The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [61]
“The Americans, they are the nicest ones,” Momman said. “The rest of them just want to do their job—they don’t care who dies.”
Momman’s warm feelings towards the Americans had come from personal experience, like the time they responded to the SOS of a ship he had hijacked—the name of which Momman naturally refused to disclose. “About forty minutes after we boarded the ship, the Americans appeared and started shooting at us,” he said. Like Boyah, Momman could recall with surprising accuracy the designations of the warships hemming him in: B135, B132, 125, 128. “The numbers kept changing” as ships arrived and retreated, he said.
“The Americans were talking at us through the ship’s loudspeakers, but we just ignored them and moved the ship to Eyl. They were warning us to leave the ship within twenty-four hours, or they would attack,” he said, smiling. “Twenty-four hours later, they repeated the same message.”
Gunfire from the American ships raked the cliffs overlooking the beach at Eyl. “Then they shot at the fishing boats on the beach,” said Momman, “because they thought they were going to bring us supplies. They fired near to the boats as they tried to approach us from shore. They stopped them from bringing us food.” It was then, according to Momman, that the ship’s owners requested that the Americans back off, paving the way for a painless ransom negotiation.
Reminded of these glory days, Momman began to speak more freely of his past life, sounding almost nostalgic. “We used to take a lot of dry food with us, extra sugar, a little flour. Enough for seven days. We would cook on board,” he said.
“It was never that hard to climb up onto the deck—it depends on how high up the ship is, how fast it’s going, but usually it’s very easy. Personally, I’ve never seen the crew fighting back. Most people would go and lock themselves inside, some would come out with their hands out, saying, ‘What do you guys want?’ ”
And was the crew ever afraid?
“Definitely, they would freak out. But we tried to calm them down, saying, ‘We’re not going to hurt you if you take our orders.’ We would tell them, ‘You’ll be all right … we’re not here to kill you.’ We never had to kill anyone.”
Momman lamented that things had gotten much more dangerous since those days. Many of his former colleagues had disappeared without a trace in recent times. “Some of my friends are still missing,” he said. “About two months ago, some of them washed up dead on the coast, near Garacad,” presumably either drowned or killed by the international naval forces. “The families of the missing boys are really upset about it; they don’t know where they are or whether they’re dead or alive,” said Momman. “It’s starting to create a lot of anger. Who knows what their families will do.
“Also, some of these young boys have gotten twenty years in Bossaso jail,” he said. “That angers their families too, but at least when they are in Somalia they can go visit them.”
* * *
It is not only foreign navies that are responsible for dead Somalis in the surf, but possibly the pirates themselves. The stretch of the Gulf of Aden linking northern Somalia and Yemen is one of the world’s busiest human smuggling routes; often when travelling from Garowe to Bossaso, I would see dozens of Oromo migrants alongside the road, staffs in hand, walking the hundreds of kilometres from the highlands of Ethiopia to Bossaso under the burning sun. Many I later observed camped in huddles outside the Bossaso compound of the UN High Commission for Refugees, but many others