Pirates of Somalia (25 page)

Today, Eyl can boast of another prominent son, President Abdirahman Farole, who was born and grew up in the town. Along with Garowe, Eyl is one of the principal strongholds of President Farole’s Isse Mahamoud sub-clan, a fact that made the area a virtual no-go zone for the previous Osman Mahamoud–dominated administration and thereby allowed the town to flourish as an autonomous base of pirate operations.

Eyl is actually two distinct towns separated by several kilometres. The first, Eyl Dawad, meaning “lookout,” is the seat of local government. By far the more populous of the two settlements, Dawad contains roughly ten thousand people, living in a collection of box-like buildings grafted onto the sloping wall of a yawning gorge carved by the Nugaal River. Halfway up the slope a natural spring bubbles forth, creating a localized jungle of towering trees along the course of a canal running down to the riverbed below.

Moving quickly through Dawad, we proceeded along a craggy path hugging the northern wall of the defile, a track whose name in English translates as “rocks, wait until I pass before you fall.” At rare intervals the dirt and rubble gave way to ten-metre stretches of concrete, the beginnings of some abortive NGO project to pave the entire roadway. It was the onset of Puntland’s second dry season, the
hagaa
, and much of the river had dried to solitary pools of water, but a verdant belt of vegetation along the bank still marked its course. A single goat was drinking from one of these oases, not even bothering to look up as we passed.

If one parallel could be drawn between the pirates of Puntland and those of Western storybooks, it is the tales of buried booty. Omar pointed to the opposite side of the gorge, high above us. “The townspeople say that there is pirate money hidden in those hills,” he said.

After a quarter hour crawling up and down this roller coaster of a road, we sighted the Indian Ocean for the first time, a slice of brilliant blue framed by the gorge’s gaping mouth. After a final bumpy downhill stretch, we passed under an unmarked, dilapidated arch flanked by an empty guardhouse and into Eyl Badey, or “seaside.” Reggae-inspired Somali tunes blasting from our speakers, we sped past houses of thatched branches and grasses, orange tarp fused with the odd piece of cardboard or corrugated metal to provide skeletal support to the walls. Even the whitewashed cement of the more upscale buildings was chipped and faded. Dented oil drums, pieces of refuse, and loose building materials were strewn haphazardly in the streets. A few fishing nets were stretched to dry in the sun.

If Eyl was awash in pirate cash, its inhabitants were certainly hiding it well. As a pirate haven, it was a profound disappointment; conspicuously absent were the opulent mansions, wild parties, and drug-fuelled binges that the international media coverage had led me to expect. The town was a fraction of Dawad’s size and seemed even poorer—not much more than a shanty village on the edge of the water. Beyond the village lay an expansive beach of white sand running kilometres in either direction, onto which spilled a small settlement built by refugees from the south, their dwellings little more than pens cobbled together out of driftwood. Lining the edge of the beach for several hundred metres was Eyl’s most imposing structure, a Soviet-built fish processing centre now crumbling into disrepair. Five-metre fishing skiffs lay idle in the sand, rendered useless by the overpowering winds of the
hagaa
, while refrigerated trucks that had once transported the day’s catch to Garowe and other inland markets were now broken-down heaps ensconced in tarps and cinder blocks, their tires shredded.

For some, however, Eyl’s economy was thriving. Floating beyond the surf, in plain sight, was the MV
Victoria
, a German-owned freighter hijacked on May 5 while transporting rice to the Saudi port of Jeddah. The recent onset of the monsoons had heralded the end of “pirate season,” and the
Victoria
was the sole remaining hostage vessel of the fleet that had once jammed Eyl’s harbour. Another ship was being held a few kilometres down the coast in an inlet known as Illig, or “Tooth”; its jittery hijackers had reportedly moved it there on account of hostility from the local people.

