The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [77]
“The way I look at it, it was a blessing in disguise,” said Kireri. “Since I took over in 2006, nothing had been done to improve the conditions here until UNODC came in. Since then, the prisoners have been given blankets and mattresses, our kitchen has been upgraded, the prison has been painted, and there have been improvements to the water and sewage systems. Before, I didn’t even have a computer,” she said, pointing to her glossy new desktop monitor and laughing. “This came with the program.” Her prison was not the only beneficiary of the UNODC’s largesse, she said; its mandate included improvements to the entire justice system, including the police and courts.
Kireri admitted that she enjoyed some other perks that had come with the media spotlight, including the chance to give a personal tour to Hollywood celebrity Nicolas Cage, who had visited the prison the previous month, ostensibly to draw attention to the problem of Somali piracy. “He was so nice, and such a humble man,” she said. “He was very impressed with our prison.” Cage’s five-minute meet-and-greet with the remanded pirates, media cameras in tow, had played out in the familiar pattern. “They told him they were fishermen,” said Kireri, pausing to recollect. “Yes, that was their story.”
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If there was a man likely to believe these tales of innocence, it was pirate defender Oruko Nyawinda, a suavely attired Kenyan attorney currently representing sixteen of Shimo La Tewa’s hapless denizens. Perched behind the desk in his deserted office in downtown Mombasa, two days before Christmas, Nyawinda launched into an impassioned defence of his clients worthy of a crowded courtroom. “Our constitution is very clear,” he declared. “If a person is charged with a bailable offence, that person must be given bail and bond.” As piracy is a bailable offence in Kenya, he said, there was no reason that he should have to visit his clients behind bars. “They are actually serving a sentence while being tried,” he said. “To me, denying them bail is an abuse of their human rights.”
Their right to a state-appointed counsel had also been violated, according to Nyawinda. Despite EU funding, the windfall from the UNODC program had all blown in one direction, he said: towards the prosecutors, the prisons, and the attorney general’s office. He and his fellow defence lawyers were receiving payment neither from the state nor from UNODC, and Nyawinda had been forced to lean on his destitute clients to raise funds. “They told me that to get money they had to send word home for goats and sheep to be sold,” he said. “We had to talk to the Red Cross, who sent their people into Somalia and finally tracked down some of their parents. In the end, I received a small payment.”
This service was not performed out of a concern for Nyawinda’s bank balance. The International Committee of the Red Cross had been saddled with the thankless task of tracking down the relatives of every pirate in Kenyan custody—even, as was often the case, when the pirates themselves were unable to point out their homes on a map.
In addition to the cost of the pirates’ defence, said Nyawinda, the EU had promised to fund new courts and new prisons to handle the pirate influx, none of which had materialized. And he said the EU had failed to take into account a plethora of future costs: “Not every suspected pirate brought here is guilty, so we can expect some of them to be acquitted and set free. The question is, who will finance their going home? Who will finance their temporary stay before they go home? Or do we give them homes here?”
But whether the majority of suspects were guilty or innocent was beside the point, Nyawinda argued. Piracy, he said, had become a full-time criminal enterprise—but instead of targeting the heads of the cartel, the police were going after the street dealers. “You hear every day about the millions being paid out [as ransoms],” he said. “The question is, are these wretched ones being brought to court the ones receiving