The Pirates of Somalia

by Jay Bahadur

  A similar point can be made about Somali piracy. Media attention has focused on the multimillion-dollar ransoms paid to the pirates, but most of the members in a pirate gang earn barely more than a crack foot soldier. Once the ransom money is divided up, the middling amount received by the average gang member is quickly either spent or bled away by family and friends.

  Even in the most high-profile hijacking cases, the ransom amounts can be deceiving. When Garaad complained (in Chapter 5) that everyone involved in the MV Faina hijacking “only got a few thousand,” he probably had a legitimate grievance. By the time the five-month-long negotiation for the Faina ended, four or five distinct pirate organizations were involved, and over a hundred pirates were stationed on board the vessel itself. Even though the $3.2 million ransom paid to release the ship was the largest at the time, if the Victoria is any guide, virtually the entire amount could have been swallowed by the costs incurred during the Faina’s captivity.

  The parallels between crack and piracy go beyond finances. Like drug dealing for inner-city youth, piracy provides one of the few avenues for a young Somali to gain status and respect. As Levitt and Dubner point out, crack foot soldiers are willing—in the short term—to accept a job paying far less than minimum wage because they view it as one of their best chances for long-term socioeconomic advancement. In Somalia, where the prospects for career development are undeniably worse than in even the most destitute of American ghettos, it is hardly surprising that piracy is the profession of choice for many ambitious young men.

  15

  The Road’s End

  ON MY FINAL DAY IN EYL, WE LEFT THE FAROLE COMPOUND IN Badey and passed through Dawad for the last time, stopping for a cup of morning shah in a cramped bodega. As we were sipping our teas, a maroon-and-chrome Land Cruiser pulled up to the shop. A few kids turned to me excitedly and pointed: “Burcad, burcad!”—pirates, pirates! The Land Cruiser revved its engine and sped away.

  Dhanane, which lay on a promontory visible to the south of Eyl, should have been a half-hour drive down the coast. But as no such road existed, we were forced to strike inland for an hour and a half before turning onto a path running roughly parallel to the shoreline. As we headed back towards the ocean, our 4×4s began the arduous climb back up the ridge, their insides rocking and jarring like flight simulators. The “path” we were on barely deserved the name; it was fighting a losing battle with the mountain, asserting itself only in brief stretches between jutting slabs of rock. Stunted myrrh trees dug into the sandy soil, their roots tenaciously gripping the sloping rock face.

  Upon reaching the top of the plateau I was again shocked by the stark change in landscape; it was completely desolate, reminiscent of the surface of Mars. The continual harsh winds had swept the plain clear down to the rock, leaving it denuded of vegetation save for scraggly patches of shrubs barely more substantial than lichens. Against this empty landscape, reddish termite mounds assumed monolithic proportions, rising out of the ground like a string of sand fortresses guarding the passage. The bluish haze of the Indian Ocean was visible in the distance, barely distinguishable at the horizon from the brown of a seaside bluff. Slightly further to the south, nestled in front of a chalk-streaked cliff jutting into the sea, lay the town of Dhanane. We bounced along for another fifteen minutes, but the headland hardly seemed to get any closer; with no reference points, it remained an unchanging mass in the distance.

  As we approached the town, a pair of 4×4s rumbled up the path towards us, likely a pirate supply convoy returning to Garowe after making a delivery in Dhanane. On the trail of Somali pirates, there was no sign more encouraging than near-new Toyota Surfs, the closest thing the pirates had to a company car. As the Surfs pulled alongside us, a driver-side window rolled halfway down and a few hands extended cautious greetings, which were reciprocated by our driver, Mahamoud.

  “If you weren’t here, we would capture or shoot them,” Colonel Omar declared. I could not tell if he was joking.

