Pirates of Somalia (7 page)

Puntland’s declining economy also provided an additional incentive to turn to turn to piracy. From 2006 to 2008, the region experienced unbridled hyperinflation that drastically reduced the standard of living of the average citizen. Puntland still uses the shilling, the currency of the defunct Somali Republic, though only the highest denominations of five hundred and one thousand shillings remain in use (the latter bill is worth approximately three cents). While US dollars are used for larger transactions, shillings remain the staple choice for everyday purchases, and are typically exchanged in bundles of 100,000.

From a high of 14,000 shillings per US dollar in 2006, by August 2008 the exchange rate had fallen to a record low of 35,000 per dollar.
¹⁸
In Garowe, Bossaso, Qardho, and Galkayo, protesters filled the streets to express their anger over the rising price of goods, blocking roads and pelting government buildings with stones. General Hersi’s administration responded with a desperate attempt to fix an exchange rate of 18,000 shillings per dollar, a measure that even a totalitarian state would have found difficult to enforce.

Counterfeiting was a problem I noticed almost immediately upon my arrival in Puntland. For a currency that had not been minted in almost two decades, it was astounding how many crisp thousand-shilling notes proclaimed “Mogadishu 1991” in unfaded orange ink. Indeed, nineteen out of twenty local bills looked as if they had been printed by a cheap photocopier. It was not until early 2009, when local sheikhs launched a campaign to dissuade the organizers of counterfeiting operations, that hyperinflation began to come under control; by March, the exchange rate had stabilized at 29,000 shillings per dollar.
¹⁹

Puntland’s economic woes were mirrored by the decline of its political institutions. As hyperinflation escalated, the salary of a regular soldier in the Darawish (the Puntland army) dropped almost threefold in real terms, from more than seventy dollars in 2006 to less than thirty dollars in 2008.
²⁰
President Hersi continued to pay his forces in printed money until, in April 2008, he stopped paying them altogether. As mentioned above, many soldiers and policemen abandoned their positions and turned to piracy; a local crime wave ensued, and May saw the first increase in pirate attacks, a trend that took off following the end of the monsoon season in August.
²¹

Prior to the discontinuation of its pay, the Darawish had already been depleted in raw numbers. When Puntland strongman Abdullahi Yusuf had accepted the post of president of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in 2004, he took about a thousand Puntland soldiers (out of an estimated five thousand) south to Mogadishu to serve as his personal militia, funded out of government revenue.
²²
With this weakening of the security forces, the Puntland government’s ability to project its power throughout its territory declined. “Puntland’s capacity to investigate piracy onshore, always weak, had totally collapsed,” writes Stig Hansen.
²³

Following Puntland’s military decline, its always-tense relationship with its western neighbour, Somaliland, worsened precipitously; in October 2007, Somaliland forces invaded Puntland and captured the town of Las Anod, capital of the disputed Sool region. Though this invasion was not in itself a direct contributor to the piracy outbreak, it was indicative of the Puntland government’s loss of control. Rival clans to the Osman Mahamoud-dominated administration, such as the Isse Mahamoud, began to assert their independence from the central government, and Isse Mahamoud–inhabited areas like Eyl became lawless enclaves ideal for pirate operations.

* * *

The history of Somali piracy has been, one might say, a tale of two cities: Eyl and Harardheere. Like the Paris and London Dickens wrote of, the towns were hotbeds of revolutionary sentiment, seething against oppression and injustice. In Eyl, a band of angry young twentysomethings headed by Boyah and Garaad Mohammed formed the simmering nucleus that developed into the modern Somali piracy movement. “Boyah was a pioneer,” one local journalist told me. “He showed the others the real potential of piracy.”

Puntland’s semi-lawless status made the region an ideal training ground and business environment for the early pirates; relatively peaceful, it was free of the organized criminal gangs, Islamist groups, and covetous warlords that plagued the turbulent south. From 2005 to early 2009, as the central government disintegrated under increasing economic and political pressures, pirate groups gained the freedom to operate with complete openness and virtual impunity.

