Pirates of Somalia (8 page)

During my months in Puntland, I questioned every pirate I met about Islamist ties, and received the same vehement denials from every one. Nonetheless, some indications of a relationship between Al-Shabaab and the pirates had emerged by late 2009, or so said my source in the Somali diplomatic community. On October 2, the Spanish tuna boat
Alakrana
was seized by one of Afweyne’s attack groups and brought to Harardheere (the thirty-six hostages were released seven weeks later for a reported ransom of $4.5 million). Before arriving in Harardheere, however, the pirates stopped at the Shabaab-controlled port of Baraawe, where two hijackers headed for shore in a small skiff. They had hardly left the ship before a Spanish navy helicopter intercepted and arrested them.

“They were supposed to meet the Shabaab leaders in Baraawe and bring them to Harardheere,” my source explained. “As it turned out, the leaders had to make the trip by road.” The incident, he argued, was “ultimate evidence” of a connection between Shabaab and the Harardheere pirates, a relationship that he said had been brokered by Afweyne himself. “Shabaab could be receiving anywhere from 5 per cent to 60 per cent of the ransom,” my source said. “And according to my information, it’s much more than a gentleman’s agreement for money. Al-Shabaab itself seems to be training for acts of piracy—becoming, in effect, ‘sea Mujahedeen.’ ”

Nevertheless, there was still no evidence, fourteen months later, that any Islamist group had launched a “piracy division.” But this may change; in a repeat of the 2006 ICU clamp-down, Hizbul Islam—the then second most influential Islamist group in Somalia, after Shabaab—invaded Harardheere in May 2010, chasing many of the resident pirates north to the town of Hobyo. Like the ICU, both Hizbul Islam and Shabaab have publicly declared piracy to be
haram
, but the lure of large sums of money may have spawned a reinterpretation of the scriptures; there are reports that the remaining Harardheere pirates have begun to split their ransoms with both Islamist groups.
⁴
In the cynical words of my diplomat source, “Nothing is
haram
if it supports the insurgency.”

In Hobyo, conversely, the pirates have decided to fight ’em rather than join ’em. Mohamed Garfjani, a Hobyo pirate strongman believed to have hijacked a half-dozen ships, has built up an organized militia consisting of several hundred men, eighty heavy machine guns, and six technicals (flatbed trucks mounted with light anti-aircraft guns).
⁵
In an effort to stave off the Islamist expansion, Garfjani has placed his muscle in the service of local officials of Galmudug, the semi-autonomous region in which Harardheere and Hobyo are located (the Galmudug administration, it must be said, has never exercised effective control over the towns).

Links between pirates and terrorists undoubtedly exist, but they are isolated and incidental—opportunistic individuals with Islamist ties who happen to dabble in piracy investments on the side. Shabaab, as an organization, does not yet have conclusive systematic links to the pirates, and the pirates have good reason to keep it that way. As one Somalia analyst put it to me: “If I’m a pirate and I’m giving money to Al-Shabaab, I can be pretty sure that some American is going to find out and drop a bomb on my head. It’s simply a very, very bad business decision.”

MYTH #3: SOMALI PIRACY IS RUN BY AN INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL CARTEL.

Many theories have sprung up to explain the astounding success of the Somali pirates in snatching vessels from right under the guns of Western naval armadas, almost all of which seem to rest on the assumption that the Somalis could not possibly be doing it on their own. Security firms, media outlets, and law enforcement agencies have all alleged the existence of a vast and sophisticated international crime network providing funding, equipment, and intelligence to their local Somali minions—conjuring the image of a sinister Bond film villain pushing buttons on a giant maritime navigation display.

