The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [20]
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The history of Somali piracy has been, one might say, a tale of two cities: Eyl and Harardheere. Like the Paris and London Dickens wrote of, the towns were hotbeds of revolutionary sentiment, seething against oppression and injustice. In Eyl, a band of angry young twentysomethings headed by Boyah and Garaad Mohammed formed the simmering nucleus that developed into the modern Somali piracy movement. “Boyah was a pioneer,” one local journalist told me. “He showed the others the real potential of piracy.”
Puntland’s semi-lawless status made the region an ideal training ground and business environment for the early pirates; relatively peaceful, it was free of the organized criminal gangs, Islamist groups, and covetous warlords that plagued the turbulent south. From 2005 to early 2009, as the central government disintegrated under increasing economic and political pressures, pirate groups gained the freedom to operate with complete openness and virtual impunity.
Yet much of the early history of Somali piracy is still clouded in obscurity. With few outside observers present on the ground, little reliable information about the country is available to academics and journalists, and many past (and present) pirate attacks go unreported by shipowners. This dearth of credible information has created an opening for conjecture and speculation, with the result that, as with the buccaneers of yesteryear, a number of present-day myths about the Somali pirates have already sprung up.
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Pirate Lore
EDWARD TEACH (OR BLACKBEARD, AS HE IS MORE COMMONLY known) was reported to have tied sulphur fuses into his beard, which he would set alight before going into battle in order to give himself the appearance of the devil. It is said he liked to drink a burning mixture of gunpowder and rum, and that, after he was killed and decapitated by the Royal Navy, his skull was fashioned into a silver chalice. Another legend holds that the Barbary corsair Barbarossa (“Red Beard”), Blackbeard’s North African predecessor, tortured the inhabitants of a small Greek island in order to discover the location of a town concealed by a precipitous gorge. As the bloodthirsty pirates descended upon the town, mothers threw their children over the edge of the cliff in order to save them from being sold into slavery.
Passed down through the centuries, such tales are probably as apocryphal as the stories of buried treasure, peg legs, and Jolly Roger flags, yet they have become part of our collective image of the swashbuckling buccaneer. Somalia’s modern sea bandits may lack some of this colour, but, aided by the news media’s inexorable search for a good yarn, they are already on their way to amassing their own canon of folklore.
MYTH #1: SOMALI WATERS ARE TEEMING WITH PIRATES.
In recent years, information technology has made twenty-four-hour-a-day news coverage a reality, with the unintended result of making the world seem much riskier than it is. Given the international media focus on every daring hijacking off the Somali coast, sailing through “Pirate Alley”—the shipping lane from the Indian Ocean through the Gulf of Aden—may appear as dangerous as a seventeenth-century trip across the Spanish Main in a gold-laden galleon. But before you abandon your plans for a career in the merchant marine, ask yourself, What are the actual chances of being hijacked by Somali pirates? When you switch off the six o’clock news and examine the numbers, they turn out not to be very high. In 2008, about twenty-four thousand commercial transits through the Gulf of Aden led to only forty-two successful hijackings, according to the International Maritime Bureau, a global body devoted to combating maritime crime.1 In short, the average sailor faced less than a 1 in 550 chance (0.17 per cent) of being taken hostage on a given voyage—not all that much worse than the effectively 0 per cent chance on any other sea route in the world.
Of course, for some this figure will be significantly