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By Root 891 0

had a veneer of legality. The hodgepodge of rebel groups, militias, and warlords that had inherited chunks of the Somali state (along with the remnants of its navy) began to arrest foreign fishing vessels and extort “fines” for their release. In Puntland, one of the men given this assignment was Abdiwahid Mahamed Hersi, known as Joaar, the owner of a small-scale lobster fishing company who had once employed, as one of his divers, none other than the young Boyah. In 1993, as the civil war continued to rage in the south, Abdullahi Yusuf instructed Joaar to end illegal fishing by foreign fleets off SSDF-controlled territory. In response to this command, Joaar told me, he hired a boat at $200 per day and recruited thirty young men to serve as his marines (I was unable to discover if Boyah was amongst them). According to Joaar’s reckoning, he and his men stopped a total of nine Pakistani dhows, bringing them to Bossaso and ransoming three of them back to their home government (there are even rumours, which Joaar denies, that he and his colleagues hijacked a ship out of Mombasa harbour by smuggling a pistol on board in the bottom of a fruit basket). His actions had the desired effect, or so he believed. “Our seas became very clean at that time,” Joaar said.

Though he had originally planned to create a full-fledged coast guard, Joaar found himself unable to complete the task. Illegal fishing ships, he said, were under the protection of southern warlords, who took exception to the harassment of their clients. “People were calling my home phone and threatening me,” he explained, a fact that helped convince him to shelve his long-term plans.

Acting as he was under orders from the SSDF—the authority in de facto control of the territory at the time—Joaar’s exploits are perhaps better described as semi-legitimate privateering rather than outright piracy. In either case, the man some call “the father of piracy” has since put his hijacking past behind him, though he has remained true to his maritime calling: Joaar is currently the director general of the Puntland Ministry of Fisheries, a position he has held since 2004.

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In 1995, two years after the commissioning of Joaar’s improvised coast guard, Boyah, Garaad Mohammed (another of Eyl’s early pirate leaders), and other Eyl fishermen unleashed their own vigilante brigade upon the seas. At least, 1995 is the starting date Boyah gave me; Stig Jarle Hansen, a Norwegian Puntland specialist who has conducted his own interviews with Boyah, reported him as claiming that “professional piracy” had begun in 1994, but that his group had been engaged in struggles with foreign trawlers as early as 1992. (Momman, one of Boyah’s former lieutenants, later told me that the group had begun operations back in 1991.)5. The public record lends some credence to Hansen’s version of events, showing a sharp rise in both pirate attacks and hijackings in 1994, though the total number of hijackings (four) remained very low.6

Boyah and his colleagues were the original models for the oft-invoked media image of the fisherman-pirate locked in a one-sided struggle against the forces of foreign exploitation. They certainly cultivated this impression; if Boyah is to be believed, his operations were directed solely against foreign fishing trawlers, though this claim could easily have been influenced by the desire to justify his actions to the outside world. His tactics were still relatively basic; Boyah repeatedly denied to me that he or his men had ever used motherships, saying they stayed relatively close to shore in their fishing skiffs. Hansen’s research attests to this limited range; from 1991 to 1995, almost half of all pirate attacks occurred in Puntland waters, while fewer than one-sixth took place on the high seas.7

In 2003, Somali piracy underwent a metamorphosis, thanks to the vision of a complete outsider: Mohamed Abdi Hassan, known as Afweyne (“Big Mouth”), a former civil servant from the distant central coastal town of Harardheere. Drawing on his fellow Habir Gedir clan members (a branch of the Hawiye),