’s fuel woes also explained why the Victoria’s distance from shore continually oscillated, giving the appearance—from my vantage point on Eyl’s beach—that she was being swept back and forth by the tides. Shortly before I arrived in Eyl, the ship’s supply of diesel had run out, and the auxiliary generator, which had powered the ship’s lights and mess facilities while anchored, sputtered to a halt. In order to generate electricity, the crew re-engaged the main engine, and with it the main propeller, forcing the Victoria to weigh anchor and chart continual circles in the harbour.

  Using a four-thousand-kilowatt engine as a generator was an extremely inefficient way of powering light bulbs and kitchen elements, and it was not sustainable for long. Shortly after I left Eyl, on June 20, the ship’s reservoir of bunker fuel (the crude oil by-product consumed by the main engine) was exhausted. The prospect of losing the Victoria’s floodlights—a critical defensive resource in case of attack—was not an option for the pirates. So they resorted to transporting small amounts of diesel from shore to power the vessel’s emergency generator during the night. For the final month of the ship’s captivity, the emergency generator provided limited power for its occupants’ basic daily needs.

  As for the pirates, their daily activities were predictable enough. “They chewed a drug that made their eyes wide, like this,” said Levenescu, using his fingers to spread his eyelids in imitation. “They wouldn’t sleep for thirty or forty hours at a time. The supply boat came three times per day to bring that fucking khat. There was only one pirate who didn’t chew: the cook. But in the end, even he started.” The pirates partnered the khat with the habitual hyper-sweet tea, having brought three kilograms of sugar on board with them. One time, said Levenescu, they substituted 7-Up for their tea, but did not alter their routine, heaping spoonfuls of sugar into the soft drink as well.5 Levenescu had also experimented with the drug. “A bit,” he said, gagging at the memory. “They all ate a lot.”

  One pragmatic effect of the khat was its ability to keep the pirates alert and ready. Staying awake late into the night, the pirates would routinely shoot off their Kalashnikovs for amusement. According to Levenescu, their on-board arsenal consisted of two RPG launchers, two Russian standard-issue machine guns (PKMs), and an AK-47 for each man. But the gang did not seriously expect to fight off an international naval assault with this weaponry. “They were more worried about attacks from other Somali pirates, not the navy ships,” said Levenescu. Yet again, Boyah’s claims of pirate solidarity and mutual affection did not seem to match the reality.

  Having heard so much about the eccentric Computer from Hersi, I eagerly asked Levenescu for his impressions of the man. But it seemed Computer was an elusive, shadowy figure even to the Victoria’s crew. “They spoke a lot about their leader,” said Levenescu. “But I don’t think he even existed. I think they made all their decisions as a group.” On the day the ransom was delivered, however, the entire gang assembled on the deck of the Victoria. “There was an older man aboard then, about fifty years,” said Levenescu. “He was dressed like a garbage man. If there was a leader, it was him.” There is little doubt that the shabby figure Levenescu described was Computer. If, as Hersi claimed, Computer had served as a police lieutenant under the former Somali Republic, he would probably be in his mid-to-late fifties.

  When the pirates finally departed, they left the Victoria in much worse shape than her crew. “The ship was a mess,” said Levenescu. “There was trash everywhere. In the end, they stole everything from us—laptops, cellphones. But they did give us back our SIM cards.”

  On July 18, the Victoria was finally released. But sudden liberty after seventy-five days of captivity was apparently not enough to perturb the stoic equanimity of Levenescu and his crewmates. “We weren’t happy,” he recalled. “We were nervous. Once we left Somalia, we were really worried about getting hijacked again.” The hardest part, he said, was the open-water dash from the Somali coast to the Yemeni island of Socotra, where a tugboat was waiting with fresh supplies, ready to take the Victoria in tow. Fortunately, the Victoria’s crew made the rendezvous, after which they were towed to Salalah, Oman, and from there were flown home via Bahrain.

  If Levenescu had been irrevocably damaged by his ordeal, he concealed it well. “It wasn’t a difficult psychological experience for me,” he said. “Maybe it was different for the others. I don’t know. I guess I appreciate life a little more,” he added, shrugging.

  Levenescu certainly had no plans to abandon his career path; as a matter of fact, I was lucky to catch him a few days before he shipped out on his next assignment. But he made it clear that he would not be returning to Somalia: “No way. Never again.”

  * * *

  The next day, in a diner on the other side of the country, Teddy and I met with Levenescu’s commanding officer and the Victoria’s chief mate, Traian Vasile Mihai—or, as he playfully called himself, “Chief.” Mihai looked to be in his early fifties, short and squat, with a drooping moustache and thinning hair. The lines of his face were imbued with mirth, his eyes lively and jovial. Like Levenescu, he declined to order any food, leaving me alone to munch on a chicken and ketchup sandwich between my questions.

