Pirates of Somalia (33 page)

“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
B
OYAH A FEW DAYS BEFORE
I
LEFT
P
UNTLAND 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, Boyah 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.

* * *

Five years ago, the Somali pirates were little more than fishermen who had traded in their nets for assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. Since then, they have blossomed into maritime trade professionals, with an expanding capital base and a logistical and navigational sophistication that has allowed them to strike deep in the Indian Ocean, hundreds of kilometres beyond the reach of the international naval forces.

Though the naval presence continues to burgeon, pirate hijackings are on the rise, and as of February 2011 more vessels are being held hostage along the Somali coast than ever before. The international naval forces have yet to grasp that violence is best used as a scalpel, not a club, and that their efforts to bludgeon the Somali pirates out of existence through sheer military force alone are no more likely to succeed in the future than in the past.

How might Somali piracy look in another five years?

First, the business will probably be a lot more lucrative. The current trend of ransom inflation is almost certain to continue unabated; hijacked vessels and their cargos are often worth hundreds of millions of dollars (over and above the value of the crews’ lives), and pirate negotiators have only just begun to realize how much shipowners are willing to pay. Each time a company agrees to a record-setting ransom, it sets a precedent that fuels the upward pressure on future payments.

Second, pirate gangs are likely to be much more organized. As the payoffs continue to rise, rival organizations, clan militias, and even Somali Islamist groups will be increasingly tempted to rip off successful pirate groups. This threat, in turn, may provoke the pirates to coalesce into more permanent criminal syndicates and establish standing armies of their own. Piracy might well develop into a mafia-style business, complete with infighting, turf wars, and mob hits.

Third, encounters at sea are likely to get a whole lot bloodier. Already, the use of firearms on all sides is on the rise; private security is becoming increasingly common on commercial vessels, the French government has stationed marines on the decks of its Indian Ocean fishing fleet, and Spain has followed suit by subsidizing the cost of armed guards on its own tuna boats. And the pirates are responding; whereas in the past, pirate attack groups used their weapons primarily as noisemakers—with the aim of frightening ships’ crews into surrendering—it has recently become standard practice to fire directly at the attacked vessel and her crew.

The brutality has already begun to escalate. In February 2011 the Associated Press reported that the pirates had begun “systematically torturing” hostages, subjecting them to beatings, locking them in freezers, and ligating their genitals with plastic ties.
²
On February 18, there occurred a tragedy unprecedented in the brief history of Somali piracy. In circumstances not yet entirely clear, American retirees Sean and Jean Adam, along with crewmates Phyllis Macay and Bob Riggle, were murdered by pirates after their yacht, the S/V
Quest
, had been hijacked four hundred kilometres off the coast of Oman. Shadowed by four US warships, navy helicopters whirring overhead, the pirates reportedly panicked and began to fight amongst themselves over which course of action to take. Responding to the sounds of gunfire aboard the
Quest
(some accounts say that the pirates also hit a warship with a rocket-propelled grenade), US forces were speedily dispatched to the yacht, prompting the pirates to execute all four hostages. The hijacking brought a cruel end to the Adams’ proselytizing voyage around the world, their vessel ballasted with thousands of Bibles to hand out along the way.

With the cost of future attacks increasingly likely to be measured in blood in lieu of dollars, bringing a swift end to the scourge of piracy has never been more imperative.

* * *

What might be done to solve the piracy problem?

Since the mid-1990s, Somali nation-building has been divided between those advocating for the “building block” approach—supporting stable, autonomous regions from the bottom up—and the top-down approach, as represented by the Transitional Federal Government (TFG). This latter strategy, which has held sway since 2000 (when the first in a series of transitional national governments was proclaimed), has been a disaster from the start. The TFG is a government in name only: its members have no constituents and its ministers no portfolios, and its continued existence rests only on the blind willingness of its international backers to believe that a fantasy is real. Yet the international community has remained steadfast in its patronage. At an April 2009 donor conference held in Brussels, for instance, Western nations pledged $250 million to support the TFG and fund the African Union’s AMISOM peacekeeping mission, the only force preventing Shabaab from driving the few MPs remaining in Mogadishu into the sea. No money, conversely, was set aside either for Puntland or Somaliland.