Pirates of Somalia (9 page)

After interviewing a man considered by many to be the father of piracy in Puntland, I was speaking with one of its unknown sons. Over the course of three hijacking operations, Ombaali had served as one of Boyah’s foot soldiers; he was a “holder,” a low-ranking member of the group brought on board to guard the crew once the vessel had been captured and taken to harbour. Or so he claimed; when I later asked Boyah about Ombaali, he waved his hand dismissively and denied ever employing him.

Ombaali, though only in his mid-twenties, had crooked and rotten teeth, perpetually bared in a leering grin, and his eyes were bloodshot. His hunched frame, petite and almost childlike, barely filled out the standard combat fatigues of a Somali militiaman. A former truck driver, Ombaali had grown up in a poor inland village, Hasballe, that lies in the corridor running from Garowe to Eyl, inhabited by the Isse Mahamoud sub-clan of Boyah and the gang’s other Eyl-born leaders.

Ombaali seemed able to remember scant details of his pirating career. He claimed that the three ships on which he had served were hijacked sometime in 2008, though his most precise guess was that they were taken during “the early months of the year.” The only other facts he was able to recall were the nationalities of two of the ships—Japanese and Yemeni—and, not surprisingly, the exact ransom amounts.

“We got $1.8 million for the Japanese tanker,” he said, of a vessel carrying a cargo of crude oil. “And $1.6 million for the other one.” The owners of the smaller Yemeni ship, on the other hand, did not deem the vessel or her crew to be worth ransoming, and in the end the gang simply let it go. Checking up on his story afterwards, I discovered only one vessel captured in 2008 that matched Ombaali’s description: the MT
Stolt Valor
, a Japanese-owned chemical tanker hijacked in the Gulf of Aden while transporting oil products. Although the ransom paid to release the ship—reported to be between $1 million and $2.5 million—fits Ombaali’s account, the
Stolt Valor
was seized on September 15, hardly “the early months of the year.”

Ombaali paused to take a pinch of sugar from the bowl in the middle of the table, casually depositing it into his mouth. I hurriedly offered him some tea for the second time, but he shook his head, seeming surprised at my solicitude.

There were fifty individuals in his gang, he said, of whom fifteen were “attackers”—those who carried out the hijacking—and the remaining thirty-five were holders, such as himself. Ombaali differed slightly from Boyah in his account of how ransoms had been divided, telling me that 50 per cent was split amongst the attackers, 30 per cent went to the investors, and the remaining 20 per cent to the holders; unlike Boyah, Ombaali had no recollection of any money going to charity. Given that an attacker earned almost six times as much as a holder, I asked Ombaali why he had been content to settle for a blue-collar position.

“There is a management board, run by Boyah and others, that selects the attackers,” he explained, presumably a reference to Boyah’s Central Committee. “If I had stayed with the group, eventually I would have become an attacker.”

Eight of the group’s attackers, said Ombaali, had previous histories with the Somali-Canadian Coast Guard (SomCan), a private security firm that provided coast guard services to the Puntland government from 2002 to 2005, and again in 2008. “They were the most experienced at attacking and capturing,” said Ombaali. They were probably also the most expert at marine navigation, including the operation of global positioning systems and other equipment. “GPS was very important,” Ombaali confirmed. “We would never launch an operation without one.”

The group had an interpreter, a Mogadishan named Yusuf, who had the dual responsibility of communicating with the crew as well as handling the ransom negotiation with the shipping company. Before working with Ombaali’s group, Yusuf had been involved with a much more nefarious hijacking—though the case is perhaps better described as a kidnapping at sea. On June 23, 2008, pirates belonging to the northern Warsangali clan seized the German sailing yacht
Rockall
in the Gulf of Aden and brought it to the fishing town of Las Qoray, whereupon the middle-aged couple on board were taken ashore and force-marched into the mountains of Sanaag region. After being held for fifty-two days, during which they were allegedly abused and brutally beaten by the pirates, the Germans were released for a reported ransom of $1 million.
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Yusuf’s references from his previous employers must have been laudatory, because Ombaali’s gang quickly sought his services. “We knew him from that operation, so we gave him a call,” said Ombaali.

