The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [5]
Contrary to the oft-recycled one-liners found in most news reports, Somalia is not a country in anarchy. Indeed, to even speak of Somalia as a uniform entity is a mischaracterization, because in the wake of the civil war the country has broken down into a number of autonomous enclaves. Founded in 1998 as a tribal sanctuary for the hundreds of thousands of Darod clanspeople fleeing massacres in the south, Puntland State of Somalia comprises approximately 1.3 million people, one-quarter to one-third of Somalia’s total land mass (depending on whom you talk to), and almost half of its coastline. Straddling the shipping bottleneck of the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, it was the natural candidate to become the epicentre of the recent outbreak of Somali piracy.
In writing this book, I had the difficult task of bringing a fresh perspective to a topic that continues to inundate the pages of news publications around the world. Pirates make good copy: there is something about them that animates the romantic imagination. But reports of daring hijackings in the international section of the newspaper are the print equivalents of the talking heads on the evening news; their polarizing effect may attract people to an issue, but they do not tell the whole story. Descriptions of hijackings are a black-and-white sketch that I intend to render in colour.
The Pirates of Somalia is about the pirates’ lives both inside and outside of attack skiffs: how they spend their money, their houses, the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the women they consort with, their drug of choice—in short, what makes them human beings, not simply the AK-47-toting thugs who appear in feature articles. Of course, this book is also about what they do—the occupation that has made them the scourge of every major seafaring nation. Over the course of my visits to Puntland, from January to March and June to July of 2009—as well as subsequent trips to London, Romania, Nairobi, and Mombasa—I spoke not only to pirates, but also to government officials, former hostages, scholars, soldiers, and jailors. Through this panorama of perspectives, I hope to tell the full story of the most nefarious of modern-day buccaneers—the pirates of Puntland.
1
Boyah
BOYAH IS A PIRATE.
He was one of the “old boys,” an original pirate, quietly pursuing his trade in the waters of his coastal hometown of Eyl years before it galvanized the world’s imagination as an infamous pirate haven in mid-2008. Abdullahi Abshir, known as Boyah—who claimed to have hijacked more than twenty-five ships—looked down on the recent poseurs, the headline-grabbers who had bathed in the international media spotlight, and it showed; he exuded a self-assured superiority.
It had taken five days to arrange this meeting. Pirates are hard to track down, constantly moving around and changing phone numbers, and are generally not reachable before twelve or one in the afternoon. Days earlier, frustrated and eager to begin interviewing, I had naively suggested approaching some suspected pirates on the streets of Garowe. Habitually munching on narcotic leaves of khat, they are easy enough to spot, their gleaming Toyota four-wheel-drives slicing paths around beaten-up wheelbarrows and pushcarts on Garowe’s eroded streets. My Somali hosts laughed derisively, explaining that to do so would invite kidnapping, robbery, or, at the very least, unwanted surveillance. In Somalia, everything is done through connections, be they clan, family, or friend, and these networks are expansive and interminable; you have to know one another, and it seems sometimes that everyone does. Warsame,1 my guide and interpreter, had been on and off the phone for the better part of a week, attempting to coax his personal network into producing Boyah. Eventually it responded, and Boyah presented himself.
I was being taken to a mutually agreed meeting place in the passenger side of an aging white station wagon, cruising out of Garowe on the city’s sole paved road. Along this stretch, the concrete had endured remarkably well, with few of