Pirates of Somalia (5 page)

Like the Bedouin, Somalis have traditionally been pastoralists, their resource-poor desert environment giving rise to a rigid and strictly territorial tribal system in which members are fiercely defended and outsiders ruthlessly attacked. Indeed, the oft-quoted Bedouin saying “Me against my brother; my brother and I against my cousin; my brother, my cousin, and I against the world” could well be adapted to Somalis: “My sub-sub-clan against my sub-clan, my sub-clan against my clan, my clan against the world.” In order to avoid mutually destructive vendettas, a system of clan law, known as
heer
, developed to resolve disputes through traditional rules of blood compensation, which stipulate the number of camels, goats, and so on paid to expiate each offence. The murder of a man, for instance, would demand a restitution of one hundred camels (the equivalent of about $20,000); a woman, fifty camels.

Despite Siad Barre’s attempts to dismantle traditional patterns of Somali life, clan loyalty remained a more dominant force than Somali national identity, to the point where it eventually tore the country apart. In a sense, the whole idea of Somalia was a contradiction—an attempt to graft the trappings of a modern state onto a mode of social organization suited to a centuries-old nomadic lifestyle. Jobs, business opportunities, military appointments, government posts, and patronage were all awarded through clan networks, reinforcing ethnic divisions and undermining the legitimacy of the central state. Ironically—given its role in sparking Somalia’s descent into civil war—the clan system has since ensured a degree of order and social cohesion in many areas, including Puntland and Somaliland, that otherwise might easily have degenerated into their own versions of Rwanda or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For a country in “anarchy,” law and order in some parts of Somalia is remarkably well-preserved.

* * *

Many of the Darod lucky enough to escape Mogadishu’s urban killing fields fled north to their ancestral clan homeland, which at the time was under the control of the SSDF, headed by the squabbling duo of Colonel Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed and General Mohamed Abshir. Towns that had been little more than underpopulated crossroads along nomadic migration routes swelled into urban centres. In the years following the outbreak of the civil war, Garowe grew from a population of five thousand to a current estimated thirty to forty thousand.
²

Though the desert provided a safe haven against the persecution suffered by the Darod in the south, without political unity they remained vulnerable. Leaders of the Harti Confederacy (see
Appendix 1
), a grouping of the three Darod sub-clans inhabiting Puntland (the Majerteen, Dhulbahante, and Warsangali), looked on with apprehension at the formation of clan polities around them. With the Isaaq-inhabited self-declared Republic of Somaliland to their western flank and the Hawiye poised to extend their control from Mogadishu to much of south-central Somalia, the fear was that without a unified front the Darod would be at a disadvantage in the clan-centred scramble for Somalia’s territories.

In May 1998, a conference of Harti clan elders in Garowe proclaimed the creation of Puntland State of Somalia, with Abdullahi Yusuf as its first president.
³
Unlike Somaliland, Puntland did not seek outright independence, but officially maintained its intention to join a future federal Somali state (albeit on its own terms). However, the international community has yet to officially recognize Puntland’s status as a semi-autonomous region, and its relations with both the internationally recognized Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and Somaliland have been tense, and at times openly hostile.

For six years following the Garowe conference, Yusuf ruled Puntland as his personal fiefdom. When a 2001 election produced a victory for Yusuf’s challenger, Jama Ali Jama, Yusuf did not bother to contest the results; he declared war, defeating Jama over the course of a six-month conflict. It was a rare outbreak of violence in a region that, since its founding, had remained largely insulated from the ongoing instability in southern Somalia.

In 2004, Yusuf headed south to take over the reins of the recently formed Somali TFG, handing over Puntland (after a three-month interim) to former general Mohamud Muse Hersi—a man known by the nickname of Adde Muse, or “White Moses.” Hersi remained in power until January 2009, when Abdirahman Farole, an academic who had spent most of the previous twenty years in Melbourne, captured 74 per cent of the vote in an indirect presidential election held by Puntland’s “parliament”—a collection of clan elders appointed from the region’s seven districts. During and following the election, Farole took a hard-line stance against the buccaneers plying the region’s waters, whom he viewed as a black mark on Puntland’s international reputation: “The pirates are spoiling our society,” he announced to the press following his victory. “We will crush them.”
⁴

It was a promise he has found difficult to fulfil.

