The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [39]
Garaad’s tenuous justification sounded similar to the Roman emperor Caligula’s remark upon being told that he had executed the wrong man for a crime: “That one deserved it just as much.” Fishing companies and international shippers rarely share parent companies, but to Garaad, any ship he caught merited equal punishment.
Garaad’s vehement quest for maritime justice had recently brought him into the open arms of SomCan, which at the time still had four months remaining on its contract. “Yes, I will be part of [SomCan],” he said. “If the coast guard is going to stop people from doing illegal fishing, destroying the marine environment, and doing toxic dumping, then we will work with them.” In other words, having tried his hand at fishing and piracy, Garaad was looking for a shot at coast-guarding. “The reason I’m with SomCan now,” Garaad said, “is because they have special ships that are well-armed with proper guns—with anti-aircraft guns—and their ships are capable of getting close to the illegal fishers.” Pressed for specifics about his job description, he continued, “I will be training their marines, and providing them with information and intelligence.”
Given his adamant hatred of illegal fishing, Garaad was curiously unconcerned by the fact that his current partners had only recently been in the business of protecting the very foreign ships he vowed to hunt down. “The reason I joined them,” Garaad said, “is that they told me that they stopped those practices. If I see that they are still doing that, then we’ll have a problem.”
As a “reformed pirate,” Garaad hoped to be a kind of Hannibal Lecter of Puntland, helping the authorities hunt down the serial hijackers of the Gulf of Aden. But “reformed” might have been a premature descriptor, for Garaad was not about to give up his pirate activities just because he happened to be working as a coast guard. “The agreement I made is to help them fight against illegal fishing,” he said. “These days, I’m concentrating on illegal fishing ships. But I will still be doing my other operations on the side.”
The exact nature of Garaad’s coast-guarding aspirations seemed to vacillate. In one version, his aim was to serve SomCan in a capacity falling somewhere between naval school drill instructor and marine commando; in another, he would use his supposedly massive pirate empire as a paramilitary force to fight foreign fishing in Somali waters, with SomCan tagging along for the ride. His next statement appeared to support this latter interpretation. “SomCan is one of us now,” he said, “it is part of our organization.” Garaad would not give any more details of the terms of his agreement, other than to say that it would remain in effect as long as illegal fishers trawled Somali seas. Despite our lengthy exchange, it was impossible to say what he saw as his role in SomCan, and I was beginning to think he had little idea himself.
Hoping to clarify these ambiguities, I brought up the subject of Garaad’s employment during my meeting with the SomCan executives the following day. I quickly learned an interesting fact: Garaad was the cousin of SomCan co-owner Said Orey. “Yes,” said Orey, “we’ve been in contact with Garaad. As his relative, it is my duty to stop him from doing bad things.” Garaad’s role in the company, Orey was quick to emphasize, would be to work on board ship as a marine, “not as a coast guard trainer.”
Hiring a pirate to police coastal waters seemed like hiring a bank robber to guard the vault, and, in Garaad’s case, one who intended to keep robbing banks during his off-hours. Yet Garaad was not the only pirate SomCan was hoping to work with. What the company had in mind, Orey told me, was a kind of employment retraining program for pirates. “Let us first try and educate these young guys,” Orey said, “and if we succeed, then, whoever refuses to cooperate, maybe we can fight against them.” At SomCan’s behest, Garaad was using his influence to recruit as many pirates as possible into its ranks. According to Orey, many were already lining up to get fitted for uniforms.