The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [57]
Indeed, Farole has made rapprochement with the international community—and in particular the United States—the cornerstone of his foreign policy. In July 2009, Farole accepted an invitation from the US State Department to appear before the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs. In his speech, Farole proposed a four-point counter-piracy plan to be financed with US money, which included the establishment of a coastal task force operating out of bases situated in eight towns along the Puntland coastline. So far, this plan has not materialized.12
The UN Monitoring Group’s accusations elicited a predictably irate reaction from the Puntland government. In a press statement shortly after the release of the group’s March 2010 report, President Farole hit back, attacking the credibility of the report’s sources as well as Bryden himself. “The report’s authors used sources that include politicians who are opportunists or are opposed to Puntland’s self-development,” he said. “Even some of the report’s authors are politically motivated to discredit Puntland as a way of achieving another hidden goal.”13
This claim was not entirely hollow: Bryden has openly campaigned for the international recognition of Somaliland—with which Puntland has a hostile relationship—indicating a political stance that made him an unusual choice to head up a UN body. Nor was it the first time that Bryden, who has familial ties to Somaliland politicians, had been accused of partiality: the pro-Somaliland reports he issued while director of the International Crisis Group’s Africa Program in the mid-2000s earned him the criticism of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development states (Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda), while the Puntland government declared him a persona non grata. This order was still standing as of 2010; the group’s March report had been compiled without Bryden ever having set foot in Puntland.
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Though the Puntland government, as Bryden suggested, has become increasingly willing to pursue the pirates on land, enthusiasm alone may not be sufficient to offset its lack of capacity. With an annual budget in the range of $20 million, derived almost exclusively from Bossaso port taxes, the Puntland government cannot afford an effective police force, let alone a justice system capable of processing hundreds of suspected pirates.
With such meagre resources at his disposal, Puntland’s president can perhaps be better described as an inter-clan mediator than as the leader of a modern state. Even to fund basic state services, the president is routinely forced to beg for handouts from unconventional sources. Addressing an assembly of Bossaso businessmen at a dinner one evening, Farole appealed for donations to pay for a list of absurdly modest projects: replacing road signs, long ago stripped bare for the valuable metal; building a six-kilometre road from the livestock inspection station to the port; constructing a small hospital.
Given Puntland’s capacities, the counter-piracy potential of the local military forces is limited. The Darawish’s five to six thousand soldiers are garrisoned at Garowe, Bossaso, and Qardho—far from the locus of pirate activity—so any land operation against the pirates involves transporting troops hundreds of kilometres across roadless terrain. The logistical difficulties in deploying such a response make successful results extremely rare, and almost entirely dependent on timely local intelligence gathering.
One such operation occurred when I was with the president’s entourage