The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [34]
A few days later, over lunch at the house of a mutual friend, I asked Director General Joaar about the ministry’s renewed interest in the licence-printing business. “Yes, we started selling licences again—with the permission of the president—for forty-five-day periods,” he admitted. “But only six have been sold so far.”
When I brought up SomCan’s contractual right to almost half the revenue from the licences, Joaar waved his hand dismissively.
“Said Orey is himself a pirate,” he declared. “Our office still hasn’t received a copy of that contract. It was a deal that was completely under the table.”
SomCan and the Ministry of Fisheries butted heads for a second time towards the end of May, after the company attacked and arrested three more foreign fishing vessels in the vicinity of Bargaal. These vessels, according to Orey, were entirely different from the two arrested in the March incident, but Joaar insisted that two of the three were the exact same ships SomCan had erroneously captured two months earlier. “This time, I told them: ‘If you think you can capture those ships, go ahead and try—because they have security on board,’ ” said Joaar. This security had been provided by the Puntland government after the vessel’s previous run-in with SomCan, as Joaar freely admitted. “If we give them licences,” he explained, “we are responsible for what happens to them.”
The SomCan patrol ship had nonetheless confronted the vessels, and, after they refused to surrender, opened fire. Responding to the fishing vessels’ distress calls, the Spanish warship Numancia, the flagship of the European Union fleet, arrived and attempted to mediate the situation. After receiving confirmation from unidentified onshore ministry officials—relayed through the Numancia—that the ships were legally licensed, SomCan disengaged and left the scene. Following the episode, Orey told me, he received a personal rebuke from the office of the president.
At best, these incidents revealed a buffoonish lack of coordination between the Puntland government and its supposed official coast guard; at worst, an endemic state of venality and double-dealing within the Puntland Ministry of Fisheries that had been granted President Farole’s blessing. In any case, the ministry’s—and Joaar’s—antipathy towards SomCan seemed somewhat self-defeating: without a coast guard backing it up, one wonders why any foreign fishing vessel would ever bother to buy a Puntland licence. But the potential loss of revenue did not seem to dampen Joaar’s sense of triumph over his adversaries.
“SomCan is finished,” he said, wiping his hands together. “No more.”
* * *
SomCan’s demise, however, did not bring an end to the Puntland government’s dalliances with private security contractors. In November 2010, Puntland entered into a deal with Saracen International, a South African private security firm with no clear address, to “train and mentor” a “Puntland Marine Force.”12 Even by the standards of the murky Hart and SomCan deals, Puntland’s agreement with Saracen had all the transparency of a muddy lake. The firm—whose Ugandan subsidiary has been fingered by the UN Security Council for training rebel paramilitary forces in the Congo—is headed by Lafras Lutingh, a former officer in the Civil Cooperation Bureau, a notorious apartheid-era internal security force.13 Several months after the announcement of the Puntland deal, Saracen was revealed to be covertly backed by Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater (now Xe Services), the much-maligned military contractor implicated in the 2007 deaths of fourteen Iraqi civilians. Saracen is currently in the process of training a one-thousand-strong anti-piracy militia in Puntland, equipped with 120 pickup trucks, four armoured vehicles, and six patrol aircraft.14 The funding for this ambitious program, Somali officials initially announced, would come from an unnamed Middle Eastern country (later revealed to be the United Arab Emirates) with a vested commercial