We turned northwards and within two minutes were out of Eyl on a path running along the beach towards a large walled house rising out of the dunes. A vacation home for the Farole family, the compound had also been an abortive experiment in fisheries development; the seaward-most building in the compound was in fact a small-scale seafood processing plant, its breeding tanks and refrigeration units now empty. Before the project could get off the ground, much of its infrastructure had been destroyed by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, a fate also suffered by Eyl’s fishing industry as a whole. Since then the compound had been virtually abandoned; the wires that had once led from the generator to the main residence were severed, and a nearby well lay in ruins. Sand deposited by the wind in sweeping dunes had half reclaimed the compound, spilling over the wall and into the courtyard.

* * *

Following a quick late-afternoon nap, I was taken back into town to meet the village elders. As we sipped
shah
around a listing wooden table in the centre of town, Omar introduced me to Abdirizak, a stout man with a crooked smile and yellowing teeth, whose official position was something resembling a town sheriff. Beside him was a lanky man with gold-rimmed glasses, Abdul, another of the town’s leading citizens, who I was told spent much of his time combing the hills for diamonds and precious metals. The exotic sweetness of the tea cascading over my tongue, against the backdrop of the setting sun, brought me a feeling of tranquillity I had not experienced in a long while.

“Look around you,” Abdirizak said. “We have nothing. Do you even see any two-storey houses? There is no pirate money here; it all goes to Garowe.”

“This is not a pirate town,” Abdul added. “It is safe and peaceful here; even foreigners, like you, can walk around at midnight with no problems.”

“We appreciate that you’ve come here with so little security,” said Abdirizak. “It shows that you trust us, that you respect the people of this town.” Though I had not considered a carload of AK-toting soldiers to be “light security,” my retinue was apparently meagre compared to the veritable invasion forces marshalled by BBC and Al Jazeera reporters during their recent visits to Eyl.

“We’re not criminals. No one here likes the pirates,” Abdirizak said, gesturing in the direction of the ocean. “Those two ships are the last ones here, and I think they are very close to being freed. Everyone in Eyl will be happy to see them go.”

Hawa Abdi Hersi, a middle-aged woman with a black headscarf and a leathery face, joined us at the table; consistent with the trend of unofficial titles, she was introduced to me as the “spokesman for the women of Eyl.” The three spoke eagerly about the problems facing the women of the town, the need for education, and democracy. I listened in silence.

At my request, the two men agreed to convene a town gathering on the following day.

* * *

Back at the guest house, dinner consisted of tuna canned in Las Qoray—one of the few products bearing the exceedingly rare stamp of “Made in Somalia”—and plain spaghetti, which we scooped off a communal platter with our hands. A few of the soldiers had managed to hook up a small generator, which emitted a soothing half buzz, half hum. Daylight was quickly supplanted by the pale hue of two flickering bulbs.

Half a kilometre distant, two generator-powered floodlights illuminating the centre of town were all that saved Eyl from total darkness, while the blackness enveloping the ocean was broken only by the distant lights of the
Victoria
, gently moving back and forth like a floating lantern. As I gazed over the wall of the compound, I spotted the tail lights of a four-wheel drive tracking across the beach, probably delivering the night’s ration of khat to a waiting skiff.

* * *

I rose early the next morning to find that a few empty oil containers, fashioned into makeshift wash buckets, had been filled with water from the courtyard well. I emptied a bucket over my head and felt the water begin to melt yesterday’s layer of sandy paste off my skin. Grabbing Said and Abdirashid, I exited the compound for a stroll along the deserted beach. The sand was blinding under the early sun; the wind was just awakening, whipping a fresh onslaught of fine grains into the grooves of my camera lens. A few hundred metres away, a fresh cohort of young pirate stevedores had picked up where the night shift had left off; they were loading several fishing skiffs beached near the edge of the surf, outboard motors attached. A lone goat stood tethered to the side of a boat, and a maroon 4×4 was parked on the sand nearby.

Whenever I glanced out to sea, the
Victoria
’s distance from shore appeared to fluctuate, at times so close that I could make out the colour of the deck cranes, other times so far to sea that she was almost lost to the horizon. Whether the ship was adrift and being swept in and out with the tide, or whether it was an optical illusion, I was unable to discern. I was told that the pirates on board had ordered the
Victoria
’s crew to keep the vessel in constant motion, in order to prevent US frogmen or submarines from latching cables onto its hull. The pirates erroneously believed US naval forces had employed these tactics during the
Maersk Alabama
incident to tow the ship’s doomed hijackers into sniper range.

