The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [51]
Sycophancy aside, the security situation had improved since the days of the previous administration. President Hersi had discontinued the pay of the security forces and civil service in early 2008, a decision that unquestionably contributed to the rise of piracy towards the end of the year. When Farole took power in January 2009, he immediately reinstated civil payrolls and began to reorganize the Darawish, Puntland’s security forces. Even in the three-month interval between my first and second visits to the region, the improvements to security had been remarkable: soldiers positioned at regular checkpoints throughout the city checked every passing vehicle, tinted windows had been prohibited, and there had been a successful campaign to get guns off the streets. At night, security patrols swept through the city and the surrounding desert, combing them for pirates and weapons smugglers.
The change, based on the stories I had heard, had been monumental. Garowe in late 2008 had been, by all accounts, practically run by pirates, with opulent weddings attended by processions of 4×4s and khat-fuelled festivities a common sight. It was an assessment that Fod’Adde corroborated.
“Once they got the ransom money the pirates would come to Garowe,” he said. “Then they’d get drunk, start gunfights in the street, things like that. Things very much against our culture.”
On what did they spend their money? I asked.
“Ladies,” Fod’Adde instantly replied. “They ruin families by stealing women away from their husbands. The women can smell the money … A lot of the women come from Somaliland, Djibouti, and other places in Somalia, so they bring a lot of diseases.”
The view that outside women were somehow tainted—which seemed to be based solely on raw clan prejudice—was shared by many of Garowe’s leading citizens; at the beginning of Farole’s anti-piracy campaign, one cleric strongly warned his Friday congregation against the spread of HIV/AIDS in the community, as “prostitutes from everywhere” had been drawn to Puntland by the pirates’ money.4
Piracy, nonetheless, represented a massive injection of foreign exchange into the Puntland economy, and it was hard to imagine that there had been no positive trickle-down effects. Fod’Adde shook his head vigorously. “That money is haram [religiously forbidden],” he said. “As Muslims, we believe that money earned in that manner can never do any good … not for the economy or anything else. The moment they get it, they waste it on women, drugs, khat … haram money never stays in one’s pocket for long.”
Nor could the new houses springing up atop the carcass of the former airport, providing a boost to Garowe’s already booming construction industry, convince him that pirate dollars would bring any benefits. “The pirates had all this money, but no experience with business,” he said. “So they pay the workers five hundred dollars per day, when normally they might be paid fifty. And so the workers themselves start chewing khat all the time, and they get used to the high pay and now are no longer happy to take regular jobs. You know, the more money you get paid, the lazier you get.”
In any case, said Fod’Adde, the reports of pirate construction sprees had been grossly overstated. “That’s not the way that most of them spend their money,” he said. “I’d say that only one in a hundred actually builds a house. As for the houses that they do build, they can’t rent them and no one buys them, because they’re haram. So the pirates are stuck with them.”
At this point, my interpreter Omar could not resist interrupting with his own anecdote. “Even the cars they buy are haram,” he said. “If we see one driving by, my dad says, ‘Don’t buy that one. It’s a haram car … a pirate car.’ ”
As proof of the curse of pirate cash, Fod