The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [17]
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Harardheere’s piracy dominance temporarily came to an end in 2006, when the Islamic Courts Union—an Islamist political movement—seized control of the south of the country and cracked down on pirate operations, claiming that the practice violated Islamic law. This paved the way for piracy to relocate to the next logical locale: back to Puntland, the gateway to the Gulf of Aden. From 2007 to 2008, Eyl was the undisputed capital of the Somali pirate empire, until the establishment of the heavily patrolled maritime safety corridor in the Gulf of Aden allowed Harardheere to reclaim the title in late 2009.
International recognition of the problem was sluggish. Though mariners in Somali waters had for years been keeping their eyes nervously glued to their radar displays, the triple intrigue of arms, oil, and Americans was needed for the Somali pirates to make international news headlines. The galvanizing event was the September 2008 seizure of the Ukrainian transport ship Faina, which combined the mystique of high-seas buccaneers and international weapons trafficking: in contravention of a UN embargo, the Faina was carrying Soviet-era tanks destined for southern Sudan, likely with the full knowledge of the Kenyan government. Two months later came the daring hijacking of the MV Sirius Star, a Saudi supertanker carrying $100 million in crude oil; seized a shocking eight hundred and fifty kilometres southeast of Somalia, the incident marked the furthest the Somali pirates had ventured out to sea at the time. Finally, in April 2009, pirates attacked the Maersk Alabama, the first American cargo vessel to be hijacked in two centuries. A tense three-day standoff with an American warship, worthy of a Hollywood script, ended with three Navy SEAL sniper bullets to the hijackers’ heads and the lone survivor brought back to face US justice in a New York courtroom. The Alabama incident catapulted Somali sea piracy to the attention of the American public, and convinced editors around the world that the pirates were worthy of their front pages.
This trinity of hijackings that seized the imagination of the average news consumer were the brainchildren of the founding fathers of Somali piracy: the Faina was a joint operation between Boyah’s and Garaad Mohammed’s gangs and the Somali Marines, the Sirius Star hijacking was carried out by Afweyne’s group alone, and the Alabama attack was publicly claimed by Garaad.13
The Somali pirates had come of age.
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The basic characteristics that made Puntland an ideal spawning ground for pirates had existed since its founding in 1998. Why, then, did it take ten years for piracy to develop into the present epidemic? Four main causes explain the rise of piracy in Puntland: geopolitics, environmental factors, economic adversity, and breakdown of governance (two other principal factors, illegal fishing and toxic dumping, and the Puntland Coast Guard, will be discussed in Chapter 4).
In geopolitical terms, two factors lent Puntland a comparative advantage in the piracy “industry”: its location and its relative (but tenuous) stability. The benefit of its geography is readily apparent: situated right at the intersection of the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden, Puntland straddles one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. More than 20,000 commercial vessels, or about 10 per cent of global shipping, transit through the Gulf of Aden each year.
Second, Puntland’s isolation from the ongoing civil war in the south as well as its semi-functioning government ensured that pirate organizers would be left in relative peace to plan and carry out their operations. Piracy is not so much organized crime as it is a business, characterized by extremely efficient capital flows, low start-up costs, and few entry barriers. Pirates, almost as much as businessmen, require