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By Root 861 0

to piracy since the onset of the civil war almost twenty years ago. In 1994, he still worked as an artisanal lobster diver in Eyl—“one of the best,” he said. Looking at his rakish figure, I believed him; it was easy to imagine his lanky form navigating the deepest oceanic crags in the reefs below. Since then, the lobster population off the coast of Eyl has been devastated by foreign fishing fleets—mostly Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean ships, Boyah said. Using steel-pronged drag fishing nets, these foreign trawlers did not bother with nimble explorations of the reefs: they uprooted them, netting the future livelihood of the nearby coastal people along with the day’s catch. Through their rapacious destruction of the reefs, foreign drag-fishers wiped out the lobster breeding grounds. Today, according to Boyah, there are no more lobsters to be found in the waters off Eyl.2

So he began to fish a different species, lashing out at those who could out-compete him on the ocean floor, but who were no match for him on its surface. From 1995 to 1997, Boyah and others captured three foreign fishing vessels, keeping the catch and ransoming the crew. By 1997, the foreign fishing fleets had become more challenging prey, entering into protection contracts with local warlords that made armed guards and anti-aircraft guns regular fixtures on the decks of their ships. So, like all successful hunters, Boyah and his men adapted to their changing environment, and began going after commercial shipping vessels. They soon attracted others to their cause.

“There are about five hundred pirates operating around Eyl. I am their chairman,” he said, claiming to head up a “Central Committee” composed of the bosses of thirty-five other groups. The position of chairman, however, did not imbue Boyah with the autocratic powers of a traditional gang leader. Rather, Eyl’s pirate groups functioned as a kind of loose confederation, in which Boyah was a key organizer, recruiter, financier, and mission commander. But would-be applicants for the position of pirate (Eyl Division) had to come to him, he claimed. The interview was not too gruelling—Boyah’s sole criteria for a recruit were that he own a gun and be “a hero, and accept death”—qualities that grace the CVs of many desperate local youth. Turnover in Boyah’s core group was low; when I asked if his men ever used their new-found wealth to leave Somalia, he laughed and shook his head.

“The only way they leave is when they die.” He smiled and added offhandedly that a member of his band had departed the previous night, dying in his sleep of undisclosed reasons. “You were supposed to meet him,” Boyah told me.

What makes for an attractive target? I asked. Boyah’s standards were not very exacting. He told me that he and his men did not discriminate, but would go after any ship hapless enough to wander into their sights. And despite their ostensible purpose of protecting Somali national waters, during the heat of the chase they paid no regard to international boundaries, pursuing their target until they caught it or it escaped them. Boyah separated his seafaring prey into the broad dichotomy of commercial and tourist ships. The commercial ships, identifiable by the cranes visible on their decks, were much slower and easier to capture. Boyah had gone after too many of these to remember: “a lot” was his most precise estimate.

He claimed to employ different tactics for different ships, but the basic strategy was crude in its simplicity. In attack groups spread amongst several small and speedy skiffs, Boyah and his men approached their target on all sides, swarming like a water-borne wolf pack. They brandished their weapons in an attempt to frighten the ship’s crew into stopping, and even fired into the air. If these scare tactics did not work, and if the target ship was capable of outperforming their outboard motors, the chase ended there. But if they managed to pull even with their target, they tossed hooked rope ladders onto the decks and boarded the ship. Instances of the crew fighting back were rare, and rarely