The Pirates of Somalia Read online

  Copyright © 2011 by Jay Bahadur

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Published simultaneously in Canada by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Maps on this page and this page by Susan MacGregor/Digital Zone.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bahadur, Jay.

  The pirates of Somalia : inside their hidden world / Jay Bahadur.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-90698-4

  1. Pirates—Somalia—21st century. 2. Piracy—Somalia—21st century.

  3. Hijacking of ships—Somalia—21st century. 4. Puntland (Somalia)—Economic conditions. 5. Somalia—Politics and government—1991–

  6. Bahadur, Jay—Travel—Somalia—Puntland. I. Title.

  DT403.2.B34 2011 364.164096773—dc22 2011011731

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Jacket illustration by Mohamed Dahir/AFP/Getty Images

  Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund

  v3.1

  To Ali, without whose infectious love for Africa

  this book would not exist

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map of Somalia

  Map: Expansion of Pirate Operations

  Prologue: Where the White Man Runs Away

  1 Boyah

  2 A Short History of Piracy

  3 Pirate Lore

  4 Of Pirates, Coast Guards, and Fishermen

  5 Garaad

  6 Flower of Paradise

  7 The Land of Punt

  8 Momman

  9 The Policemen of the Sea

  10 The Law of the Sea

  11 Into the Pirates’ Lair

  12 Pirate Insider

  13 The Cadet and the Chief

  14 The Freakonomics of Piracy

  15 The Road’s End

  Epilogue: The Problems of Puntland

  Appendix 1: Simplified Somali Clan Tree

  Appendix 2: The Victoria Gang

  Appendix 3: Piracy Timeline

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Illustrations

  Somalia

  Expansion of Pirate Operations

  Prologue

  Where the White Man Runs Away

  IT WAS MY FIRST TRIP TO AFRICA.

  I arrived in Somalia in the frayed seat of a 1970s Soviet Antonov propeller plane, heading into the internationally unrecognized region of Puntland on a solo quest to meet some present-day pirates. The 737s of Dubai, with their meal services and functioning seatbelts, were a distant memory; the plane I was in was not even allowed to land in Dubai, and the same probably went for the unkempt, ill-tempered Ukrainian pilot.

  To the ancient Egyptians, Punt had been a land of munificent treasures and bountiful wealth; in present times, it was a land of people who robbed wealth from the rest of the world. Modern Puntland, a self-governing region in northeastern Somalia, may or may not be the successor to the Punt of ancient times, but I was soon to discover that it contained none of the gold and ebony that dazzled the Egyptians—save perhaps for the colours of the sand and the skin of the nomadic goat and camel herders who had inhabited it for centuries.

  The cabin absorbed the heat of the midday African sun like a Dutch oven, thickening the air until it was unbearable to breathe. Sweat poured freely off my skin and soaked into the torn cloth of my seat cover. Male passengers fanned themselves with the Russian-language aircraft safety cards; the women fanned their children. The high whine of the Antonov’s propellers changed pitch as it accelerated along the Djibouti runway, building towards a droning crescendo that I had not heard outside of decades-old movies.

  The stories I had heard of these planes did nothing to put me at ease: a vodka-soaked technician banging on exposed engine parts with a wrench; a few months prior, a plant-nosed landing at Bossaso airstrip after a front landing strut had refused to extend. Later, in Bossaso, I saw the grounded craft, abandoned where it had crashed, a few lackadaisical guards posted nearby to prevent people from stripping the valuable metal.

  This flight was like a forgotten relic of the Cold War, a physical testament to long-defunct Somali-Soviet geopolitical ties that had disintegrated with the countries themselves; its Ukrainian crew, indentured servants condemned forever to ferry passengers along this neglected route.

  Over the comm system, the Somali steward offered a prayer in triplicate: Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, as the plane gained speed. The whine heightened to a mosquito-like buzz and we left the ground behind, setting an eastward course for Somalia, roughly shadowing the Gulf of Aden coastline.