  Though posted to the same ship as Levenescu, Mihai was born of a different age; lighting one cigarette after another, he wistfully reminisced about the past glory of NAVROM, the state-owned shipping fleet active during the rule of Communist-era dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. “Romania had a merchant marine of 345 ships at that time,” he sighed. “Now, nothing.” After about five minutes, I managed to steer the conversation to the subject of the Victoria’s capture.

  Following the pirate takeover, said Mihai, he, Captain Tinu, and the second mate Sarchizian were the only three crew who remained on active duty—though “forced labour” was perhaps a more accurate descriptio
n. Serving six- to eight-hour shifts, Mihai’s principal responsibility was to keep watch on the bridge and monitor the radar for possible threats to the pirates. One night, he detected a small vessel approaching, which he dutifully reported to his captors.

  “What is that? What’s its name?” they asked him.

  “How am I supposed to know?” he retorted, gesticulating at an imaginary radar display. “It’s a radar! It tells you the position, course, speed—no problem. But that’s it.”

  Mihai chuckled at the recollection. “Everyone ran outside to the edge of the ship, pointing their guns. ‘If they come closer, we’ll just kill them,’ the pirates said. Then they hailed the ship on the VHF [high frequency radio] in the Somali language, checking to see if it was one of their own,” said Mihai. In the end, the situation was resolved without violence. It is possible that this incident was the alleged “American attack” described by Hersi. For his part, Mihai hypothesized that the unknown vessel was a Somali fishing boat—far more likely than an American warship attempting to sneak up on the pirates in the middle of the night.

  One night, about a week after arriving at Eyl, the Chief was serving his watch shift on the bridge. At around midnight, several pirates barged in and demanded that he start the main engine and set an immediate course for the south. Mihai hurriedly tried to explain to non-receptive ears that the main engine required half an hour to warm up before it could be engaged.6

  “ ‘It’s not a car,’ I told them,” he said, miming the act of turning a key in an ignition. “ ‘You can’t just start it and go. It’s impossible!’ ‘No, now!’ they said.” Pleading that he had no authority to order a course change, Mihai hastily summoned Captain Tinu to the bridge. When he arrived, Tinu took an unsuccessful turn at explaining the mechanics of the engine to the pirates. Finding it difficult to get their message across, the two men asked to speak to Loyan, the interpreter.7

  “ ‘Fuck Loyan,’ they said. ‘Start the engine!’ Then one of them points a gun at my head,” Mihai said, raising an imaginary weapon to my temple. “And tells me that if I don’t start the engine in five minutes he’ll kill me.” In desperation, Captain Tinu convinced the would-be absconders to first speak with their boss on the shore. Two or three minutes later, Tinu was on the satellite phone with the group’s chief (presumably Computer), who did not prove much more helpful.

  “Captain, please start the engine,” Computer said through the interpreter. “I can’t control these guys, they’re crazy. Do whatever they tell you.” Faced with no alternative, Mihai contacted the engine room and ordered a cold start-up. Seven or eight minutes later, the Victoria weighed anchor and headed south.

  “It was a big risk,” said Mihai. “The engine could have easily broken down.” If the pirates had had a good reason for risking damage to their hard-won prize, the Chief was not aware of it. After sailing south for six hours, the Victoria dropped anchor for two or three hours before turning around and heading straight back to Eyl. “I have no idea why they wanted to leave,” he said. “Maybe because they were chewing their drugs.”

  If their khat had more influence over the pirates than Computer, one wonders how strong a leader he could have been. Perhaps he could be better likened to the majority shareholder in a company, whose employees—as is the case in any corporation—sometimes functioned in divergent and unpredictable ways. Of the nine pirates who attacked the Victoria, Mihai said, three of them held positions of authority over the others, though the exact nature of their power remained a mystery. “One of these leaders was very dangerous,” he said. “Very evil.” Mihai described how Mohamed Abdi, the first pirate to board the ship, had approached him as he was eating in the mess hall with three of his crewmates.

  “Chief, today I’m going to kill the whole crew,” he said.

  “Why?” Mihai replied, in a tone of mock incredulity. “Why you gonna kill me? I’m on board this ship working for the German company to make money. I have a wife and children to support, no? You understand?”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  “You are a pirate. Why’d you capture this ship?—For money, no?”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  “Then, Romanian and Somalian, we’re the same, no?”

  “Okay, Chief. I’ll kill the Germans instead.”

  Mihai burst into hearty laughter, and my interpreter and I could not help but join him.

