Pirates of Somalia (17 page)

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?”
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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.

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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 affiliation 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.”
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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.”

In the West, a public official receiving money under such circumstances would be labelled corrupt. But in the Somali context, the label is not entirely appropriate. In Somalia, clan and politics are incestuously intertwined, and political life is based on loyalty to one’s clan, not the state apparatus. When, as is generally the case, one sub-clan—in essence an extended family—dominates the machinery of government, money changing hands between its members is considered no more illicit than an aunt looking after the children when their parents are away. “From the outside, it’s impossible to determine whether Boyah giving money to Farole would be an attempt to sweeten the administration, or simply a contribution to a not-so-distant kinsman,” explained Bryden.

On a personal level, these allegations came as a shock; it was difficult for me to accept that a man with whom I had shared a table on multiple occasions, a soft-spoken academic who seemed to have a sincere distaste for piracy, and whom I genuinely admired, could be guilty of such hypocrisy. The behaviour also seemed inconsistent with his political past; while serving as planning minister during the previous administration of Mohamud Hersi, Farole had resigned his post in protest over a shady oil deal that the president had entered into with the Australian firm Range Resources—a contract that would have offered Farole as lucrative a kleptocratic opportunity as pirate handouts.
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Despite Bryden’s claimed plethora of unnamed sources, there has only been one publicly documented case of a Puntland official, Omar Shafdero, being directly involved in piracy. Shafdero, an employee at the Ministry of Finance and a relative of former president Hersi, was arrested in February 2008 and accused of links to the gang responsible for hijacking the Russian tugboat
Svitzer Korsakov
.
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Shafdero spent a short time in custody before being mysteriously released, after which he fled into exile in Somaliland.

But pirate cash, argued Bryden, had been particularly instrumental in funding political candidacies in the run-up to the 2009 presidential election. According to the UN Monitoring Group report, a prominent pirate leader, Fu’ad Warsame Hanaano, “had contributed over $200,000” to the election campaign of Farole’s foremost opponent (and now interior minister), General Abdullahi Ilkajir—a member of Hanaano’s sub-clan, the Warsangali. Farole, the report contends, “benefitted from much larger contributions to his political war chest.”
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During the pre-election period, Bryden claimed, “There was a lot of excitement, a lot of money was changing hands and people didn’t worry too much about where it came from. Now, because of international scrutiny, the movement of money is quieter … people are much more cautious. But according to captive pirates, the payments to the administration are ongoing.”

The accusations surrounding President Farole have been fuelled, in part, by the fact that he is a native of Eyl and belongs to the Muse Isse, the same sub-clan as Boyah, Garaad, and many other Puntland-based pirates. This affiliation with Eyl, ironically, has also placed Farole in a much better position to tackle piracy than his predecessor, General Hersi, whose bumbling efforts to fight piracy were once related to me by a Puntland journalist colleague.

In early 2008, as Hersi—who belongs to the Osman Mahamoud sub-clan—continued to lose local support and credibility, Eyl was steadily establishing itself as Somalia’s forefront pirate base. Knowing that to enter Eyl with his Osman Mahamoud militiamen would initiate a bloodbath, Hersi appointed an Isse Mahamoud supporter, Mohamed Haji Adan, to the made-up position of “deputy police commander,” with instructions to bring Eyl under government control. On June 11, 2008, Haji travelled to Eyl with an escort of soldiers, leaving them on the outskirts of the town and sending an unarmed representative to demand a bribe from the pirates. The negotiations were brief; one of the pirate leaders asked Haji’s man how much he wanted and sent him back with a shopping bag filled with $20,000 in cash. Haji promptly vacated his esteemed position and fled to the city of Galkayo, where he spent the following days and nights chewing khat. He was officially sacked four months later.
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Despite being far more capable than Hersi of cracking down on Eyl, according to Bryden, Farole has so far made no effort to impose central authority on his hometown, and has yet to even make a visit since his election. “The reason for him not doing so,” Bryden wryly jibed, “is quite obvious.”

Yet, according to Puntland government insiders, Farole has established new leadership in Eyl, including a mayor and a police commander equipped with a fleet of technicals (armed flatbed trucks). Since late 2009, Eyl had all but lost its status as a pirate base, with ships hijacked by Puntland gangs being taken to the more southern (and isolated) port of Garacad. Whether the pirate exodus was a result of Farole’s leadership, or the general decline in the number of hijackings in the Gulf of Aden, is difficult to say for certain.

Bryden, for his part, was not convinced by the efforts of the Farole administration. “What’s alarming,” he said, “is how foreign governments have been duped into believing that Puntland is a real partner in anti-piracy, closing their eyes to the complicity.”

Under mounting international pressure, said Bryden, there had been signs that Farole was starting to take the piracy issue more seriously—particularly since the US Treasury Department had placed Boyah and Garaad on a sanctions list in April 2010 (the US government, it appears, was not convinced by Boyah’s quest for redemption). “Now that the US has designated Boyah and Garaad as wanted men,” Bryden said, “he is in a position where he can no longer dodge the issue. If Farole wants good relations with the US, which by all accounts he does, he will need to get serious.”

Indeed, Farole has made rapprochement with the international community—and in particular the United States—the cornerstone of his foreign policy. In July 2009, Farole accepted an invitation from the US State Department to appear before the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs. In his speech, Farole proposed a four-point counter-piracy plan to be financed with US money, which included the establishment of a coastal task force operating out of bases situated in eight towns along the Puntland coastline. So far, this plan has not materialized.
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The UN Monitoring Group’s accusations elicited a predictably irate reaction from the Puntland government. In a press statement shortly after the release of the group’s March 2010 report, President Farole hit back, attacking the credibility of the report’s sources as well as Bryden himself. “The report’s authors used sources that include politicians who are opportunists or are opposed to Puntland’s self-development,” he said. “Even some of the report’s authors are politically motivated to discredit Puntland as a way of achieving another hidden goal.”
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