Interpreters, I would later learn, are in such high demand that they essentially functioned as independent contractors, hiring themselves out to various pirate groups and moving from job to job. Many translators are simply English-speaking members of the Somali diaspora out to make a few quick dollars in their homeland—where English is rarely spoken by the local inhabitants—while others establish themselves as
dilals
, professional negotiators who take pride in exacting the best possible price from shipowners.

From his two operations, said Ombaali, he had received a total of $50,000.
²
Unlike some of his more spendthrift colleagues—who had blown their earnings on cars and khat—Ombaali had invested in his future, using a portion of his profits to construct a house. “The rest I invested in a pirate operation,” he said. “But I got unlucky. They were at sea for a long time, but they didn’t find any ships.”

Whatever Boyah’s actual level of control over the day-to-day operations of the gang, Ombaali’s testimony made it clear that the position of investor was open to anyone who had the money. Like many pirate operations, Boyah’s extended group apparently employed a shareholder structure, with Boyah and the other members of the “management board” responsible for gathering funding from local investors and organizing the crew.
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With his dreams of early retirement dashed, Ombaali was forced back to work, albeit in the public sector; with his sub-clan, the Isse Mahamoud, now in power, he had had little difficulty in finding a job with the Puntland armed forces. If Ombaali was to be believed, this opportunity might have prevented his foray into the pirate world. “The reason that I became a pirate was that the government was not functioning,” he said. “With the new government, I have expectations that things will change. If they do, I will stay a soldier. If not, I’ll go back to the pirates.”

Ombaali was evidently still struggling with this dilemma when I returned to Puntland five months later. By that time, he was working as a driver and bodyguard for Omar, one of my interpreters. When Omar fired him for incompetence, Ombaali repeatedly threatened to return to piracy unless he was reinstated. Following the failure of this strategy, Ombaali somehow got hold of my phone number, and would call me up to three times a day for no apparent reason.

Throughout the interview, Ombaali had sat squirming in his chair, his manner suggesting more the subject of a police interrogation than a friendly exchange. By the forty-minute mark I had clearly nearly exhausted his limited supply of patience, and he began to grumble about being late for an appointment. I squeezed in one final question: With hours of idle time and few diversions, how did he and his fellow guards get along with their hostages?

“We gave them the best treatment,” he said. “We never stole anything from them, even their cellphones.”

“But what if you had not received any ransom money?” I asked.

Ombaali leaned back in his chair and calmly replied, “Then we would have killed them all.”

* * *

The decision to kill, thankfully, was not in Ombaali’s hands, but in those of his fishermen bosses—the long-serving generals of the Central Committee, most of whom, years earlier, had begun the struggle against foreign incursions into their fishing waters. Since the foreign destruction of Somali fisheries is commonly cited as the impetus for piracy, it may be surprising to discover that fishing has never played much of a role in Somalia, either as a means of sustenance or as a sector in the formal economy.
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In fact, prior to the 1970s virtually no Somalis engaged in fishing as a livelihood, and it was traditionally viewed as a somewhat ignoble occupation.

Like any good Marxist dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre sought to re-engineer his country’s society and patterns of life. Aiming to reduce the population’s overreliance on livestock, Siad Barre attempted to alter cultural attitudes about the value of fish, even going so far as to broadcast daily educational jingles over the radio exhorting nomads to “eat fish and make profit from it.”
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Natural disaster afforded him a more direct means of getting his message across; following severe droughts in 1974 and 1986, Siad Barre forcibly resettled tens of thousands of nomads into coastal towns, which soon developed into fishing communities.

In 1999, in response to persistent complaints from these communities about foreign fishing, Puntland president Abdullahi Yusuf brought in the British private security firm Hart Security to supply coast guard services to the nascent state. Yusuf did not contract Hart directly, but instead used an umbrella organization of local businessmen, the rapidly formed Puntland International Development Corporation. One of these intermediaries was Khalif Isse Mudan, a hotel proprietor and major shareholder in Golis Telecom, Puntland’s largest mobile phone company. In February 2009, I met with Mudan in the office of the hotel he owned on the outskirts of Bossaso.

