The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [32]
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After the dissolutions of Hart and SomCan in 2002 and 2005, respectively, their employees melted like a tide into the coastline. As Ombaali’s testimony suggests, some of them discovered that their nautical training had practical applications at the opposite end of the employment spectrum from law enforcement. In an October 2008 report by the British think tank Chatham House, Captain Colin Darch, skipper of the hijacked Russian tugboat Svitzer Korsakov, related that several of the vessel’s captors had previously belonged to the Puntland Coast Guard. “One pirate called Ahmed told us he had been in the coast guard,” he said, “and only Ahmed and one or two others who had also been coast guards understood our engines.” 11
The involvement of ex-Puntland Coast Guard marines in piracy is hardly surprising. The skills and experience possessed by former coast guards—trained to a European standard in sharpshooting, maritime navigation, and boarding and seizure operations—made them perfect employees for the new businesses springing up around the Gulf of Aden. The Somali pirates who burst onto the scene in 2007 and 2008 were organized to a level attested by the immediacy of their success, and by the millions of dollars that were literally airlifted their way. Long-range motherships and advanced navigation systems like GPS and radar made it possible for them to carry out deep-water operations. These technologies—as well as larger investments in fuel and weapons—extended the pirates’ attack radius hundreds of kilometres from the coast. During the extended hunting trips into the wilderness of international waters that characterized this new wave of pirates, a former coast guard’s knowledge of GPS systems, radar, and the more complex engines on board the motherships would be an invaluable asset.
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The peaceful election of Abdirahman Farole—a PhD candidate from Melbourne’s La Trobe University—in January 2009 was regarded as something of a landmark in Puntland politics; he was only the second civilian Somali leader, along with Somaliland founder Mohamed Egal, since the assassination of Somali Republic president Abdirashid Ali Shermarke in 1969. During his political campaign, Farole promised to get tough on piracy, a stance he has reiterated in media interviews since his election. Hoping to tease out the specifics of his plan, I spoke with him at the presidential compound in the centre of Garowe.
Farole, meaning “fused toes,” was a nickname that the president had inherited from his great-grandfather. In his mid-sixties, Farole was diminutive, but the intensity of his almost-feline eyes commanded an authority that his body did not; they seemed to swallow anyone meeting his gaze. The president was an erudite man, fluent in English, Arabic, and Italian, and his first sentence to me inaugurated a half-hour lecture on the history of Somalia’s current tribulations; finally, I managed to steer the conversation towards the topic of the Puntland Coast Guard.
“We are nowhere near being able to establish a functioning coast guard,” Farole began bluntly. “This force must be professionally trained and equipped with speedboats, telecommunications, and GPS technology, heavy weapons, and a continual supply of fuel,” he said, at a cost that the Puntland government was unable to shoulder. With his administration struggling to keep up with monthly army wages of $30, financing the monthly coast guard salary of $300 (a necessary wage, said the president, for a highly skilled job requiring long periods spent absent from families) for a hundreds-strong force would be impossible without international financial assistance.
“Money will also be needed to reward marines who successfully capture pirate vessels,” said Farole, adding that additional funds would be required to satisfy traditional Somali clan law, or heer, which requires compensation to be paid to the families of soldiers killed in action. Hearing the president speak, it was clear that