Pirates of Somalia (6 page)

But though their official raison d’être might have been to prevent the theft of Somalia’s fish, the Somali Marines showed no shame in attacking those whose intentions were quite the opposite. From 2005 to 2007, the gang targeted World Food Programme (WFP) transports delivering vital food aid to the famine-stricken population of southern Somalia, attacking five vessels and hijacking at least two. Perhaps Afweyne was aware of his potential vulnerability to accusations of hypocrisy; following the seizure of the MV
Semlow
in June 2005, he claimed the vessel’s 850-tonne cargo of rice in the name of the people of Harardheere, accusing the international community of neglecting the region.
¹²
The threat to WFP vessels did not disappear until late 2007, when the French navy began to escort the shipments to port.

As for Afweyne, he has since entered a comfortable semi-retirement, handing over many of the day-to-day operations of the family business to his son Abdulkhadar. Afweyne is perhaps one of the few men to fit the media stereotype of a cash-flush pirate kingpin, having allegedly converted his pirate earnings into a business empire stretching from India to Kenya. He has even enjoyed the dubious distinction of a state reception from eccentric Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who had revealed a quixotic affection for the Somali pirates during his seventy-five-minute rant at the 2009 UN General Assembly world leaders’ summit.

* * *

As a boil festers before it bursts, the 2003–2006 Eyl–Harardheere alliance represented an incubation period for the Somali pirates, a time during which they gradually accumulated capital and experience, continually reinvesting their ransom money in ongoing operations. By the 2008 explosion of piracy in the Gulf of Aden, the pirate business model had already been tried and tested, and sufficient cash was available from previous ransoms to provide gainful employment for the countless volunteers lining up on the beaches of Eyl.

For the poorly educated, locally born youth, the security sector, both public and private, had been the steadiest source of formal sector jobs. It came as a shock, then, when in April 2008 the Puntland government ran out of money to pay its security forces. Many members of the police and army naturally sought alternative employment, and there was hardly a more lucrative career than piracy for a young man possessing nothing but a gun and a desperate disregard for his own life.

Scant other opportunities were available. Puntland’s almost non-existent factories provide only a handful of manufacturing jobs, and the already negligible seafood export industry had been suffering on account of both illegal foreign fishing and the decline of lobster stocks. Day labour in Puntland’s rapidly expanding cities was one of the only avenues of steady employment open to the estimated 70 per cent of Puntlanders under the age of thirty. While much of the population (65 per cent, according to the Puntland government), remains nomadic, living a traditional pastoral lifestyle outside the formal economy, the increasing numbers of nomads flocking to urban centres in recent years have not found much to occupy their time other than the drug khat.

There
is
legitimate money to be made in Somalia. But the most lucrative business opportunities—livestock export, the transport and telecommunications industries, as well as jobs in government and the civil service—are monopolized by educated Somali expats, who speak English and Arabic and often split their time between Somalia and their adoptive homelands. The result has been a gross socioeconomic gap between those who were able to escape the civil war and those who were forced to remain in Somalia and suffer the brunt of the violence. For the masses of unemployed and resentful local youth, piracy was a quick way to achieve the respect and standard of living that the circumstances of their birth had denied them.

* * *

Before the presence of the massive naval flotillas that now jam Somali coastal waters, the risks were fewer, but the payouts were also relatively paltry. One of the Somali Marines’ most noteworthy prizes in the early days was the MV
Feisty Gas
, a Hong Kong–flagged liquid petroleum tanker captured in April 2005. In exchange for her release, the Marines received a mere $315,000, likely about one-tenth the sum they might have received five years down the line. Since then, ransom amounts have crept steadily higher, with each new precedent exerting an upward pressure on future payments. At the time of writing, the highest recorded ransom had reached a staggering $9.5 million, paid in November 2010 to free the oil supertanker
Samho Dream
.

Later generations of pirates owed their extravagant multimillion-dollar ransoms to the negotiating abilities of the pioneers. Indeed, the triumvirate of Afweyne, Boyah, and Garaad Mohammed could be compared to the hard-nosed leaders of a newly formed labour union—though in their struggle for higher wages they admittedly employed stronger-arm tactics than typically seen in collective bargaining. The lucrative ransoms for which they fought predictably attracted a new influx of independent groups to the industry—what I refer to as the “third wave” of piracy in Puntland. Many of these pirates were opportunists without histories in fishing, often disaffected inland youth. Yet their recent entry into the field did not stop them from telling any apologist reporter who would listen that persecution by foreign fishing fleets had driven them to their desperate course.

* * *

Harardheere’s piracy dominance temporarily came to an end in 2006, when the Islamic Courts Union—an Islamist political movement—seized control of the south of the country and cracked down on pirate operations, claiming that the practice violated Islamic law. This paved the way for piracy to relocate to the next logical locale: back to Puntland, the gateway to the Gulf of Aden. From 2007 to 2008, Eyl was the undisputed capital of the Somali pirate empire, until the establishment of the heavily patrolled maritime safety corridor in the Gulf of Aden allowed Harardheere to reclaim the title in late 2009.

International recognition of the problem was sluggish. Though mariners in Somali waters had for years been keeping their eyes nervously glued to their radar displays, the triple intrigue of arms, oil, and Americans was needed for the Somali pirates to make international news headlines. The galvanizing event was the September 2008 seizure of the Ukrainian transport ship
Faina
, which combined the mystique of high-seas buccaneers and international weapons trafficking: in contravention of a UN embargo, the
Faina
was carrying Soviet-era tanks destined for southern Sudan, likely with the full knowledge of the Kenyan government. Two months later came the daring hijacking of the MV
Sirius Star
, a Saudi supertanker carrying $100 million in crude oil; seized a shocking eight hundred and fifty kilometres southeast of Somalia, the incident marked the furthest the Somali pirates had ventured out to sea at the time. Finally, in April 2009, pirates attacked the
Maersk Alabama
, the first American cargo vessel to be hijacked in two centuries. A tense three-day standoff with an American warship, worthy of a Hollywood script, ended with three Navy SEAL sniper bullets to the hijackers’ heads and the lone survivor brought back to face US justice in a New York courtroom. The
Alabama
incident catapulted Somali sea piracy to the attention of the American public, and convinced editors around the world that the pirates were worthy of their front pages.

