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Ombaali leaned back in his chair and calmly replied, “Then we would have killed them all.”

* * *

The decision to kill, thankfully, was not in Ombaali’s hands, but in those of his fishermen bosses—the long-serving generals of the Central Committee, most of whom, years earlier, had begun the struggle against foreign incursions into their fishing waters. Since the foreign destruction of Somali fisheries is commonly cited as the impetus for piracy, it may be surprising to discover that fishing has never played much of a role in Somalia, either as a means of sustenance or as a sector in the formal economy.4 In fact, prior to the 1970s virtually no Somalis engaged in fishing as a livelihood, and it was traditionally viewed as a somewhat ignoble occupation.

Like any good Marxist dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre sought to re-engineer his country’s society and patterns of life. Aiming to reduce the population’s overreliance on livestock, Siad Barre attempted to alter cultural attitudes about the value of fish, even going so far as to broadcast daily educational jingles over the radio exhorting nomads to “eat fish and make profit from it.”5 Natural disaster afforded him a more direct means of getting his message across; following severe droughts in 1974 and 1986, Siad Barre forcibly resettled tens of thousands of nomads into coastal towns, which soon developed into fishing communities.

In 1999, in response to persistent complaints from these communities about foreign fishing, Puntland president Abdullahi Yusuf brought in the British private security firm Hart Security to supply coast guard services to the nascent state. Yusuf did not contract Hart directly, but instead used an umbrella organization of local businessmen, the rapidly formed Puntland International Development Corporation. One of these intermediaries was Khalif Isse Mudan, a hotel proprietor and major shareholder in Golis Telecom, Puntland’s largest mobile phone company. In February 2009, I met with Mudan in the office of the hotel he owned on the outskirts of Bossaso.

Working as partners, said Mudan, the Puntland government provided the coast guard’s single ship and weaponry, with Hart Security responsible for the selection and training of its marine force. For the task of patrolling the sixteen-hundred-kilometre coastline of Puntland, Hart was given one twenty-metre trawler and a multi-clan force of seventy local men, armed with two aging ZU-23 Soviet anti-aircraft guns—weaponry on a par with that which the more prudent foreign fishing trawlers had begun to carry.

Hart Security’s principal duty was to prevent illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing in Puntland waters, and its operations were funded by selling official government fishing licences, issued through the Puntland Ministry of Fisheries, Ports, and Marine Transport. The licensing revenues were collected by Hart and split almost evenly with the government, the latter taking a 51 per cent share. “They were like joint venture investors,” explained Mudan. For a fragile natural resource like the fisheries, a for-profit approach to licensing had obvious implications; the success of Hart’s operation was defined not by the tranquillity of the waters it patrolled, but by the profits it generated, which in turn depended on the number of licences issued. The Ministry of Fisheries lent only a thin veneer of lawfulness to the process, as it had no policy in place to regulate the issuing of licences—nor any reliable marine research on which to base such a policy.

Despite Hart’s support for foreign fishing companies, Mudan insisted that neither the firm nor its clients had entered into confrontations with local fishermen. “It was a very smooth operation,” he assured me. Only five or six licences had been sold to short-range trawlers, and these had strict restrictions that prevented them from coming in contact with locals. “The trawlers weren’t allowed to use very small-mesh nets,” said Mudan, “or to come within less than ten miles of the shore.”

According