The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [110]
The Marathon was one of the rare instances where casualties had been incurred among the crew of a hijacked ship. Up to this point, it had been possible for me to view pirates as a sympathetic breed of criminal like the bank robbers audiences cheer in movie theatres—the sort who never shoot the guards on the way in. For a pirate, killing hostages is not an economically rational decision, yet I had had the distinct impression that the Dhanane gang would have been as perfectly at ease with slaughtering their captives as ransoming them. Later, when reading news of the casualties the crew had suffered, I was struck by the chilling realization that I had shared tea with murderers.
It is often argued that movements based on violence or criminality become, by their very nature, increasingly radicalized as time passes, as the moderates are slowly squeezed out by the extremists. The gangs I encountered in Eyl and Dhanane were examples of what I term the “third wave” of piracy. Unlike the first wave of fishermen vigilantes in the mid-1990s, or the second wave of the mid-2000s, when the same men developed their operations into large-scale businesses, the third wave has consisted largely of opportunists without fishing backgrounds—often disaffected youth from the large inland nomad population. They mouth the worn-out mantra of the just crusade against illegal fishing like sanctimonious popes, with sly eyes and cynical smiles. But absent is the simple earnestness of Boyah and Momman, their brooding introspection regarding the morality of their actions, their sincere desire to lead a higher life.
The bosses in Dhanane exuded a cold ruthlessness that permitted a man to joke that his hostages were fat and sated, while one of them had been shot dead and another lay bleeding on the deck. These men had inherited Boyah’s legacy.
Epilogue
The Problems of Puntland
I LAST SAW BOYAH A FEW DAYS BEFORE I LEFT PUNTLAND FOR the final time. His Blue Jays T-shirt was absent, but as we parted he surprised me by seizing my hand and pulling me in for a pound hug, enveloping me in his massive frame. We had evidently come a long way from the menacing stares he had levelled at me during our first meeting six months previous.
Since that first meeting, Boyah has attained international fame as the self-appointed media spokesman of the Somali pirates, his name growing with every interview he has granted. Foreign journalists from the BBC, Al Jazeera, and the New York Times, among others, flocked to hear what Boyah had to tell them, in part because he guaranteed a good interview: he was frank, disarming, and always reliable for a great quote. His motivation was a simple wish to let the world know about the struggles that he and his brethren had faced growing up as poor fishermen. Unlike many of his successors, he was no petty thug or cheap sadist, and willingly subjected his past choices to a self-probing moral reflection. The remorse he expressed, I believe, was genuine.
In the end, Boyah paid a heavy price for his love of the spotlight. When his frankness during interviews extended to taking public credit for hijacking more than twenty-five ships, it was inevitable that he would catch the eye of the US government. After enduring continual criticism over his lax treatment of pirate leaders, President Farole finally caved under the weight of US and international pressure. On Tuesday, May 18, 2010, Boyah and ten other men were arrested as they were preparing to flee Garowe in three Toyota Surfs; in their possession were two pistols and, for all Boyah’s earlier claims of being penniless, $29,500 in cash. As of February 2011, Boyah was still sitting in a cell, awaiting sentencing.
“Of course he’ll go to jail,” a Puntland government insider told me. “Life in prison.”
From what I heard, Boyah had become disillusioned with the government’s refusal to commission