The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [56]
Despite Bryden’s claimed plethora of unnamed sources, there has only been one publicly documented case of a Puntland official, Omar Shafdero, being directly involved in piracy. Shafdero, an employee at the Ministry of Finance and a relative of former president Hersi, was arrested in February 2008 and accused of links to the gang responsible for hijacking the Russian tugboat Svitzer Korsakov.9 Shafdero spent a short time in custody before being mysteriously released, after which he fled into exile in Somaliland.
But pirate cash, argued Bryden, had been particularly instrumental in funding political candidacies in the run-up to the 2009 presidential election. According to the UN Monitoring Group report, a prominent pirate leader, Fu’ad Warsame Hanaano, “had contributed over $200,000” to the election campaign of Farole’s foremost opponent (and now interior minister), General Abdullahi Ilkajir—a member of Hanaano’s sub-clan, the Warsangali. Farole, the report contends, “benefitted from much larger contributions to his political war chest.”10 During the pre-election period, Bryden claimed, “There was a lot of excitement, a lot of money was changing hands and people didn’t worry too much about where it came from. Now, because of international scrutiny, the movement of money is quieter … people are much more cautious. But according to captive pirates, the payments to the administration are ongoing.”
The accusations surrounding President Farole have been fuelled, in part, by the fact that he is a native of Eyl and belongs to the Muse Isse, the same sub-clan as Boyah, Garaad, and many other Puntland-based pirates. This affiliation with Eyl, ironically, has also placed Farole in a much better position to tackle piracy than his predecessor, General Hersi, whose bumbling efforts to fight piracy were once related to me by a Puntland journalist colleague.
In early 2008, as Hersi—who belongs to the Osman Mahamoud sub-clan—continued to lose local support and credibility, Eyl was steadily establishing itself as Somalia’s forefront pirate base. Knowing that to enter Eyl with his Osman Mahamoud militiamen would initiate a bloodbath, Hersi appointed an Isse Mahamoud supporter, Mohamed Haji Adan, to the made-up position of “deputy police commander,” with instructions to bring Eyl under government control. On June 11, 2008, Haji travelled to Eyl with an escort of soldiers, leaving them on the outskirts of the town and sending an unarmed representative to demand a bribe from the pirates. The negotiations were brief; one of the pirate leaders asked Haji’s man how much he wanted and sent him back with a shopping bag filled with $20,000 in cash. Haji promptly vacated his esteemed position and fled to the city of Galkayo, where he spent the following days and nights chewing khat. He was officially sacked four months later.11
Despite being far more capable than Hersi of cracking down on Eyl, according to Bryden, Farole has so far made no effort to impose central authority on his hometown, and has yet to even make a visit since his election. “The reason for him not doing so,” Bryden wryly jibed, “is quite obvious.”
Yet, according to Puntland government insiders, Farole has established new leadership in Eyl, including a mayor and a police commander equipped with a fleet of technicals (armed flatbed trucks). Since late 2009, Eyl had all but lost its status as a pirate base, with ships hijacked by Puntland gangs being taken to the more southern (and isolated) port of Garacad. Whether the pirate exodus was a result of Farole’s leadership, or the general decline in the number of hijackings in the Gulf of Aden, is difficult to say for certain.
Bryden, for his part, was not convinced by the efforts of the Farole administration. “What’s alarming,” he said, “is how foreign governments have been duped into believing that Puntland is a real partner in anti-piracy, closing their eyes to the complicity.”
Under mounting international pressure, said Bryden, there had been