  * * *

  As I approached my thirty-fifth weary hour of travel, my desire to socialize with fellow passengers had diminished, but on purely self-serving grounds I forced myself to chat eagerly with anyone throwing a curious glance in my direction. I had never met my Somali host, Mohamad Farole, and any friend I made on the plane was a potential roof over my head if my ride didn’t show. Remaining alone at the landing strip was not an option; news travels around Somalia as fast as the ubiquitous cellphone towers are able to transmit it, and a lone white man bumming around the airstrip would be public knowledge sooner than I cared to contemplate.

  When he learned that I was travelling to Garowe, Puntland’s capital city, the bearded man sitting next to me launched into the unfortunate tale of the last foreigner he knew to make a similar voyage: a few months previous, a Korean man claiming to be a Muslim had turned up in the capital, alone and unannounced. Not speaking a word of Somali, he nonetheless succeeded in finding a residence and beginning a life in his unusual choice of adoptive homeland.

  He lasted almost two weeks. On his twelfth day in Puntland, a group of rifle-toting gunmen accosted the man in broad daylight as he strolled unarmed through the streets. Rather than let himself be taken hostage, the Korean made a fight of it, managing to struggle free and run. He made it several metres before one of his bemused would-be captors casually shot him in the leg. The shot set off a hue and cry, and in the ensuing clamour the gunmen dispersed and someone helped the man reach a medical clinic. I later learned from another source that he was a fugitive, on the run from the Korean authorities. His thought process, I could only assume, was that Somalia was the last place on earth that his government would look for him. He was probably right.

  * * *

  Just a few months earlier, I had been a recent university graduate, killing the days writing tedious reports for a market research firm in Chicago, and trying to break into journalism with the occasional cold pitch to an unresponsive editor. I had no interest in journalism school, which I thought of as a waste of two of the best years of my life—years that I should spend in the fray, learning how to do my would-be job in places where no one else would go.

  Somalia was a good candidate, jockeying with Iraq and Afghanistan for the title of the most dangerous country in the world. The country had commanded a soft spot in my heart since my PoliSci days, when I had wistfully dreamt of bringing the astounding democratic success of the tiny self-declared Republic of Somaliland (Puntland’s western neighbour) to the world’s attention.

  The headline-grabbing hijacking of the tank transport MV Faina in September 2008 presented me with a more realistic opportunity. I sent out some feelers to a few Somali news services, and within ten minutes had received an enthusiastic response from Radio Garowe, the lone news outlet in Puntland’s capital city. After a few long emails and a few short phone calls with Radio Garowe’s founder, Mohamad Farole, I decided to
buy a ticket to Somalia.

  It took multiple tickets, as it turned out. Getting to Somalia was an aerophobe’s nightmare—a forty-five-hour voyage that took me through Frankfurt, Dubai, Djibouti, Bossaso, and finally Galkayo. In Dubai, I joined the crowd of diaspora Somalis, most making short visits to see their families, pushing cart upon cart overflowing with goods from the outside world. Curious eyes began to glance my way, scanning, no doubt, for signs of mental instability. I was in no position to help them make the diagnosis; by the first leg of my trip, I had already lost the ability to judge objectively whether what I was doing was sane or not. News reports of the numerous journalists kidnapped in Puntland fixated my imagination. I channelled the hours of nervous energy into studying the lone Somali language book I had been able to dig up at the public library; I scribbled answers to exercises into my notebook with an odd sense of urgency, as if cramming for an exam that would take place as soon as I set foot in Somalia.

  The last white face disappeared at Djibouti’s dilapidated, near-deserted airport, as American F-16s performed eardrum-shattering training manoeuvres overhead. By the time the plane landed in Galkayo, I was the only non-Somali passenger on board.