Working as partners, said Mudan, the Puntland government provided the coast guard’s single ship and weaponry, with Hart Security responsible for the selection and training of its marine force. For the task of patrolling the sixteen-hundred-kilometre coastline of Puntland, Hart was given one twenty-metre trawler and a multi-clan force of seventy local men, armed with two aging ZU-23 Soviet anti-aircraft guns—weaponry on a par with that which the more prudent foreign fishing trawlers had begun to carry.

Hart Security’s principal duty was to prevent illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing in Puntland waters, and its operations were funded by selling official government fishing licences, issued through the Puntland Ministry of Fisheries, Ports, and Marine Transport. The licensing revenues were collected by Hart and split almost evenly with the government, the latter taking a 51 per cent share. “They were like joint venture investors,” explained Mudan. For a fragile natural resource like the fisheries, a for-profit approach to licensing had obvious implications; the success of Hart’s operation was defined not by the tranquillity of the waters it patrolled, but by the profits it generated, which in turn depended on the number of licences issued. The Ministry of Fisheries lent only a thin veneer of lawfulness to the process, as it had no policy in place to regulate the issuing of licences—nor any reliable marine research on which to base such a policy.

Despite Hart’s support for foreign fishing companies, Mudan insisted that neither the firm nor its clients had entered into confrontations with local fishermen. “It was a very smooth operation,” he assured me. Only five or six licences had been sold to short-range trawlers, and these had strict restrictions that prevented them from coming in contact with locals. “The trawlers weren’t allowed to use very small-mesh nets,” said Mudan, “or to come within less than ten miles of the shore.”

According to Mudan, Hart focused its patrols in the waters from Hafun to Hobyo, a stretch of about six hundred kilometres in which most illegal fishing occurred. But even this reduced range consisted of a length of coastline greater than that running from Boston to New York, which Hart patrolled with one lone ship. In order to facilitate this immense job, the company set up observation posts in towns along the coast, from which it received daily reports via high-frequency radio, informing its forces of any suspicious ships fishing in the vicinity.

Hart’s effectiveness was severely limited by the sheer territory its sole ship was tasked with patrolling. However, the company managed to arrest a number of foreign fishing vessels, most notably the Spanish fishing ship
Alabacora Quatro
, whose owner Hart successfully sued in a UK court, winning an undisclosed settlement.

Hart’s patrols rarely brought its ship into contact with any pirates; the company’s only significant encounter occurred in 2000, when the cargo vessel
Mad Express
was hijacked after experiencing technical problems near Bargaal. According to Hart chief Lord Richard Westbury, a former SAS officer, the pirates’ level of sophistication was far below what they have demonstrated in recent years. “Basically, the pirates jumped off the ship. One injured his ankle,” Westbury related in a January 2009 interview. “They certainly had no skills to operate in the way they are currently operating.”
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* * *

Hart’s operations in Puntland continued until 2002, when the company was unwillingly squeezed out of the business by the sudden arrival of the Somali-Canadian Coast Guard (SomCan), a private security firm headed by a former Toronto taxi driver named Abdiweli Ali Taar. The circumstances under which SomCan ousted Hart were decidedly suspicious. After the Puntland presidential election of 2001, which resulted in the victory of challenger Jama Ali Jama, the incumbent Abdullahi Yusuf attempted to oust Jama in a military coup. During the ensuing civil conflict from 2001 to 2002, the Ali Taar family—who belonged to the same Omar Mahamoud sub-clan as Yusuf—supported the former warlord in his fight against Jama. When Yusuf prevailed, the Ali Taars began operations in Puntland’s waters. The brief civil war had also played itself out within the ranks of Hart’s multi-clan coast guard force, which split into opposing factions; when fighting broke out near Hart’s bases of operation, the firm packed up and set sail for the United Kingdom.
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