* * *

By the time Farole assumed office in early 2009, sea banditry had become Puntland’s only claim to recognition on the international stage. Yet piracy had existed as a Somalia-wide phenomenon since the outbreak of the civil war. As the central government collapsed on land, its ability to control its seas declined commensurately, and a varied assortment of militiamen, fishermen, and dregs of the Somali army all seized advantage. Like darts striking a map, pirate attacks occurred up and down the length of the Somali coast, indifferent to geographical location. These early operations were sporadic, opportunistic, and unsophisticated—little more than groups of gunmen floating in four-metre skiffs a few kilometres away from the shore, waiting for wayward vessels to stray too close. The use of far-ranging “motherships” (fishing dhows or other larger vessels employed as floating bases of operations) was not yet common, and these nascent pirates did not typically venture far beyond the hundred or so miles constituting the traditional sphere of Somali fishermen—well short of international shipping lanes. By consequence, their victims were typically fishing trawlers, whose search for lobster and demersal (bottom-dwelling) fish required them to come close to shore.

The attacks most frequently took the form of “marine muggings,” during which the brigands would board the vessel and steal money and everything else of easily transportable value before quickly departing. Like muggings, they sometimes turned violent, as was the case in the very first recorded act of modern piracy in Somalia—an incident that marked the closest the Somali pirates have come to the seventeenth-century stereotype of bloodthirsty buccaneers.

On January 12, 1991, the cargo ship
Naviluck
was boarded by three boatloads of armed pirates off the Puntland coast near the town of Hafun while en route from Mombasa to Jeddah. The pirates took three of the vessel’s Filipino crewmen ashore and summarily executed them, before forcing the remaining crew to jump overboard and setting the
Naviluck
ablaze. Only by the grace of a passing trawler were the floundering victims of this “plank walking” saved from the fate of their three comrades.

Not all hijackings were carried out by these sorts of water-borne thugs; some had a veneer of legality. The hodgepodge of rebel groups, militias, and warlords that had inherited chunks of the Somali state (along with the remnants of its navy) began to arrest foreign fishing vessels and extort “fines” for their release. In Puntland, one of the men given this assignment was Abdiwahid Mahamed Hersi, known as Joaar, the owner of a small-scale lobster fishing company who had once employed, as one of his divers, none other than the young Boyah. In 1993, as the civil war continued to rage in the south, Abdullahi Yusuf instructed Joaar to end illegal fishing by foreign fleets off SSDF-controlled territory. In response to this command, Joaar told me, he hired a boat at $200 per day and recruited thirty young men to serve as his marines (I was unable to discover if Boyah was amongst them). According to Joaar’s reckoning, he and his men stopped a total of nine Pakistani dhows, bringing them to Bossaso and ransoming three of them back to their home government (there are even rumours, which Joaar denies, that he and his colleagues hijacked a ship out of Mombasa harbour by smuggling a pistol on board in the bottom of a fruit basket). His actions had the desired effect, or so he believed. “Our seas became very clean at that time,” Joaar said.

Though he had originally planned to create a full-fledged coast guard, Joaar found himself unable to complete the task. Illegal fishing ships, he said, were under the protection of southern warlords, who took exception to the harassment of their clients. “People were calling my home phone and threatening me,” he explained, a fact that helped convince him to shelve his long-term plans.

Acting as he was under orders from the SSDF—the authority in de facto control of the territory at the time—Joaar’s exploits are perhaps better described as semi-legitimate privateering rather than outright piracy. In either case, the man some call “the father of piracy” has since put his hijacking past behind him, though he has remained true to his maritime calling: Joaar is currently the director general of the Puntland Ministry of Fisheries, a position he has held since 2004.