  If Eyl was the Wild West, then Dhanane was the wilderness—a hamlet of huts beginning about fifty metres back from the cliffside, many with green-tinged thatched roofs the colour of a corroded penny. Rising ten metres above the ground, the spire of a lone radio tower dominated the town; a nearby mosque was the only stone building in sight. It was as if humanity had attempted to scratch proof of its existence into the bare rock, a testament that would be washed off the cliff by the first torrential rain. Of course, such a rain would never come in Somalia, but it seemed a miracle that the flimsy huts could withstand the vicious winds of the hagaa.

  A few faded NGO signs marked the entrance to the village, probably planted during a brief detour by the tsunami relief expedition sent to Eyl in 2004. We drove slowly through the centre of town, past dwellings spilling rough-and-tumble towards the sea. The village was completely deserted, its inhabitants not yet awakened to our presence. We stopped the vehicles short of the cliff and strolled down to its edge.

  The bluff on which Dhanane was situated wrapped around to cradle a large inlet at its base. Walking to the edge of the cliff, I gazed onto a white sand beach fifty metres directly below; the drop was precipitous, but a near-vertical path allowed access to it. Waves of rolling blue turned gently to green as they broke against the shallow incline of the beachhead. Subtract the wind, install a few shark nets, bring an end to the civil war, and Dhanane would have made a fine spot for a seaside resort. On the sand stood a solitary building resembling a beach house, surrounded by overturned fishing skiffs. There were no fishermen in sight, and it was easy to understand why; the winds in Dhanane were even stronger than those in Eyl, and in the horseshoe-shaped bay below they must have been close to tropical storm force. A pirate skiff would have been hard-pressed to make it past the first salvo of waves breaking against the shore.

  My bodyguard Said grabbed my arm and pointed eagerly leftward on the horizon. There, almost obscured by the edge of the bluff, was the object of my trip to this obscure little town. It was the Dutch-owned cargo ship Marathon, hijacked on May 7, twenty-eight days previously, while transporting coke fuel through the Gulf of Aden safety corridor. There were eight Ukrainian crew members on board.

  As I snapped away at these various sights, digital SLR in one hand, camcorder in the other, a number of young men detached themselves from the huts above and made their way to the cliffside to observe. They soon wandered over to Omar and began to question him.

  “Why did you bring this spy?” one of them said. “Tell him that it’s a Yemeni fishing ship,” pointing to the Marathon, clearly hoping that I would go looking somewhere else for Europeans. He was hardly to blame for this cynical attitude, given the international media’s failure to spare any ink for the scores of unreported attacks on Yemeni fishermen.

  The curious youth soon tired of their windy watch-keeping and receded back into the town, glancing back at me over their shoulders. We began to wind our way back up through the village, the orange tarpaulins of the hut walls snapping violently as we passed like sails luffing in the wind. We came to a small enclosure ringed by piles of stacked brushwood, where a few townspeople had gathered beside a small outdoor kiosk. Omar motioned to a thatched lean-to nearby, and I pushed through the canvas entrance and into the dark, cool interior. There were a few plastic chairs scattered in a circle around the wooden strut holding up the hut, and Omar and I sat down.

  Two members of the local pirate chapter lounged on the woven mats lining the dirt floor of the lean-to. One, whom I later learned was the group’s accountant, had recently arrived from Garowe in anticipation of the impending delivery of the ransom money; he lay curled in a semi-foetal position, his cellphone clutched in his left hand. Another member of the gang, sporting an oversized UNICEF T-shirt, joked that he had renounced piracy and was now working for the United Nations. Discarded khat leaves lay in two messy piles at his feet, flanked by several packs of British Tobacco cigarettes. Ombaali reclined next to him with his 7-Up in hand, and they chatted like old
comrades.

  I had no idea whose hut this was or who had invited us in, but soon a man dressed in brown khaki pants and vest entered and greeted us. His name was Dar Muse Gaben, and he soon revealed himself to be a high-ranking member of the local group, the man in charge of organizing and delivering supplies to his colleagues aboard the Marathon. Gaben took his work into his off-hours, it seemed, because he soon returned with a round of shah and several warm 7-Ups for Omar and me. After some prodding, Gaben cautiously agreed to answer a few of my questions.