  * * *

  With the air conditioning switched off to conserve power, most of the crew was forced to sleep on the floor on mattresses the Chief had managed to beg from their captors, while the pirates slept comfortably in their beds. To pass the time, Mihai and his crewmates watched movies (the Victoria had a library of over a thousand DVDs), listened to music, and played cards and backgammon. Cigarettes were ample; at sixty cents a pack, the pirates were extremely liberal in providing them to the crew. The Chief lamented, however, that there had been no alcohol to help them pass the time; the crew had intended to replenish their depleted supply once they reached their destination of Jeddah. Contrary to Hersi’s assertions, Mihai never witnessed the pirates consume any alcohol themselves.

  “I asked one pirate: Why don’t you drink? Because of the Koran?” he said.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “You read the Koran?”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  “What else does the Koran say? Don’t kill, don’t kidnap people …?”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  The pirates showed as little regard for the Koranic injunctions against theft. “They stole everything, even Ruxandra’s Tampax and underwear,” said Mihai. The pirates’ cook had taken a liking to her, and managed to convince his colleagues to return all of her belongings. The Chief was not so lucky: he lost his mobile phone, a pair of shoes, two bags, a set of pyjamas, two sweatshirts, a leather jacket, and around $500 in cash; fortunately, he had managed to hide his laptop. The pirates also helped themselves to communal goods, ransacking the medical stores and stealing, among other things, the defibrillator and emergency oxygen kit—though according to Mihai they had no inkling what the items were used for.

  Nor were the Romanian crew members the only victims of the hijackers’ seemingly compulsive desire to thieve. “One pirate stole the Somali cook’s mobile phone,” said Mihai. Wondering where it had gone, the cook did the first logical thing in such a situation: he called his telephone from another line. “The phone rang in the thief’s pocket,” said Mihai, laughing aloud. Punishment was swift; the pirates tied up the transgressor and sent him to shore, only receiving him back about two weeks later. “That was a unique case,” he said.

  Not surprisingly, fights involving khat were much more common. “When one of them had greener stuff, and the other had drier stuff, they would fight,” said Mihai, throwing a few shadow boxing jabs in my direction.

  Unlike his younger shipmate, the Chief had never felt the desire to experiment with khat, and seemed more shocked by the pirates’ lack of fiscal responsibility than anything else. “Thirty-eight dollars per kilogram they paid for that stuff,” he said. “My God!” Yet, despite their khat-fuelled antics, the Chief had no objections to the majority of his captors. “The three leaders were the worst,” he said. “The others were okay.”

  Nevertheless, the crew and the pirates always ate separately, said Mihai, relating how he spurned the one invitation he received to the pirates’ dinner table, extended by the pirates’ cook. “They used their hands to eat, and they added a hot green pepper to their food,” he said, disgusted. “My God! If I had eaten that I would have had to run right to the toilet.”

  In a sign of improving relations between hostages and captors, the pirates began to bring goats on board for the crew during the final three or four weeks of their imprisonment. “Small ones, eight or nine kilograms,” said the Chief. They had to slaughter the goats themselves, but the meat was a welcome complement to their previous meals, which had been based around potatoes, onions, and flour—as well as an endless supply of rice from the V
ictoria’s ten-thousand-tonne hold, as my translator Teddy lightheartedly pointed out. “Yeah!” Mihai exclaimed. “I told my wife on the telephone: ‘Honey, I’m coming home. No rice, please, no rice!’ ” wagging his finger in mock consternation.

  The Chief’s loving warning to his wife had occurred during one of only three or four opportunities the crew were given to speak to their families on the Victoria’s satellite phone, each call lasting only a few minutes. The exception was Levenescu, once again thanks to the kindness of the Somali cook, who risked his colleagues’ wrath by secretly allowing Levenescu to contact his family on his mobile phone.

  In addition to the predictable assurances of their well-being, the crew members also urged their loved ones to help bring them home. “We told our families to protest, to talk to the media—anything that could help put pressure on the German company,” said Mihai.

  * * *

  The German owners had warned the pirates that no ransom would be agreed upon unless the Victoria had enough fuel remaining to reach international waters—twelve nautical miles from the Somali coast—under her own power; in response, the pirates immediately shut down the main engine in order to conserve bunker fuel. The endless circles the vessel had been performing in Eyl’s harbour for almost two weeks had taken a toll on its reserves. According to Mihai, the ship had consumed 146 tonnes of oil, leaving a mere 28 tonnes, enough for only a day and a half on the open sea. There was another problem: the heating system used to warm the main engine prior to ignition was diesel-powered, and the Victoria’s diesel stores had long since been depleted. Consequently, the pirates began a mass importation of diesel, bringing on board four tonnes, in increments of thirty- and forty-litre drums, over the course of three days.