* * *

In 1995, two years after the commissioning of Joaar’s improvised coast guard, Boyah, Garaad Mohammed (another of Eyl’s early pirate leaders), and other Eyl fishermen unleashed their own vigilante brigade upon the seas. At least, 1995 is the starting date Boyah gave me; Stig Jarle Hansen, a Norwegian Puntland specialist who has conducted his own interviews with Boyah, reported him as claiming that “professional piracy” had begun in 1994, but that his group had been engaged in struggles with foreign trawlers as early as 1992. (Momman, one of Boyah’s former lieutenants, later told me that the group had begun operations back in 1991.)
⁵
. The public record lends some credence to Hansen’s version of events, showing a sharp rise in both pirate attacks and hijackings in 1994, though the total number of hijackings (four) remained very low.
⁶

Boyah and his colleagues were the original models for the oft-invoked media image of the fisherman-pirate locked in a one-sided struggle against the forces of foreign exploitation. They certainly cultivated this impression; if Boyah is to be believed, his operations were directed solely against foreign fishing trawlers, though this claim could easily have been influenced by the desire to justify his actions to the outside world. His tactics were still relatively basic; Boyah repeatedly denied to me that he or his men had ever used motherships, saying they stayed relatively close to shore in their fishing skiffs. Hansen’s research attests to this limited range; from 1991 to 1995, almost half of all pirate attacks occurred in Puntland waters, while fewer than one-sixth took place on the high seas.
⁷

In 2003, Somali piracy underwent a metamorphosis, thanks to the vision of a complete outsider: Mohamed Abdi Hassan, known as Afweyne (“Big Mouth”), a former civil servant from the distant central coastal town of Harardheere. Drawing on his fellow Habir Gedir clan members (a branch of the Hawiye), Afweyne formed the Somali Marines, an organization that transformed his hometown and its southern neighbour Hobyo—which had hitherto spawned relatively little pirate activity—into the centre of the pirate world.

A capitalist at heart, Afweyne was the first to realize the potential of piracy as a business, and went about raising venture funds for his pirate operations as if he were launching a Wall Street IPO. One repentant potential investor recalled Afweyne’s sales pitch: “He asked me to invest USD 2,000, as he was gathering money for his new business venture. He was begging … [but] I did not invest and I regret it so much today.”
⁸

Like any conscientious employer, Afweyne sought to provide the very best training for his employees. Though the old boys of Eyl belonged to the rival Majerteen clan, Afweyne was not one to allow tribalism to get in the way of business, and he personally recruited the most locally renowned pirates—including Boyah and Garaad Mohammed—to work as instructors. The Eyl veterans did not limit their role to that of mere consultants but travelled up and down the coast, organizing and even participating in pirate operations. Even in 2007–2008, after most of the Eyl pirate leaders had returned to Puntland—attracted by the easy hunting offered in the Gulf of Aden—piracy remained the incestuous province of the Majerteen and Habir Gedir clans. Boyah, during our numerous conversations, was not shy about discussing the Eyl–Harardheere connection, readily speaking about “joint operations” between the two groups; one such collaborative effort was the hijacking of the MV
Faina
, the tank-laden Ukrainian transport ship that first splashed Somali piracy across international headlines. Boyah was upfront about Afweyne’s business acumen: “Afweyne hand picked his pirate group,” he later testified, “carefully designed it to keep costs low, profits high and to maximize efficiency.”
⁹

In contrast to previous groups, the Somali Marines were extremely well organized, employing a military-style hierarchy with titles such as fleet admiral, admiral, vice admiral, and head of financial operations (Afweyne himself).
¹⁰
They exhibited an operational sophistication that matched their corporate professionalism, employing motherships that extended their attack radius hundreds of kilometres from the coast.

Around the same time, other professionally organized groups began to appear. Garaad Mohammed was not content to remain as Afweyne’s underling, but formed his own organization, the National Volunteer Coast Guard (NVCG), in the major southern port of Kismaayo.
¹¹
Not only were groups like the NVCG and the Somali Marines more sophisticated in an operational sense, their creative names—which cast them as the defenders of Somali waters against the imperialist incursions of foreign vessels—showed that their PR acumen was keeping pace.