Yet much of the early history of Somali piracy is still clouded in obscurity. With few outside observers present on the ground, little reliable information about the country is available to academics and journalists, and many past (and present) pirate attacks go unreported by shipowners. This dearth of credible information has created an opening for conjecture and speculation, with the result that, as with the buccaneers of yesteryear, a number of present-day myths about the Somali pirates have already sprung up.

3

Pirate Lore

E
DWARD
T
EACH (OR
B
LACKBEARD, AS HE IS MORE COMMONLY
known) was reported to have tied sulphur fuses into his beard, which he would set alight before going into battle in order to give himself the appearance of the devil. It is said he liked to drink a burning mixture of gunpowder and rum, and that, after he was killed and decapitated by the Royal Navy, his skull was fashioned into a silver chalice. Another legend holds that the Barbary corsair Barbarossa (“Red Beard”), Blackbeard’s North African predecessor, tortured the inhabitants of a small Greek island in order to discover the location of a town concealed by a precipitous gorge. As the bloodthirsty pirates descended upon the town, mothers threw their children over the edge of the cliff in order to save them from being sold into slavery.

Passed down through the centuries, such tales are probably as apocryphal as the stories of buried treasure, peg legs, and Jolly Roger flags, yet they have become part of our collective image of the swashbuckling buccaneer. Somalia’s modern sea bandits may lack some of this colour, but, aided by the news media’s inexorable search for a good yarn, they are already on their way to amassing their own canon of folklore.

MYTH #1: SOMALI WATERS ARE TEEMING WITH PIRATES.

In recent years, information technology has made twenty-four-hour-a-day news coverage a reality, with the unintended result of making the world seem much riskier than it is. Given the international media focus on every daring hijacking off the Somali coast, sailing through “Pirate Alley”—the shipping lane from the Indian Ocean through the Gulf of Aden—may appear as dangerous as a seventeenth-century trip across the Spanish Main in a gold-laden galleon. But before you abandon your plans for a career in the merchant marine, ask yourself, What are the actual chances of being hijacked by Somali pirates? When you switch off the six o’clock news and examine the numbers, they turn out not to be very high. In 2008, about twenty-four thousand commercial transits through the Gulf of Aden led to only forty-two successful hijackings, according to the International Maritime Bureau, a global body devoted to combating maritime crime.
¹
In short, the average sailor faced
less than a 1 in 550 chance
(0.17 per cent) of being taken hostage on a given voyage—not all that much worse than the effectively 0 per cent chance on any other sea route in the world.

Of course, for some this figure will be significantly higher; to the poor sailor on a supertanker with a maximum speed of eight knots and a low freeboard, the Gulf of Aden might start to look uncomfortably similar to the Spanish Main.

MYTH #2: THE PIRATES ARE IN THE POCKETS OF SOMALI ISLAMISTS.

By all measures, Somalia should have been one of the most economically successful African nations: it has the continent’s longest coastline, is strategically situated on the Suez Canal shipping lane, and has a long-standing history of trade and entrepreneurship. Sadly, events have taken the country along a different trajectory, and for the last two decades the international community has been trying a variety of strategies to piece it back together. Initially, the United Nations embraced the “building block” approach, which focused on supporting and engaging with the relatively stable mini-states within Somalia, such as Puntland and Somaliland. The logic was that if these regions became bastions of peace and security, their stability would spread to the more turbulent areas surrounding them. Once a number of such “blocks” were in place, reassembling a federal government would be a relatively easy task.

This all changed in 2000, when the Somali National Peace Conference held in Djibouti produced the Transitional National Government (TNG), an ultimately ineffectual attempt to restore central government to the country from the top down. After the TNG went bankrupt and collapsed, it was replaced in 2004 by the current Transitional Federal Government (TFG). Choosing to view these national reconciliation attempts as legitimate expressions of the will of the Somali people (despite the fact that Somaliland—representing a quarter of the nation’s territory—continued to seek outright independence), the international community threw its backing behind the TFG.

