The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [90]
Once his attacking team was in place, Computer sent money from Garowe to Bossaso for the purchase of various supplies—boats, outboard motors, fuel, and food—as well as for the accommodations and entertainment of his men during this preparatory phase. In order to escape the scrutiny of the Bossaso police and their notoriously tough anti-pirate chief, Colonel Osman Hassan Afdalow, the gang made its way to a location a few hours’ off-road drive east of Bossaso—perhaps the village of Marero, a common launch site for pirates, as well as human traffickers.
Within a few days, Hersi said, on May 9 the attack group sighted the Victoria; following a forty-minute chase, she was boarded without a fight. “The first one to jump on the ship, his name was Abdi,” said Hersi. “Computer bought him a fifteen-thousand-dollar Land Cruiser as a gift.”
The bestowing of such gifts on the first to board a vessel—the piratical equivalent of what in more traditional workplaces would be called performance-linked bonuses—is commonplace in many pirate groups, and Land Cruisers are a typical choice. Such incentives must have arisen out of a need to encourage understandably hesitant pirates into climbing up metres of hull on flimsy ladders while carrying out the seaborne equivalent of a high-speed chase. According to Hersi, his cousins were the right type of people for the job.
“They’re suicidal,” he said. “As they are heading into the ocean, they say to themselves, ‘Either I capture a ship, or I die.’ One or the other. They say, ‘If I don’t get a Land Cruiser to drive in Garowe, it’s better to be dead.’ All of them, except for Computer and the interpreter, are between eighteen and twenty-five years old. This is their mentality.”
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Like most eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds, Hersi’s cousins enjoyed experimenting with mind-altering substances, alcohol included. “When they drink, they go wild,” he said. “They start fighting each other. The young guys, they don’t know how to drink—they take a bottle of tequila and glug-glug-glug-glug,” he said, emptying an imaginary bottle into his mouth. “Then they start shooting.” According to Hersi, drunken duelling had cost the life of one gang member and resulted in another being wounded.1 Unruly behaviour, however, carried consequences.
“Inside the ship they’re organized like a military,” Hersi said. “There are officers, subordinates … everyone has a title. If you refuse to take orders, they take your weapon away and tie you up, hands behind your back, and beat you.”
Hersi obliged me with accounts of two incidents that had resulted in this punishment. He described how one member of the original nine-strong attacking party had been testing out his recently acquired Land Cruiser on the rocky bluff overlooking the Eyl valley. Having drunk large quantities of Ethiopian liquor, he decided that his new prized possession was able to leap the gorge. The next part played out like a bad Hollywood movie: “The guy in the passenger seat grabbed the driver and pulled the hand brake, stopping the car just in time,” said Hersi. “It was teetering back and forth on the edge of the cliff.” Computer sent eight members of the gang to stabilize the situation (literally), and bring the two joyriders down to him. They were tied up and subjected to a gang beating, as the other pirates encircled and repeatedly kicked them. Still inebriated, they were then locked together in a small room (the Victoria’s version of a drunk tank) and thoroughly doused with water. The next day, having sobered up, they begged Computer’s forgiveness. He granted it, but declared an era of prohibition, forbidding any member of the group to consume alcohol thereafter.
In Hersi’s second yarn, one of the members of the attacking team—having evidently decided that he was above guarding prisoners—refused to serve