The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [8]
The captured ship was then steered to a friendly port—in Boyah’s case, Eyl—where guards and interpreters were brought from the shore to look after the hostages during the ransom negotiation. Once the ransom was secured—often routed through banks in London and Dubai and parachuted like a special-delivery care package directly onto the deck of the ship—it was split amongst all the concerned parties. Half the money went to the attackers, the men who actually captured the ship. A third went to the operation’s investors: those who fronted the money for the ships, fuel, tracking equipment, and weapons. The remaining sixth went to everyone else: the guards ferried from shore to watch over the hostage crew, the suppliers of food and water, the translators (occasionally high school students on their summer break), and even the poor and disabled in the local community, who received some as charity. Such largesse, Boyah told me, had made his merry band into Robin Hood figures amongst the residents of Eyl.
I asked Boyah where his men obtained the training to operate their ships and equipment.
“Their training,” he facetiously quipped, “has come from famine.” But this epigram, however pithy, did not contain the whole truth. Beginning in 1999, the government of Puntland had launched a series of ill-fated attempts to establish an (official) regional coast guard, efforts that each ended with the dissolution of the contracting company and the dismissal of its employees. The origin of the new generation of Somali pirates—better trained, more efficiently organized, and possessing superior equipment—can be traced in part to these failed coast-guarding experiments; with few other opportunities for their skills, many ex-coast-guard recruits turned to piracy. When pressed, Boyah confirmed that some of his own men had past histories in the Puntland Coast Guard, having joined his group after their salaries went unpaid.
Boyah’s testimony revealed another detail of the interwoven dynamic between pirates, coast guards, and fishermen. Far from being a neutral state actor, the Puntland Coast Guard of the late 1990s and early 2000s worked as a private militia for the protection of commercial trawlers in possession of “fishing licences”—informal documents arbitrarily sold by various government bureaucrats for personal profit. The Puntland Coast Guard thus further alienated local fishermen, and indeed escalated at times into open confrontation with them. Boyah recounted that in 2001 his men seized several fishing vessels “licensed” by then-president Abdullahi Yusuf and protected by his coast guard force. Almost a decade before the fierce acceleration in pirate hijackings hit the Gulf of Aden, the conditions for the coming storm were already recognizable.
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Boyah’s moral compass seemed to be divided between sea and shore; he warned me, half-jokingly, not to run into him in a boat, but, despite my earlier misgivings, assured me that he was quite harmless on land. “We’re not murderers,” he said. “We’ve never killed anyone, we just attack ships.”
He insisted that he knew what he was doing was wrong, and, as evidence of his sincerity, relayed how he had just appeared on the local news radio station, Radio Garowe, to call a temporary ceasefire on all pirate activity. Though I was sceptical that he wielded the authority necessary to enforce his decree amongst the wide range of decentralized groups operating over a coastline stretching almost sixteen hundred kilometres, Boyah stressed that the decision had been made by the Central Committee—and woe to those who defied its orders. “We will deal with them,” Boyah promised. “We will work with the government forces to capture them and bring them to jail.”
Subsequent events quickly proved that Boyah’s radio statement was just so