The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [16]
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As a boil festers before it bursts, the 2003–2006 Eyl–Harardheere alliance represented an incubation period for the Somali pirates, a time during which they gradually accumulated capital and experience, continually reinvesting their ransom money in ongoing operations. By the 2008 explosion of piracy in the Gulf of Aden, the pirate business model had already been tried and tested, and sufficient cash was available from previous ransoms to provide gainful employment for the countless volunteers lining up on the beaches of Eyl.
For the poorly educated, locally born youth, the security sector, both public and private, had been the steadiest source of formal sector jobs. It came as a shock, then, when in April 2008 the Puntland government ran out of money to pay its security forces. Many members of the police and army naturally sought alternative employment, and there was hardly a more lucrative career than piracy for a young man possessing nothing but a gun and a desperate disregard for his own life.
Scant other opportunities were available. Puntland’s almost non-existent factories provide only a handful of manufacturing jobs, and the already negligible seafood export industry had been suffering on account of both illegal foreign fishing and the decline of lobster stocks. Day labour in Puntland’s rapidly expanding cities was one of the only avenues of steady employment open to the estimated 70 per cent of Puntlanders under the age of thirty. While much of the population (65 per cent, according to the Puntland government), remains nomadic, living a traditional pastoral lifestyle outside the formal economy, the increasing numbers of nomads flocking to urban centres in recent years have not found much to occupy their time other than the drug khat.
There is legitimate money to be made in Somalia. But the most lucrative business opportunities—livestock export, the transport and telecommunications industries, as well as jobs in government and the civil service—are monopolized by educated Somali expats, who speak English and Arabic and often split their time between Somalia and their adoptive homelands. The result has been a gross socioeconomic gap between those who were able to escape the civil war and those who were forced to remain in Somalia and suffer the brunt of the violence. For the masses of unemployed and resentful local youth, piracy was a quick way to achieve the respect and standard of living that the circumstances of their birth had denied them.
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Before the presence of the massive naval flotillas that now jam Somali coastal waters, the risks were fewer, but the payouts were also relatively paltry. One of the Somali Marines’ most noteworthy prizes in the early days was the MV Feisty Gas, a Hong Kong–flagged liquid petroleum tanker captured in April 2005. In exchange for her release, the Marines received a mere $315,000, likely about one-tenth the sum they might have received five years down the line. Since then, ransom amounts have crept steadily higher, with each new precedent exerting an upward pressure on future payments. At the time of writing, the highest recorded ransom had reached a staggering $9.5 million, paid in November 2010 to free the oil supertanker Samho Dream.
Later generations of pirates owed their extravagant multimillion-dollar ransoms to the negotiating abilities of the pioneers. Indeed, the triumvirate of Afweyne, Boyah, and Garaad Mohammed could be compared to the hard-nosed leaders of a newly formed labour union—though in their struggle for higher wages they admittedly employed stronger-arm tactics than typically seen in collective bargaining. The lucrative ransoms for which they fought predictably attracted a new influx of independent groups to the industry—what I refer to as the “third wave” of piracy in Puntland. Many of these pirates were opportunists without