  “Illegal fishing, that’s the only reason we’re doing this,” he said. Then, in an effort to sound convincing, “Last night, there were two illegal fishing ships right here. We tried to fight them, but they had anti-aircraft guns.”

  Though there was certainly no dearth of foreign fishing trawlers to attack, Gaben was set on an early retirement. “This is going to be my last ship,” he assured me, almost apologetically, referring to the Marathon.

  “We treat the hostages very well,” he continued. “We bring them all the food and drink they want. They’ve become fat.” He smiled broadly. “Let me tell you,” he said, “they like it better on that ship than in the Ukraine.”

  Could I go on board and ask them myself? Gaben shook his head perturbedly, rose, and stormed out of the hut. I later discovered from media accounts of the Marathon’s release that the ship’s welder, Serhiy Vartenkov, was already dead, shot and killed as the pirates boarded the vessel. The ship’s cook, Georgi Gussakov, had also been shot and was in critical condition by the time the Marathon was released.

  After a few more sips of 7-Up I wandered out after Gaben, but he had disappeared. Nearby, I spotted a group of local bushmen reclining against a wall, grinning openly at me through rows of straight white teeth. Two of the men enthusiastically agreed to my request to film them. The first looked to be in his early sixties, short and dark-skinned, cotton-white hair receding in a horseshoe pattern around a bulbous scalp; like many Somali elders, he dyed his beard with orange henna. He cradled a herder’s staff between the loose folds of his ma’awis.

  “We used to be fishermen, but we went back to the bush after it became too dangerous,” he said. “We didn’t become pirates. We don’t even know who these guys are,” he said, referring to my erstwhile tea companions. “We think they’re from very far away.”

  “There are no soldiers here, and they know that,” the second herdsman added. “And we hardly have any weapons. So they keep coming. They even used to steal our goats, though that doesn’t happen as much anymore. There used to be more pirates here, but now there is only one ship left. This will be the last one, inshallah.”

  As I chatted with the bushmen, Gaben returned, accompanied by the young men who had earlier been studying me by the cliff. Each was carrying his gun slung over his shoulder. The atmosphere had become perceptibly tenser, and the townspeople began to slink away into the maze of huts until the area around the kiosk was deserted. The pirates moved to their row of parked 4×4s and milled around them anxiously, as if leaving open either option of a fight or flight response.

  “You really freaked them out by asking to see the ship,” Omar nervously explained. It was the same reaction I had provoked in Eyl, the only difference being that instead of moving their ship, the pirates were asking us to move. “There’s nothing more to be gained by staying here,” Omar advised.

  The Colonel, meanwhile, broke into a wide grin and ordered me to follow his movements with my video camera. Out of habit I obeyed, tracking him in the viewfinder as he weaved his way through the crowd of posturing pirates. He returned after completing his round, winking and grinning at me.

  “Eh, Levish? You said you wanted pictures of pirates,” he said. Stunned, I thanked him for his help.

  Not being inclined to wait around to find out how pirates dealt with spies in their midst, I agreed to Omar’s request to leave. We quickly filed into our vehicles, and within a few minutes our mini-motorcade was out of Dhanane and back on the rocky trail.

  It was time to go home.

  * * *

  The pirate board meeting onto which we stumbled had not been convened in vain. A few days later, on June 23, the Marathon was released for a reported ransom of $1.3 million.1 As previously mentioned, the ship’s welder had been killed by a stray bullet during the boarding operation; though initially denying that a death had occurred aboard a Dutch-flagged vessel, the government of the Netherlands soon issued a strongly worded promise to right the injustice. “I am shocked by the cowardly murder of a member of the crew,” Dutch foreign minister Mamime Verhagen announced in a statement. “The Netherlands will do everything to end these practices, by putting Dutch navy ships into operations against piracy and supporting the creation of a regional tribunal so that the criminals do not escape punishment.”2