  * * *

  The Antonov’s first stop was Bossaso, Puntland’s northernmost port and most populous city. We wove back and forth over water and land, as Somalia’s undulating coastline cut back and forth across the vector of our flight. Out of the scratched porthole, the solid azure of the Gulf of Aden below was broken only by intermittent white cracks marking the location of swells; from the sky, they looked like fissures erupting on the surface of a perfectly smooth blue rock face. As the plane swung back towards the coast, the lines of white increased in number, joined by the occasional fishing trawler cutting its own independent trail across the water.

  As we crossed over land, Bossaso came into view. It was the first sign of life Somalia had displayed, a settlement rising out of the vast, lunar wasteland enveloping it. From the air, the city appeared as a clutter of corrugated roof buildings, gathering in a concentrated burst before spilling into the sea. The minarets of occasional mosques poked out of the conglomeration of one- and two-storey structures. A miniature range of denuded mountains, looking like cropped volcanoes, formed a crescent around the city.

  The plane banked precipitously and began its descent towards the thin stretch of unclaimed beach lying between city and ocean, in which Bossaso airstrip was nestled. The temperature in the cabin began to rise once more as the Antonov left the higher altitudes. Within a few minutes, the plane had come to a bumping stop on the sand-coated runway.

  The thought hit me for the first time: I am in fucking Somalia.

  Somalia is like a country out of a twisted fairy tale, an ethereal land given substance only by the stories we are told of it. Everything known by the outside world has been constructed from news reports spilling out of the country over the last twenty years: warlords, famine, Black Hawks, jihadis, and now pirates. Along with bananas and livestock, international news is one of the few items that Somalia can still claim to export, and crossing the border from Djibouti into Somalia had brought me from the world of news consumers into the world of news producers.

  The stopover was brief; as soon as the Antonov had finished refuelling, the remaining passengers climbed back on board and it took off once more, setting a course for Galkayo, a city straddling Puntland’s southern border. The desert below stretched in shades of brown and blond; evaporated riverbeds scarred the pockmarked terrain, carving valleys in their wake. Galkayo is a dangerous place, a crucible where the northern Darod and the southern Hawiye clan families meet, cleaving the city along its east–west axis; the reputed English translation of the city’s name, “where the white man runs away,” did not put me at ease. Though I had initially assumed that the site marked a decisive victory by Somali independence fighters over British or Italian colonial forces, I later discovered that Galkayo was the location of a much earlier battle between invading Somalis and the non-Muslim indigenous inhabitants.

  After another ninety minutes and seven hundred kilometres, Galkayo appeared. We touched down on another dusty landing strip, tires churning to a stop near an expectant crowd. It was the end of the line. I stepped once more down the six shaky steps onto Somali soil, and looked anxiously through the milling throng.

  My own name had never sounded as sweet as when I heard it being called from across the landing strip. The voice belonged to Mohamad’s cousin Abdirizak, who waved and walked hurriedly towards me. He was short and trim, with a joyous laugh, warm smile, and a receding hairline. Hours of pent-up stress drained out of my body.

  Abdi and I proceeded to a customs office, a largely empty building containing a few uniformed officials milling around behind bare wood and glass partitions. One of the bored agents looked me over and demanded twenty dollars for an “airport tax” and another twenty dollars for a visa, which he impressed onto my passport with a stamp that looked to be left over from the days of the collapsed Somali Republic.1 Asking how long I wished to remain in the country, he scribbled my answer into the allotted field on the still-drying stamp—apparently the twenty-dollar visa was a flat rate.

  Abdi led me to a gleaming white-and-chrome Land Cruiser. Perched at either end of the back seat were two UN-trained bodyguards, Said and Abdirashid, who would accompany me like another heartbeat for the next six weeks. They cradled their worn AK-47s between the pant legs of their beige uniforms; crudely sewn on their sleeves were patches with the letters “SPU”—Special Police Unit—superimposed on a blue stag’s head, the emblem of the Puntland police.

