The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [41]
A social drug, khat is usually chewed for hours on end by groups of friends in picnic-like settings. Owing to its bitter taste, it is often accompanied by a special, heavily sugared tea or other sweet beverage, such as 7-Up. Once harvested, the plant retains its potency for only a short time and must be consumed fresh—the plant’s active chemical, cathinone, breaks down within forty-eight hours after its leaves have dried—a fact that explains its previous lack of international distribution. Shipments to Puntland are flown three times daily from Nairobi and Addis Ababa into Galkayo airport. As is often the case with products designated for export, the khat that finds its way into Garowe is reputed to be of the lowest quality.
One company, SOMEHT, is responsible for importing virtually all of Puntland’s khat, around seven thousand kilograms per day as of 2006.3 According to Fadumo—a Garowe khat merchant whom I interviewed—each plane is greeted at the airstrip by large numbers of independent distributors, who deploy a network of transports for the slow and bumpy 250-kilometre journey from Galkayo to Garowe. Such is the addiction inspired by this delectable plant that crowds of youth throw up improvised roadblocks composed of small rocks or metal drums at frequent intervals by the sides of the road. At these unofficial checkpoints the young men, often armed with Kalashnikovs, clamour for handouts of the shrub. The drivers are happy to mollify their dangerous fans, throwing offerings of khat out the window at the outstretched hands as they pass. On rare occasions, these self-appointed tax collectors become too persistent, and are shot at, and sometimes killed, by the security guards stationed atop the trucks. Nonetheless, the khat trade generates relatively little attendant violence; Fadumo had never heard of a shipment being hijacked.4
Once the transports arrive at the main checkpoint outside Garowe, individual merchants meet them and transfer the cargo to their own cars. Fadumo’s arrangements were informal; she tended to buy from a regular distributor, but would sometimes go to other suppliers for smaller amounts, or if her supplier was out of stock.
Though khat has long been a facet of Somali life, the last decade has seen imports into the country soar, and Puntland’s piracy explosion in late 2008 brought consumption levels onto a whole new plane. Outside of cars and khat, there is not much available in Puntland on which to spend tens of thousands of dollars, and pirates are famous for the almost religious fervour with which they chew the drug (though they seem to lack the corresponding devotion to Koranic study). So overblown is the pirates’ infatuation with khat that at times it approaches comical proportions; there are stories, from the early days of multimillion-dollar ransoms, of recently paid pirates rushing to the khat suq and spending their US hundred-dollar bills as if they were thousand-shilling notes (which are worth about three cents).
Even without this absurd level of reckless spending, the money disappears remarkably quickly. A successful pirate is expected to share his good fortune with his friends and relatives; the moment he steps off the ship, his money begins to diffuse through an endless kinship network, ending only when the last of the khat leaves have been chewed up and spit out.
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In its short-term effects, khat resembles its South American equivalent, the coca leaf, causing mild euphoria, heightened energy, garrulousness, and appetite loss. Another effect is the belief in one’s own invincibility, which many Somalis view as a factor contributing to the endemic conflict plaguing their country; like pirates, Somali militants are renowned for their rampant khat use, and the drug is thought to help fuel the violence (albeit to a lesser degree than in Liberia,