In town, Omar, the Colonel, and I ate breakfast in a small lean-to, reclining in bare feet on woven mats. Abdirizak, Eyl’s “sheriff,” told me that a special meal had been planned in honour of my arrival, a fish caught especially for me late the previous night, when the wind was calm enough for a skiff to manage. A tray containing a single bony fish was brought out, which the four of us proceeded to attack with our
injera
bread. “This is the worst fish,” Abdirizak said apologetically. “The good ones all stay away during the
hagaa
. You should come back in December, which is the best time for fishing.”

Following our breakfast, I met with the townspeople of Eyl outdoors, on the sprawling veranda of a general store. Seated directly in front of me on plastic lawn chairs were Abdirizak, Abdul, Abdi Hersi, and a new man by the name of Aaul Mohammad, who introduced himself as the head of Eyl’s “public relations department.” The place of honour was reserved for a withered, silver-haired man said to be the oldest fisherman in the town. For the duration of the meeting, the old man remained placidly rooted to his seat, staring vacantly into space. On the other end of the age spectrum, a large crowd of young men and women formed a ring of spectators around us; their only contribution to the conversation was the intermittent ringing of their mobile phones, as loud as stereo speakers.

Aiming to strike a sympathetic tone, I began with a question about the town’s troubles with illegal fishing.

“In 1991, after the government collapsed, ships from all different countries started coming here,” said Abdirizak.

“Italians, Taiwanese, Japanese, Koreans, everyone comes here,” added Aaul Mohammad. “The trawlers come as close as one mile. Illegal fishing vessels were around here last night, not very far away; we saw their lights. But no one can get close to them, they carry such heavy weapons.”

“They use drag nets made of hard metal, and they pull everything off the bottom,” added Abdirizak. The result, he said, had been the destruction of the local lobster population. “There used to be a lot, now they’re all gone. The trawlers took the rocks off the bottom, and the lobster eggs along with them.”

But the lobsters had not been the only victims, Abdi Hersi lamented. “One time, four young men—lobster divers—were caught up in a trawler’s drag net. They all drowned. We’ve lost a lot of boys, about twenty of them. The foreign ships come and run over their small fishing boats. They used to die every day … and no one cares about them.”

Though small-scale sustenance fishing continued, exports had trickled to a halt.

“We don’t even have a market here where we can sell our fish,” explained Abdirizak. Referring to the ubiquitous laid-up refrigeration trucks, he continued: “They’re all rusted and broken down now. There used to be a lot of business here.”

Where were their export markets? “Dubai!” the townspeople enthusiastically exclaimed in unison, where they used to receive a good price for their lobster and shark fins. The 2004 tsunami, they said, had destroyed Eyl’s fishing economy, as well as reduced local fish stocks. In the aftermath of the disaster, an immense NGO relief mission had distributed new fishing gear to 105 fishermen, but it was soon destroyed by illegal fishing vessels. This type of hostility had spurred local fishermen to fight back, beginning, if Boyah is to be believed, with his attack on a Korean fishing vessel in 1995. But Eyl’s townspeople did not appear ready to take Boyah at his word.

“It was in 1999 that Boyah started attacking ships around Eyl; in 1995 it was a different one—near Garacad,” they debated. Each time I had attempted to establish a piracy timeline—whether through Boyah, members of his gang, or the people of Eyl—the dates seemed to change. Only a hatred of the rampant corruption and double-dealing miring the illegal fishing trade united the various accounts I had heard.

“In 1999, we caught an Italian fishing trawler and brought it to court,” said Abdirizak. “But a Somali businessman arrived and arranged for its release. There was one Somali stationed on board the ship, who translated for the crew.” Indeed, since 1999 many illegal fishing vessels had placed armed Somali guards on their decks, and there was a widespread belief amongst local Somalis that local businessmen in the diaspora were responsible. “Somali businessmen from overseas are organizing it. They call their cousins, some local guys here, and tell them, ‘Go on that ship, I’ll give you a hundred bucks,’ ” Abdirizak added.