The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [63]
As I got up to depart, blood rushing into my numbed legs, I asked permission to take a photo of Momman and his two colleagues. Maya, no, he said, waving away my camera. I reminded him that I had videotaped Momman, Boyah, and the other pirates during our recent khat picnic together. “I couldn’t do anything about that,” he answered. “Here, I can.”
Memory would have to suffice. My last image of Momman, as his wife led us out the door, was of him reclining against a bolster, teacup in one hand, khat stalk in the other, staring pensively into the carpet.
9
The Policemen of the Sea
MOMMAN’S ANIMOSITY TOWARDS THE INTERNATIONAL NAVAL coalitions policing Somali waters was shared by many of his peers. Boyah, for one, still spoke with anger about the six men he lost, plucked into the sky by French navy helicopters and transported half a world away to face eventual trial in a Parisian courthouse. Yet he was quick to express his contempt for the international naval forces. “Sometimes, we capture vessels when warships are right around us,” Boyah had told me during our first meeting. “We don’t care about them. They’re not going to stop us.”
Though it is tempting to write off Boyah’s remarks as empty bluster, the facts are harder to dismiss: the deployment of three multinational naval task forces beginning in late 2008 has done little to halt pirate attacks. Conversely, from 2008 to 2010 the number of hijackings continued to rise, and the trend had not abated as this book went to press.
When the Somali pirates exploded onto the scene following the end of the summer monsoon season in 2008, the world was caught unprepared. The only naval presence in the region was Combined Task Force 150 (CTF-150), a multinational coalition built around the US Fifth Fleet whose primary function was counter-terrorism. Following the sharp increase in the pirate threat, counter-piracy was hastily tacked onto CTF-150’s mandate, though clearly only as a stopgap solution.
In October 2008, NATO finally announced plans to deploy a seven-warship task force by the year’s end. Two months later, the European Union added its own flotilla to Somalia’s increasingly congested waterways, EU Naval Force Somalia (EUNAVFOR, also designated “Atalanta”). And in January 2009, the United States proclaimed the creation of Combined Task Force 151 (CTF-151), a multinational fleet tasked with taking over counter-piracy operations from CTF-150. Independently operating navies from countries as diverse as China, India, Iran, Russia, and Malaysia also joined the fray, with the clear priority of defending their own nationals and flag vessels. As individual warships have come and gone at the behest of their home governments, the combined strength of the international coalition has varied between twenty-five and forty vessels, at an estimated annual cost of $1–$1.5 billion.
For many countries, the piracy crisis provided an ideal opportunity to flex naval muscles: Operation Atalanta was the very first maritime mission under the EU flag, China’s deployment of three warships was its first overseas mission since 1949, and Germany’s and Japan’s respective contributions to Atalanta and CTF-151 exemplified the two nations’ gradual movement away from five decades of dogmatic pacifism. The Somali pirates seemed to be an enemy that the whole world could agree on.
Yet these three fleets, the collective product of an unprecedented level of international naval cooperation, have been unable to stop a motley assortment of half-starved brigands armed with aging assault rifles and the odd grenade launcher. Many find it incomprehensible that, despite bristling with state-of-the-art weaponry and detection systems, Western warships have allowed the pirates to continue to hijack ships with seeming impunity.
Such an attitude fails to appreciate the sheer size of the area that international forces must cover. From the time the crew of a targeted vessel spots the oncoming hijackers and sends out a distress