The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [19]
The four-year delay between the drought and tsunami and the outbreak of piracy makes it difficult to finger them as immediate causes. But these environmental factors undoubtedly exacerbated the general level of poverty and suffering in Puntland, increasing the pool of candidates for pirate recruiters.17
Puntland’s declining economy also provided an additional incentive to turn to turn to piracy. From 2006 to 2008, the region experienced unbridled hyperinflation that drastically reduced the standard of living of the average citizen. Puntland still uses the shilling, the currency of the defunct Somali Republic, though only the highest denominations of five hundred and one thousand shillings remain in use (the latter bill is worth approximately three cents). While US dollars are used for larger transactions, shillings remain the staple choice for everyday purchases, and are typically exchanged in bundles of 100,000.
From a high of 14,000 shillings per US dollar in 2006, by August 2008 the exchange rate had fallen to a record low of 35,000 per dollar.18 In Garowe, Bossaso, Qardho, and Galkayo, protesters filled the streets to express their anger over the rising price of goods, blocking roads and pelting government buildings with stones. General Hersi’s administration responded with a desperate attempt to fix an exchange rate of 18,000 shillings per dollar, a measure that even a totalitarian state would have found difficult to enforce.
Counterfeiting was a problem I noticed almost immediately upon my arrival in Puntland. For a currency that had not been minted in almost two decades, it was astounding how many crisp thousand-shilling notes proclaimed “Mogadishu 1991” in unfaded orange ink. Indeed, nineteen out of twenty local bills looked as if they had been printed by a cheap photocopier. It was not until early 2009, when local sheikhs launched a campaign to dissuade the organizers of counterfeiting operations, that hyperinflation began to come under control; by March, the exchange rate had stabilized at 29,000 shillings per dollar.19
Puntland’s economic woes were mirrored by the decline of its political institutions. As hyperinflation escalated, the salary of a regular soldier in the Darawish (the Puntland army) dropped almost threefold in real terms, from more than seventy dollars in 2006 to less than thirty dollars in 2008.20 President Hersi continued to pay his forces in printed money until, in April 2008, he stopped paying them altogether. As mentioned above, many soldiers and policemen abandoned their positions and turned to piracy; a local crime wave ensued, and May saw the first increase in pirate attacks, a trend that took off following the end of the monsoon season in August.21
Prior to the discontinuation of its pay, the Darawish had already been depleted in raw numbers. When Puntland strongman Abdullahi Yusuf had accepted the post of president of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in 2004, he took about a thousand Puntland soldiers (out of an estimated five thousand) south to Mogadishu to serve as his personal militia, funded out of government revenue.22 With this weakening of the security forces, the Puntland government’s ability to project its power throughout its territory declined. “Puntland’s capacity to investigate piracy onshore, always weak, had totally collapsed,” writes Stig Hansen.23
Following Puntland’s military decline, its always-tense relationship with its western neighbour, Somaliland, worsened precipitously; in October 2007, Somaliland forces invaded Puntland and captured the town of Las Anod, capital of the disputed Sool region. Though this invasion was not in itself a direct contributor to the piracy outbreak, it was indicative of the Puntland government’s loss of control. Rival clans to the Osman Mahamoud-dominated administration, such as the Isse Mahamoud, began to assert their independence from the central government, and