  In Somalia, 4×4s are needed to get around even in urban areas; with the exception of the main thoroughfare, Galkayo’s unpaved streets were worn down to their bare bones, the dirt eaten away by tire treads to the uneven rock beneath. The surfaces of the buildings, some whitewashed, some matching the dull brown of the road, were chipped and worn, and occasionally bullet-marked. The more upscale houses were covered with geometric patterns of vibrant blues, greens, and yellows, like the colours of a Van Gogh canvas. Similarly vivid paintings on the facades of shops—bags of flour, cans of oil, generic bottles of pills—advertised what was sold within. The Land Cruiser rocked to a stop in front of one of these; the listing English letters above the entrance read “General Store,” and one of the SPU guards dashed inside and returned with some cream-filled biscuits and a number of bottles of water. In the mid-afternoon heat, the streets were largely deserted except for a few children, who skipped around me cautiously.

  The one-lane highway connecting Galkayo to Garowe and Bossaso is the sole road running through Puntland along its north–south axis, a solitary link stretching across seven hundred kilometres of desert. Its decrepit state was symbolic of the neglect the region experienced under former dictator Siad Barre, and from the international community more recently. The three-decade-old Chinese concrete was crumbling and corroded, and craterous potholes turned the 250-kilometre journey from Galkayo to Garowe into a four- or five-hour jolting ordeal. It was January 2009, the onset of the first of Puntland’s two dry seasons, the jiilaal, and parched shrubs dotted the barren landscape; the dust clung to my skin until my shirt felt like fine sandpaper. Piles of bottles, old tires, and the odd stripped chassis lined both sides of the road; discarded plastic bags, struggling in the clutches of spiny bushes, waved at us spasmodically as we drove by. Every so often an impassive camel plodded across the road, slowing us to a near halt.

  At irregular intervals, buildings of thatched branches and the occasional panel of corrugated metal clustered into settlements by the side of the highway. The boundaries of these shantytowns were marked by speed bumps built by the inhabitants out of packed dirt and rocks. A few empty gasoline drums blocked the road at the entrance to each village, with two or three listless guards loitering around the makeshift checkpoints.

  At one of these pit stops we abruptly turned off the road and pulled into an open-air restaurant, its plastic
tables and chairs almost spilling onto the highway. A few words were exchanged, and out came metal plates heaped with sticky rice sopped in goat’s milk, flanked by fist-sized chunks of gristly camel meat. My two guards, sharing one of the plates, used their hands to squish the rice into pasty balls, which they proceeded to deposit into their mouths. I decided to use the spoon that had been offered to me, feeling somehow like an elitist in doing so. They looked attentively at me and smiled, waiting for my reaction to tasting camel meat for the first time. I picked at the stringy meat with a knife and my teeth as best I could, smiling back vacuously.

  As we ate, a menacing semicircle of youth gradually formed around me, glowering eyes filled with mistrust and suspicion. I tried to lean as casually as possible against the back of my plastic lawn chair, but I was grateful for the SPU.

  Four hours down the road, darkness fell. Close to the equator, night arrives startlingly quickly, with dusk relegated to the role of minor broker between night and day. The straight track ahead dissolved into the night beyond the reach of our high beams. No other cars were on the road, and the blackness around us was absolute. We climbed over the last in a series of gentle hills, and the muffled lights of Garowe finally came into view.

  Soon we passed a checkpoint where a few yawning soldiers in fatigues hurriedly waved us through, then an abandoned gas station, the UN compound, and many other buildings I was unable to make out. Under the city’s muted street lights, Garowe was reduced to a monochromatic grey. Partway through the city we pulled off the main road and struck out onto Garowe’s pitch-black streets. Our headlights began to reveal haphazard piles of stone littered around spacious plots of empty land, evidence of Garowe’s ongoing building boom. We hit another, miniature, checkpoint, nothing more than a log laid across the path, where a uniformed soldier shouted at us to extinguish our headlights, glanced inside the car, and waved us through.