International support for the central government became further entrenched in 2006, when Ethiopian troops disastrously invaded Somalia in order to overthrow the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), an Islamist political movement that had wrested control of Mogadishu and much of the south from the TFG and competing warlord factions. The Ethiopian intervention drove ICU’s moderate leadership into exile and sparked a radicalization of the organization, as the ICU’s extremist military wing, Al-Shabaab, splintered from the group and launched a brutal insurgency against the Ethiopian occupiers. The US government had already been wary of the ICU’s Islamist ideology and its potential links to Al Qaeda, and had backed the Ethiopian invasion with air and logistical support; the emergence of Shabaab turned the TFG into a key ally in the war on terror. No longer was the TFG merely the latest phase of a strategically irrelevant country’s struggle with anarchy, but the last bulwark against an Islamist takeover of the Horn of Africa. This perception was reinforced in March 2010, when Al-Shabaab officially declared its affiliation with Al Qaeda, and in July, when Shabaab carried out its first suicide attack outside of Somalia, setting off bombs in two bars in Kampala, Uganda, packed with World Cup revellers.

Following the overthrow of the ICU, the TFG underwent another transformation. Under pressure from the international community, it merged with the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia (ARS), an “opposition party” hastily formed by the self-proclaimed moderate ICU cadres who had fled into exile in Eritrea and Djibouti. The repentant Islamists were accommodated with 275 new seats in the Somali parliament, doubling it to an absurdly bloated 550 members. The leader of the ARS (and former ICU chief), Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, was elected president of the new body. Since 2009, members of Sheikh Sharif’s government have been huddling in their Mogadishu barracks, their daily docket of business more concerned with surviving the continual onslaught of Shabaab militants than administering the country.

Drawn by YouTube videos, foreign jihadis have come flocking to Somalia from around the world, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Canada, Britain, and the United States (Omar Hammami, known as Abu Mansoor “Al-Amriki,” one of Shabaab’s more notorious online recruiters, is a US citizen born in small-town Alabama). With its suppression of women, glorification of martyrdom, and visions of a global caliphate, Shabaab embraces the kind of Islam the war on terror thrives on. In the areas under its control, the group has banned sports, music, and even bras; those who transgress the group’s strict Salafi interpretation of sharia law face amputation and medieval executions (girls as young as thirteen have been stoned to death for the “crime” of adultery).
²
Shabaab’s radicalism was new to Somalis, who had traditionally practiced a moderate, Sufi-influenced variety of Islam. Up until a generation ago, it was common for women to uncover their heads; these days, the Arab style of dress, with its accompanying headscarf, is virtually ubiquitous.

In a world dominated by the discourse of the war on terror, various policy analysts, journalists, and politicians pushing particular agendas inevitably began to speculate about pirate cash ending up in the hands of terrorists. One of the early claims came from the London-based publication
Jane’s Terrorism and Security Monitor
, which reported that Shabaab had provided the pirates with funds, bases, and “specialist weapons” in exchange for a share of the ransoms as well as pirate training in “naval tactics.”
³
The image of turbaned Islamists instructing pirates in sharpshooting in return for sailing lessons would be laughable if it did not have such serious implications for the safety of hostages; a Shabaab-piracy connection would effectively prevent the paying of ransoms, since in most Western countries it is illegal under any circumstances to transfer funds to a designated terrorist organization.

History, at least, seems to be against those who would claim an Islamist-pirate conspiracy. In 2006, the Islamic Courts Union began pushing north, reaching Harardheere in August. Dubbing piracy un-Islamic, or
haram
, ICU militias shut down operations in Harardheere, forcing many pirates into Puntland (as mentioned in
Chapter 2
, the ICU clamp-down in Harardheere partly accounted for the rise of Eyl as Somalia’s piracy capital). Despite the potential loss of revenue, evincing such an attitude—at least publicly—was necessary for the ICU to maintain the legitimacy of its fundamentalist ideology. It was able to afford its pious airs; the group reportedly receives substantial funding from affluent supporters in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states.