The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [55]
Some, predictably, have imputed more insidious motives to the Farole government’s unwillingness to prosecute past (and present) pirate kingpins, namely that the president himself has been receiving handouts from the very leaders he ostensibly condemns. Since his election, the accusations against Farole have ranged from complicity to profiteering, and even to direct involvement in piracy. My own affiliation with the president’s son, Mohamad Farole, has been cited as evidence in the mounting case against him; Mohamad’s presence at my meetings with pirates had been referenced in multiple online articles aimed at incriminating him, and, by extension, his father.
Some of the strongest indictments have come from the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia, in language surprisingly impolitic for a United Nations body. Warning that the new administration was “nudging Puntland in the direction of becoming a criminal state,” the group’s March 2010 report cited evidence from unnamed firsthand sources that “senior Puntland officials, including President Farole and members of his Cabinet, notably the Minister of the Interior, General Abdullahi Ahmed Jama ‘Ilkajir’ … and the Minister for Internal Security, General Abdillahi Sa’iid Samatar, have received proceeds from piracy and/or kidnapping.”7
Hoping to shed some light on these claims, I spoke with Matt Bryden, the monitoring group’s Nairobi-based coordinator. Though Bryden refused to reveal the group’s sources, he was adamant that there was little reason to doubt their credibility. “We had a wealth of evidence, both direct and indirect, from eyewitnesses to direct monetary transactions, to testimony from captured pirates themselves,” he said. “We saw signed statements from convicted pirates who did not appear to have been coerced and who stood by these statements when we interviewed them. We had sources who were in the room when cash was delivered, and sources party to telephone calls where cash payments were being discussed.”
During a videotaped interview with local news agency Garowe Online in late 2008, Boyah had claimed that 30 per cent of all ransom money went into the pockets of Puntland officials—a statistic he had denied to me multiple times since (possibly out of concern for embarrassing his newly powerful co-clansman, President Farole). It was a notion that Bryden endorsed. “Did [Boyah] pay 30 per cent to local leaders in Eyl? I would think not,” he said. “It is reasonable to assume that what Boyah was referring to was the payments he made to senior officials.”
In the West, a public official receiving money under such circumstances would be labelled corrupt. But in the Somali context, the label is not entirely appropriate. In Somalia, clan and politics are incestuously intertwined, and political life is based on loyalty to one’s clan, not the state apparatus. When, as is generally the case, one sub-clan—in essence an extended family—dominates the machinery of government, money changing hands between its members is considered no more illicit than an aunt looking after the children when their parents are away. “From the outside, it’s impossible to determine whether Boyah giving money to Farole would be an attempt to sweeten the administration, or simply a contribution to a not-so-distant kinsman,” explained Bryden.
On a personal level, these allegations came as a shock; it was difficult for me to accept that a man with whom I had shared a table on multiple occasions, a soft-spoken academic who seemed to have a sincere distaste for piracy, and whom I genuinely admired, could be guilty of such hypocrisy. The behaviour also seemed inconsistent with his political past; while serving as planning minister during the previous administration of Mohamud Hersi, Farole had resigned his post in protest over a shady oil deal that the president had entered into with the Australian firm Range Resources—a contract that