This trinity of hijackings that seized the imagination of the average news consumer were the brainchildren of the founding fathers of Somali piracy: the
Faina
was a joint operation between Boyah’s and Garaad Mohammed’s gangs and the Somali Marines, the
Sirius Star
hijacking was carried out by Afweyne’s group alone, and the
Alabama
attack was publicly claimed by Garaad.
¹³

The Somali pirates had come of age.

* * *

The basic characteristics that made Puntland an ideal spawning ground for pirates had existed since its founding in 1998. Why, then, did it take ten years for piracy to develop into the present epidemic? Four main causes explain the rise of piracy in Puntland: geopolitics, environmental factors, economic adversity, and breakdown of governance (two other principal factors, illegal fishing and toxic dumping, and the Puntland Coast Guard, will be discussed in
Chapter 4
).

In geopolitical terms, two factors lent Puntland a comparative advantage in the piracy “industry”: its location and its relative (but tenuous) stability. The benefit of its geography is readily apparent: situated right at the intersection of the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden, Puntland straddles one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. More than 20,000 commercial vessels, or about 10 per cent of global shipping, transit through the Gulf of Aden each year.

Second, Puntland’s isolation from the ongoing civil war in the south as well as its semi-functioning government ensured that pirate organizers would be left in relative peace to plan and carry out their operations. Piracy is not so much organized crime as it is a business, characterized by extremely efficient capital flows, low start-up costs, and few entry barriers. Pirates, almost as much as businessmen, require a certain level of order and predictability for their enterprises to prosper (and to avoid getting ripped off by actual organized crime networks). Roger Middleton, a Horn of Africa expert with the London-based think tank Chatham House, summed it up eloquently for me: “Puntland was the perfect area for pirates to operate because it’s just stable enough, but also ungoverned enough. You don’t have the chronic instability you have further south … There’s too great a chance of getting caught in the crossfire and too many competing interests to pay off.”

The link between political stability and the frequency of pirate attacks has some convincing empirical support; when Puntland descended into violence, piracy was the first business to suffer. In 1992, for instance, the year when Abdullahi Yusuf was locked in a fierce conflict to prevent the Islamist organization al-Ittihad al-Islami from establishing a Puntland foothold, piracy completely disappeared from the region. In 1994–1995, after Yusuf had triumphed and relative peace was restored, the frequency of pirate attacks began to creep up once more.
¹⁴

The theory holds for Harardheere and Hobyo as well, which are located in another autonomous region—Galmudug—insulated from the chaotic south. Galmudug, with an administration far weaker than even Puntland’s, was perhaps an even more ideal business environment for pirate entrepreneurs—a fact that the astute Afweyne was able to capitalize on.

Somaliland, in contrast, possesses a Gulf of Aden coastline comparable to Puntland’s, yet the few pirates originating from the region have been swiftly arrested and incarcerated by the local authorities. The difference is due to Somaliland’s greater political stability, a product of its robust history of democracy and inter-clan consensus. Its central government can exert control over its territory in a way that Puntland’s leaders, who must navigate a much more fractured clan landscape, cannot. In the south, in short, the pirates had to fear other criminals; in Somaliland, the danger came from a more traditional source: the police.

Environmental circumstances also contributed to the rise of piracy. The population of Puntland is largely nomadic, and depends heavily on the seasonal rains to sustain their livestock herds. From 2002 to 2004, Puntland suffered its worst drought in thirty years. Herds were decimated, and much of the nomadic population flocked to urban centres in search of food. With an estimated 600,000 across Somalia directly affected by the dry spell, the governments of both Puntland and Somaliland declared a humanitarian emergency. Although there is no conclusive evidence, it is possible that this drought drove those traditionally dependent on livestock to rely on fishing as a source of sustenance, with the result that the standard encroachment by foreign fleets on Somali fisheries may have been viewed as especially egregious.

Just as Puntland was on the verge of recovery from this crippling drought, Mother Nature supplied her own solution to the water shortage. On December 26, 2004, one of the most powerful tsunamis in recorded history struck near the Indonesian island of Sumatra, sending waves as high as thirty metres surging across the Indian Ocean. The coastal areas of Puntland—though more than 4,800 kilometres from the tsunami’s epicentre—did not escape. Over three hundred people were killed and the livelihoods of forty-four thousand affected.
¹⁵
The tsunami devastated the region’s fishing economy, destroying an estimated six hundred boats and damaging 75 per cent of the fishing gear beyond repair.
¹⁶

One of the tsunami’s indirect contributions to the piracy outbreak was the (literal) exposure of toxic dumping in Somali waters. Residents of Eyl and nearby coastal towns related how the tsunami’s waves had broken open and scattered ashore previously submerged toxic waste canisters, causing an increase in the incidence of radiation sicknesses amongst the local population. Though a brief UN fact-finding mission to the area found no evidence to corroborate these claims, the perception that foreign nations have used Somalia as a toxic dumping ground has served as both a rallying cry and a post hoc justification for the pirate movement.

The four-year delay between the drought and tsunami and the outbreak of piracy makes it difficult to finger them as immediate causes. But these environmental factors undoubtedly exacerbated the general level of poverty and suffering in Puntland, increasing the pool of candidates for pirate recruiters.
¹⁷