The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [76]
Following the Kenyan parliament’s elimination of the legal hurdles, the pirates have come sweeping off the Indian Ocean like the monsoon winds. After being handed over to Kenyan authorities they are transferred to Mombasa’s colonial-era Shimo La Tewa prison, an institution whose living environment was condemned in 1995 by local journalist Mutonya Njunguna as “belonging to a horror film,” with thirty-five hundred inmates forced to sleep on the floor in sweltering and unhygienic conditions.14 Perhaps the criticism had an effect, because Shimo is now touted by the Kenyan prison service as one of the most progressive and modern prisons in the country.
As of my visit, 107 suspected pirates were awaiting trial in Shimo, and the number is certain to increase faster than Kenya’s beleaguered legal system can process their cases. Shimo’s indefatigable warden, Wanini Kireri, embraced the challenge despite her limited resources. Built for a thousand-prisoner capacity, her maximum-security facility was crammed with twice that number, and the added responsibility of becoming the world’s foremost pirate warden came as a shock.
“I wake up one evening and they tell me that I have fifty pirates to take care of,” she said from across her office desk. “I didn’t know what to do. There were security issues, questions on how to treat them—whether we should mix them with the Kenyan prisoners, how we were going to communicate with them, and so on. We didn’t know how to handle them at first. There was a lot of talk from different quarters, about whether Kenya should really be taking the Somalis, if our prison conditions were good enough for them,” she added.
The culture shock, said Kireri, went both ways. “At first, we saw a lot of anger from [the Somalis],” she said. “They said, ‘We’ve done nothing to wrong the Kenyans, so why are we here?’ ” Many, according to Kireri, had wished to face trial in the home countries of the ships that captured them—a demand entirely justified under the SUA Convention. “By six months, they had settled in,” she said. In the end, Kireri decided to give the pirates their own prison block, with a few Kenyans mixed in to fill up the remaining space. Despite their cultural differences, conflicts with the Kenyan inmates were rare—though friendly competition abounded.
“They love football,” she said. “The pirates have a team, and the Kenyans have a team, and they play against each other.” Temporarily discarding the neutrality required of a prison warden, Kireri had no problem letting me know where her loyalties lay. “They can’t beat the Kenyans,” she said, laughing. “The Kenyans have been playing football for years, while the pirates say that they have been at sea, so they haven’t had much time to practice.”
Although the Kenyan authorities lacked the ability to notify most of the prisoners’ relatives of their situation (or even locate them), the populous Somali community in Kenya ensured that the pirates received visits from their countrymen every weekend, though not always from members of their own families. “Even when there are only one or two people visiting, they’ll bring things like soap and clothes for all the Somali prisoners,” Kireri said. “I don’t know if they’re all cousins, or they just behave like they are.” Through this close-knit network, she figured, her prisoners were able to send messages that would eventually find their way back to their relatives in Somalia.
Though accommodating her Somali charges had been difficult at times, the extra work had brought its rewards. As partial compensation for the Kenyan government’s willingness to serve as a dumping ground for the world’s piracy problem, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) stepped in with a $12 million EU-funded counter-piracy