The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [52]
As I prepared to leave, Fod’Adde seamlessly resumed his earlier extolling of the present government’s efforts to combat piracy: “Some of the pirates have been killed, some have no money left, and some have gone overseas. But we’re always looking around for them, and if we catch any we send them to the prison in Bossaso.
“We don’t even see them anymore. We ask ourselves, were they ghosts or human beings?” he said, laughing.
* * *
Bossaso prison lies a kilometre down a bumpy path jutting off the main road at the southern outskirts of the city. The square fortress-like structure with outer walls of pale yellow stands alone in an empty expanse, with nothing in the vicinity but stony rubble and the distant outline of the Karkaar Mountains. At opposing corners of the building stand two monolithic guard towers, whose sentries shout out demands for identification from the occupants of any vehicle passing within range of their assault rifles. Like runway markers, lines of carefully placed stones trace out the correct approach vector to the prison’s imposing blue gateway.
Built with UN Development Programme money, this is one of two prisons serving a population of 1.3 million; the other, 250 kilometres south in the town of Qardho, is not yet operational. (There are also two rundown jails, located in Garowe and Galkayo.) With an incarcerated population of about one person per 5,000 (in the United States, the figure is one in 120), the fact that Puntland is not overrun by criminal gangs might seem inexplicable. The simple answer is that clan law (heer), not the rule of law, rules in Puntland. The state-administered justice system is, in a way, a last recourse in the event that clan mechanisms of dispute resolution fail.5 Almost half the inmates of Bossaso prison are pirates, a consequence of the Puntland government’s desire to demonstrate to the international community that it is serious about cracking down on piracy. It is unclear, however, under which law the men were charged; Puntland is still technically operating under the decades-old criminal code of the defunct Somali Republic, which lacks specific provisions for criminalizing piracy. Though Puntland’s Islamic clerics have interpreted vague proscriptions in sharia law against the setting up of trade-disrupting “roadblocks” as applying to sea piracy, such an approach is hardly a substitute for a modern juridical process.
When I visited, Bossaso prison, meant for a capacity of 150, was jammed to the point of putrefaction with 275 ragged men. They were crammed into a half-dozen cells lining a central courtyard that doubled as an exercise yard. Beyond the chain-link fence surrounding the enclosure, the smell of urine saturated the July air. On the far side of the yard was the prison’s approximation of a mental health ward, an orange tarp spread over a few barrels, underneath which a solitary man was shackled to the ground by his ankle. The man introduced himself as Dr. Osman, a “human rights victim” who had once lived in Virginia. A few moments later, a prison administrator introduced Dr. Osman as “a madman” who had been jailed for his own good after falsely claiming to be an Al-Shabaab agent.
At mealtimes, guards spooned helpings of gruel into the prisoners’ cupped shirts, or, if they lacked an intact garment, directly into their hands. On alternating days, half the prison population was let out into the yard to exercise. The atmosphere I observed was reminiscent