One of the strongest and most outlandish claims came in October 2009, when Interpol announced that Somali piracy was controlled by “transnational crime syndicates.” “It is organized crime,” Jean-Michel Louboutin, executive director of police services at Interpol, bluntly told the Agence France-Presse (when I attempted to contact Mr. Louboutin to clarify his statement, a public relations rep informed me, without elaborating, that he had been misquoted).
⁶

I asked Toby Stephens, a London-based crisis response lawyer, about these claims. The principal function of Stephens’s firm is to “convince” a hijacked ship’s various insurers to put up the ransom money, and his job had taken him almost as far as the negotiating room during the ransom bargaining process. “We’ve been involved with various security services in tracing the pirates’ phone calls, as well as their assets,” said Stephens. “There have been definite instances of calls coming to telephones in London. The criminal network certainly extends beyond Somalia, but my perception is that it is not nearly as organized as people think,” he continued. “I think the pirates are a disorganized bunch, but they do have contacts—friends, family, whoever it may be—in places around the globe. And they draw on those, but it’s not a mafia-style organized crime network.”

On the ground, there is little to back up the tales of international conspiracy. Pirates operate in relatively small, decentralized groups of twenty to fifty—essentially, relatives and friends who come together for the purpose of a mission, then disperse once the task is complete and the ransom has been divided up. The loyalty of the average pirate is to the money, not the Don.

Nor is there any evidence of the rivalries and turf wars one would expect in an organized crime environment. While isolated cases of gang infighting have resulted in deaths, no pirate organization maintains a standing “hit squad,” and inter-group conflict has been virtually non-existent. There seem to be plenty of cargo ships to go around.

Pirate money certainly passes back and forth across international borders, but this movement is not necessarily extralegal. The Somali diaspora is one of the most interconnected and interdependent in the world, and the international exchange of funds should be viewed as family finances, rather than the monetary trail of a transnational criminal cartel.

MYTH #4: PIRATE GROUPS EMPLOY HIGHLY SOPHISTICATED INTELLIGENCE NETWORKS

Accompanying the claims of transnational pirate crime networks have been numerous media reports suggesting that pirate organizations are being fed vital shipping data enabling them to pick and choose targets from the tens of thousands of vessels charting the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden each year. In May 2009, for instance, Spanish media cited a European military intelligence report claiming that pirates were targeting specific ships identified by a team of “well-placed advisers” in London. “These consultants,” the report read, “are in constant satellite telephone contact with pirate commanders on land, who can then pass details of the layout of the vessel, its crew, route and cargo to their colleagues at sea.” The article went on to insinuate that the passing of such information, if true, represented a major intelligence failure on the part of the UK government: “It was unclear why leaks of such sensitive details appear to be coming from Britain.”
⁷

In reality, these so-called sensitive details are practically public knowledge, available to anyone with an Internet connection and access to an online maritime tracking service, such as Lloyd’s Marine Intelligence Unit. By paying a subscription fee, users—such as these hypothetical “consultants”—are able to continually monitor the course and position of virtually any commercial shipping vessel in the world, as well as its cargo, crew manifest, and other details of interest to pirates (such as freeboard and maximum speed). But it is not clear that such information would be particularly useful; even with access to a maritime tracking service, intercepting a vessel on the open sea is not nearly as easy as it may seem. For security reasons, the vessels’ exact coordinates are delayed by at least five or six hours, and plotting an intercept course using the commercially available GPS device a pirate attack group is likely to possess is an extremely formidable task. Even missing a pre-selected target by as little as half an hour would put a vessel moving at ten knots out of visual range, exposing its now-aimless pursuers to an increased risk of being picked up by international naval patrols, or even dehydration, starvation, and death. In myopically chasing a single target, moreover, the pirates would probably have to pass over a host of other perfectly suitable ships.

Roger Middleton voiced his own reasons for rejecting the existence of a sophisticated pirate intelligence network: “Why on earth would you need intelligence to hijack a ship in the Gulf of Aden? Spend half an hour googling and you can find where the shipping lanes are and therefore where the best targets are likely to be. You go north, and maybe left a little bit, and then you just wait.” Middleton conceded that the vast Indian Ocean presented them with a greater navigational challenge, but argued that their basic strategy had remained unchanged. “If there were a certain ship sailing through the Indian Ocean and you wanted to catch it, then of course you’d need intelligence. But that’s not the nature of this crime … it’s not an intelligence-led crime—it’s opportunistic. It’s like walking down the street looking through windows: you see one that has a single glazing, so you smash the window, go in, and steal the TV.”

