The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [62]
Tragically, those who smuggle them often do not complete the job, forcing migrants into the water kilometres from shore in order to avoid Yemeni coastal patrols; according to the UN’s Mixed Migration Task Force, 1–7 per cent of those making the journey from 2007 to 2009 died in the attempt.1 Pirate groups, other UN agencies have claimed, are directly involved in human trafficking. It makes sense: pirates already use Yemeni ports to obtain smuggled weapons, and pirate organizations could use their equipment and smuggling networks to achieve a perverse economy of scale by bridging the piracy and human smuggling “industries.”
Momman agreed, but made it clear that his generation had never been involved in such activities. “The pirates operating now are definitely doing that,” he said, “but it wasn’t going on earlier.” According to him, the going rate for a trip to Yemen was $200 for a spot in a “small boat”—holding about thirty people—and $100 for a place in a more crowded “big boat”—one carrying eighty to a hundred people. The business had a dual purpose that went beyond the money: the pirates, said Momman, used the migrants as a cover to conceal their activities from both the Puntland government and international naval forces. Unlike piracy, transporting people is not a crime, at least until an attempt is made to enter a foreign state illegally.
“They don’t want the government to see that they are pirates,” he explained. “They drop off [the migrants] and then go about their pirating.” The idea was not completely far-fetched. During President Farole’s impromptu raid on pirates in the village of Marero, his soldiers captured documents conclusively linking the gang to human smuggling.
Whether pirate gangs are amongst the many smuggling groups guilty of murdering their charges is unknown. But Momman doubted it: “They always deliver the people on time.”
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The desire to trace the poorly marked money trail always led my interviews to one central question: How do pirates spend their cash? Judging from Momman’s response, it was the wrong question to ask.
“I told you before,” he said, “this house is not mine, it’s my wife’s. I never used any piracy money to live on—it’s haram to do so. We used that money to fund new pirate operations and to buy weapons. That’s all. We don’t build houses with it.” Indeed, the like-minded devotion by other pirate headmen to continual capital reinvestment had allowed piracy to develop into a self-sustaining industry.
The fleeting Somali dusk had come and gone, and the strips of sky poking through the bars of the windows were now a deep navy blue. Colonel Omar roused himself from the couch and headed off to meet some visiting Kenyan documentary makers being hosted by the Farole family. The hours of continual chewing had taken their toll on me: gut rot was gnawing at my stomach lining and an indefinable pain was pounding my brain, but my body was taut with nervous energy, my jaw clenched. Omar and I were also scheduled to meet with the Colonel’s Kenyan journalists, and his phone chimed every few minutes with the Colonel’s insistent reminders. After about the seventh call within a quarter hour, I decided that the interview had reached its natural conclusion.
I picked up my half-finished bundle of khat and tossed it gently into Momman’s dwindling pile. He protested; take it, please, I said, and he accepted.
Throughout the interview, Mohamed and Abdirahman had been content to let Momman act as their mouthpiece, perhaps because their own mouths had been too jammed with khat leaves to be of any service to them. As I was about to leave, Mohamed, who up until now had been fairly reticent, timidly requested permission to ask me a question: What, he hesitantly inquired, do people in the West think about pirates? “They think about people with eye patches,” I replied, wondering in what mangled form my meaning would reach Mohamed’s brain. The romantic stereotype of the swashbuckling pirate was so foreign to the Somalis