The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [49]
We continued chewing our khat as the sky grew dark, faces fading into the twilight until only the glowing points of cigarettes marked their locations. Abruptly, the Colonel roused himself from his nearby reverie and declared that the time had come to leave—the heightened risk of kidnapping made my presence a security liability at nighttime, even at a location as remote and isolated as this farm.
As we rolled up the dirins and collected our garbage—to be dumped by the side of the main road—Boyah admonished me to tell the story of him and his men exactly as they had given it to me. “Something good has to come back to us from all of this,” he said.
By the time we had pulled back onto the road it was fully dark. The white outline of the pirates’ Mark II station wagon was visible ahead of us, growing closer as Omar gunned our Land Cruiser towards it. The needle on the speedometer pushed past 140 kilometres per hour before we overtook the Mark II, passing it with a few fist-widths to spare. If this was the typical driving style on this unlit, steeply embanked roadway, the stripped chassis and blackened wrecks I routinely saw by the side of the road needed no explanation. We left the Mark II behind as we barrelled towards the lights of Garowe.
7
The Land of Punt
IT WAS JUNE, AND GAROWE WAS IN THE MIDST OF THE HAGAA, the second of Puntland’s two dry seasons. It had been a month since rain last fell, and it would be three months before the next rain would come. The bridge over the Nugaal River spanned a vast, rocky emptiness; further down its course, the last vestiges of the wet season had dried to isolated, listless pools. In the evenings, the haunting refrains of Allahu akbar drifted from the muezzins over a ruddy landscape strewn with rusted cans, broken glass, and camel tracks. Garbage carpeted the streets; at an improvised dump at the outskirts of town, thousands of plastic bags caught in thorny shrubs formed a vast artificial garden.
Since the collapse of the central state, the city has sprawled outwards, unchecked; over the last two decades Garowe’s population has multiplied eightfold, swelled by the influx of Darod clanspeople fleeing the violence in the south. Virtually ignored under the dictatorship of Mohamed Siad Barre, the returning migrants inherited no infrastructure, financial base, or skilled bureaucracy, and were forced to build a functioning polity out of an empty desert.
With a paltry $20 million annual budget that often fails to include items as basic as civil service salaries, it comes as no surprise that Puntland officials at all levels have been accused of systematically accepting bribes and payouts from pirate gangs in exchange for turning a blind eye. My own impression, however, was that there were few local officials actually worth bribing. State power was extremely decentralized and diffuse, and the military forces were highly immobile and mostly confined to garrisons in the large cities. In the smaller towns the government had virtually no presence, and certainly no armed force capable of matching firepower with even the smallest of pirate gangs.
Yet, in spite of the logistical difficulties it faces—not to mention the suspicions about its own complicity—the Puntland government appears bent on proving to the world that it alone is capable of neutralizing the pirates on land.
* * *
Officially, the government of Puntland has advocated a strict policy of non-negotiation with pirates since the very beginning of the crisis. Former president Mohamud Muse Hersi, though himself accused of receiving ransom kickbacks, blamed the piracy problem on the willingness of international shippers to accede to the hijackers’ demands. “Can you reward a thief who mugged you?” said Hersi in an interview. “This money makes them stronger and encourages