The major hijackings hitting the news are bound to create the impression that pirate gangs purposefully go after only the juiciest of targets. But of the over two hundred vessels to have been successfully hijacked, only five—four oil supertankers and the tank transport MV
Faina—
could be considered “ideal targets.” For the average pirate—ragged, ill-equipped, and often without enough food and fuel to get him home—any ship that floats is a welcome oasis in the desert.

MYTH #5: PIRATE DOLLARS ARE FUELLING A PROPERTY BOOM IN NAIROBI

The Nairobi suburb of Eastleigh, unofficially known as “Little Mogadishu,” is a slice of Somalia transported into Kenya; the roads are unpaved and perpetually clogged with noisy traffic, and khat leaves litter the ground between colourful rows of open-air kiosks. As he dropped me off at the outskirts of the sprawling neighbourhood, my Kenyan taxi driver earnestly cautioned me to stay alert. “Somalis don’t argue with you,” he warned. “They just stab you.”

House prices in Nairobi have risen two- and threefold over the last five years, and angry local residents have naturally turned to Somalis—already viewed with suspicion by native Kenyans—as convenient scapegoats. Since the piracy outbreak two years ago, the scapegoating has included allegations that pirate dollars are in large part responsible for the rising costs.
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A few days earlier, a University of Nairobi medical student I had met on the streets downtown echoed the concerns felt by many Nairobi residents. “Somalis are buying all the land from the Kenyans,” he exclaimed. “How? Where do they get all the money?”

Strolling down the streets of Eastleigh in December 2009, I could not deny that the neighbourhood was in the midst of a building boom. Alongside the broad thoroughfares carving up the suburb, layers of scaffolding snaked around the shells of six-storey buildings under construction. I stopped and began to question passers-by, and soon a small mob had gathered around me. I asked the crowd for their thoughts on a recent broadcast by the Kenyan Television Network, which had sent a team to Eastleigh with the express purpose of looking for pirates. “All they found were Toyota Surfs and
mirra
[the Kenyan term for khat],” one man shouted out. “That’s not enough evidence!”

Irrespective of whether pirates are hiding out in Eastleigh, a rough calculation is sufficient to dismiss the notion that piracy has had anything to do with the skyrocketing demand for Nairobi land. At the time, pirate ransoms had not totalled more than $125 million; given how much pirate booty is blown on cars and khat, it would be a miracle if as much as a tenth had made its way from Somalia into the Nairobi property market. And $12.5 million in over two years could not noticeably affect average property prices in even the smallest slum of a global city like Nairobi.

Though admittedly not as glamorous an explanation, the Nairobi property boom has been a result of the Kenyan government’s investor-friendly policies over the last half-decade—not the laundered proceeds of pirate kingpins.

* * *

Looking beyond the mythology that has coloured the reality of piracy both past and present, there are some striking similarities. Despite their notorious reputations, the pirates of old, like Somali pirates today, usually left their hostages alive (after all, they needed to provide an incentive for crews to surrender without a fight). Like the Somalis, they were spendthrift; Captain Kidd was the only pirate known to have buried treasure, and he did not do so very often (pirates didn’t—and still don’t—plan for the future). Even in their organizational cultures, the two groups are remarkably similar; like the Somalis, pirate crews on seventeenth-century vessels more resembled associations of shareholders than servants indentured to a despotic captain.

Among the Somali pirates, of course, not all shareholders were equal.

4

Of Pirates, Coast Guards, and Fishermen

T
HE DAY AFTER MY FARM MEETING WITH
B
OYAH
, I
WAS SITTING
at the dining-room table of my guest house in Garowe, sipping a cup of Shah (sweet tea) and waiting for Abdirizak, my host and interpreter, to bring me a pirate. Before long, I heard Abdi’s station wagon pulling through the fortified iron gate and into the courtyard, and he soon appeared with a sullen youth in tow. Consistent with the Somali nickname culture, Abdi introduced him as Ombaali, meaning “the burdened camel”; I learned only later that his real name was Abdulkhadar.