  The Marathon was one of the rare instances where casualties had been incurred among the crew of a hijacked ship. Up to this point, it had been possible for me to view pirates as a sympathetic breed of criminal like the bank robbers audiences cheer in movie theatres—the sort who never shoot the guards on the way in. For a pirate, killing hostages is not an economically rational decision, yet I had had the distinct impression that the Dhanane gang would have been as perfectly at ease with slaughtering their captives as ransoming them. Later, when reading news of the casualties the crew had suffered, I was struck by the chilling realization that I had shared tea with murderers.

  It is often argued that movements based on violence or criminality become, by their very nature, increasingly radicalized as time passes, as the moderates are slowly squeezed out by the extremists. The gangs I encountered in Eyl and Dhanane were examples of what I term the “third wave” of piracy. Unlike the first wave of fishermen vigilantes in the mid-1990s, or the second wave of the mid-2000s, when the same men developed their operations into large-scale businesses, the third wave has consisted largely of opportunists without fishing backgrounds—often disaffected youth from the large inland nomad population. They mouth the worn-out mantra of the just crusade against illegal fishing like sanctimonious popes, with sly eyes and cynical smiles. But absent is the simple earnestness of Boyah and Momman, their brooding introspection regarding the morality of their actions, their sincere desire to lead a higher life.

  The bosses in Dhanane exuded a cold ruthlessness that permitted a man to joke that his hostages were fat and sated, while one of them had been shot dead and another lay bleeding on the deck. These men had inherited Boyah’s legacy.

  Epilogue

  The Problems of Puntland

  I LAST SAW BOYAH A FEW DAYS BEFORE I LEFT PUNTLAND FOR the final time. His Blue Jays T-shirt was absent, but as we parted he surprised me by seizing my hand and pulling me in for a pound hug, enveloping me in his massive frame. We had evidently come a long way from the menacing stares he had levelled at me during our first meeting six months previous.

  Since that first meeting, Boyah has attained international fame as the self-appointed media spokesman of the Somali pirates, his name growing with every interview he has granted. Foreign journalists from the BBC, Al Jazeera, and the New York Times, among others, flocked to hear what Boyah had to tell them, in part because he guaranteed a good interview: he was frank, disarming, and always reliable for a great quote. His motivation was a simple wish to let the world know about the struggles that he and his brethren had faced growing up as poor fishermen. Unlike many of his successors, he was no petty thug or cheap sadist, and willingly subjected his past choices to a self-probing moral reflection. The remorse he expressed, I believe, was genuine.

  In the end, Boyah paid a heavy price for his love of the spotlight. When his frankness during interviews extended to taking public credit for hijacking more than twenty-five ships, it was inevitable that he would catch the eye of the US government. After enduring continual criticism over his lax treatment of pirate leaders, President Farole finally caved under the weight of US and international pressure. On Tuesday, May 18, 2010, Bo
yah and ten other men were arrested as they were preparing to flee Garowe in three Toyota Surfs; in their possession were two pistols and, for all Boyah’s earlier claims of being penniless, $29,500 in cash. As of February 2011, Boyah was still sitting in a cell, awaiting sentencing.

  “Of course he’ll go to jail,” a Puntland government insider told me. “Life in prison.”

  From what I heard, Boyah had become disillusioned with the government’s refusal to commission him and his men as coast guards, and decided to return to the sea on his own initiative. Following the arrest, the governor of Nugaal region claimed that Boyah, despite his highly publicized redemption movement, had never stopped covertly financing pirate activities.1 The Puntland security forces had been tailing him for months.

  It was a positive sign from the Puntland government, an indication that President Farole was willing to get tough with his own sub-clan in order to earn the trust of the international community. Such commitment from the Farole administration—free of the nepotistic proclivities bred by Somali clanism—will be critical if Puntland is to become a valid partner in the anti-piracy struggle.

  * * *