The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [13]
For six years following the Garowe conference, Yusuf ruled Puntland as his personal fiefdom. When a 2001 election produced a victory for Yusuf’s challenger, Jama Ali Jama, Yusuf did not bother to contest the results; he declared war, defeating Jama over the course of a six-month conflict. It was a rare outbreak of violence in a region that, since its founding, had remained largely insulated from the ongoing instability in southern Somalia.
In 2004, Yusuf headed south to take over the reins of the recently formed Somali TFG, handing over Puntland (after a three-month interim) to former general Mohamud Muse Hersi—a man known by the nickname of Adde Muse, or “White Moses.” Hersi remained in power until January 2009, when Abdirahman Farole, an academic who had spent most of the previous twenty years in Melbourne, captured 74 per cent of the vote in an indirect presidential election held by Puntland’s “parliament”—a collection of clan elders appointed from the region’s seven districts. During and following the election, Farole took a hard-line stance against the buccaneers plying the region’s waters, whom he viewed as a black mark on Puntland’s international reputation: “The pirates are spoiling our society,” he announced to the press following his victory. “We will crush them.”4
It was a promise he has found difficult to fulfil.
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By the time Farole assumed office in early 2009, sea banditry had become Puntland’s only claim to recognition on the international stage. Yet piracy had existed as a Somalia-wide phenomenon since the outbreak of the civil war. As the central government collapsed on land, its ability to control its seas declined commensurately, and a varied assortment of militiamen, fishermen, and dregs of the Somali army all seized advantage. Like darts striking a map, pirate attacks occurred up and down the length of the Somali coast, indifferent to geographical location. These early operations were sporadic, opportunistic, and unsophisticated—little more than groups of gunmen floating in four-metre skiffs a few kilometres away from the shore, waiting for wayward vessels to stray too close. The use of far-ranging “motherships” (fishing dhows or other larger vessels employed as floating bases of operations) was not yet common, and these nascent pirates did not typically venture far beyond the hundred or so miles constituting the traditional sphere of Somali fishermen—well short of international shipping lanes. By consequence, their victims were typically fishing trawlers, whose search for lobster and demersal (bottom-dwelling) fish required them to come close to shore.
The attacks most frequently took the form of “marine muggings,” during which the brigands would board the vessel and steal money and everything else of easily transportable value before quickly departing. Like muggings, they sometimes turned violent, as was the case in the very first recorded act of modern piracy in Somalia—an incident that marked the closest the Somali pirates have come to the seventeenth-century stereotype of bloodthirsty buccaneers.
On January 12, 1991, the cargo ship Naviluck was boarded by three boatloads of armed pirates off the Puntland coast near the town of Hafun while en route from Mombasa to Jeddah. The pirates took three of the vessel’s Filipino crewmen ashore and summarily executed them, before forcing the remaining crew to jump overboard and setting the Naviluck ablaze. Only by the grace of a passing trawler were the floundering victims of this “plank walking” saved from the fate of their three comrades.
Not all hijackings were carried out by these sorts of water-borne thugs; some