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By Root 823 0

to Mudan, Hart focused its patrols in the waters from Hafun to Hobyo, a stretch of about six hundred kilometres in which most illegal fishing occurred. But even this reduced range consisted of a length of coastline greater than that running from Boston to New York, which Hart patrolled with one lone ship. In order to facilitate this immense job, the company set up observation posts in towns along the coast, from which it received daily reports via high-frequency radio, informing its forces of any suspicious ships fishing in the vicinity.

Hart’s effectiveness was severely limited by the sheer territory its sole ship was tasked with patrolling. However, the company managed to arrest a number of foreign fishing vessels, most notably the Spanish fishing ship Alabacora Quatro, whose owner Hart successfully sued in a UK court, winning an undisclosed settlement.

Hart’s patrols rarely brought its ship into contact with any pirates; the company’s only significant encounter occurred in 2000, when the cargo vessel Mad Express was hijacked after experiencing technical problems near Bargaal. According to Hart chief Lord Richard Westbury, a former SAS officer, the pirates’ level of sophistication was far below what they have demonstrated in recent years. “Basically, the pirates jumped off the ship. One injured his ankle,” Westbury related in a January 2009 interview. “They certainly had no skills to operate in the way they are currently operating.”6

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Hart’s operations in Puntland continued until 2002, when the company was unwillingly squeezed out of the business by the sudden arrival of the Somali-Canadian Coast Guard (SomCan), a private security firm headed by a former Toronto taxi driver named Abdiweli Ali Taar. The circumstances under which SomCan ousted Hart were decidedly suspicious. After the Puntland presidential election of 2001, which resulted in the victory of challenger Jama Ali Jama, the incumbent Abdullahi Yusuf attempted to oust Jama in a military coup. During the ensuing civil conflict from 2001 to 2002, the Ali Taar family—who belonged to the same Omar Mahamoud sub-clan as Yusuf—supported the former warlord in his fight against Jama. When Yusuf prevailed, the Ali Taars began operations in Puntland’s waters. The brief civil war had also played itself out within the ranks of Hart’s multi-clan coast guard force, which split into opposing factions; when fighting broke out near Hart’s bases of operation, the firm packed up and set sail for the United Kingdom.7

A few days after speaking with Mudan, I met with two of SomCan’s top executives, Said Orey and Abdirahman Ali Taar (elder brother of Abdiweli), on the patio of the same hotel. Joining us was Captain Abdirashid Abdirahim Ishmael, the commander of SomCan’s marine forces.

Said Orey was quick to provide me with his no doubt partial explanation for Hart’s hurried exit from Somalia. “Hart Security failed in its task,” he claimed. “They weren’t interested in the job. Hart failed to bring in sufficient equipment to properly protect the coast, and so people wanted a local company to do the job.”

Though run by Somalis, the company did not represent much of a break from the past, being yet another private venture. SomCan seamlessly continued Hart’s coast guard fishing licence business model, on an even greater scale. During its glory days, from 2002 to 2005, SomCan boasted an armada of six patrol boats and a force of four hundred marines, and claimed to have identified and arrested a total of thirty illegal fishing vessels. During this period, the company was heavily involved in selling fishing permits, with a quarterly licence fetching about $50,000. These revenues were supposed to be channelled through the Ministry of Fisheries, but the company was alleged to have often bypassed the ministry and sold fishing licences directly to foreign concessions.

“Some licences were coming from the ministry,” Mudan had told me a few days earlier, “and some were issued by SomCan itself. I saw one of them, in Dubai. And it was not issued by the ministry; it was signed by Abdiweli