The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [94]
It was close to four o’clock in the afternoon, nearing Dahabshiil’s closing hour. I was two weeks in arrears with Said’s and Abdirashid’s wages (twenty dollars each per day), and I had promised them earlier that I would make a cash run before the day’s end. I now spotted them wandering around the corner of the house, peering expectantly in my direction. Not wishing to give them any further cause to despise Hersi, I decided to take a break from the khat; for his part, Hersi was also delighted by my decision to fetch some cash. We agreed to reconvene in half an hour.
* * *
As soon as I returned with the money, Hersi picked up where he had left off, beginning a lecture on the Puntland government’s total inability to tackle the piracy issue. “At the beginning of this game, maybe fourteen or fifteen months ago, Puntland tried twice to attack Eyl with their military forces,” he said. “They came to the town with technicals and almost sixty soldiers, but when they arrived there were three hundred twenty-year-olds with anti-aircraft guns waiting for them. The soldiers came running back.”
The incident to which Hersi was referring, Haji’s abortive invasion of Eyl, had unfolded much as he described. After their boss had absconded with his $20,000 payoff, the Puntland soldiers had been wise to withdraw; not only would the pirates have defended themselves, but their clan militias—indeed, anyone in the town who owned a gun—would have come to their defence, and the streets of Eyl would have turned into an urban battleground.
“The second thing,” continued Hersi, “is that the soldiers are related to the pirates. Farole couldn’t attack Eyl. His soldiers would say to themselves, ‘How can we kill our cousins?’ ” There was no better illustration of the problem gnawing at the root of President Farole’s attempts to combat piracy. Unlike the army of a mature state, Puntland’s security forces (as is the case across Somalia) are not seen by the local population as a neutral entity, but through the lens of clan. Military action is viewed either as a declaration of war by one clan on another, or as an attempt to turn cousin against cousin; in both cases, it is ineffective. Only inter-clan mediation, not a strong central state, has prevented Puntland from Balkanizing into a collection of warring enclaves.
As the sky darkened, we slowly began to collect the discarded khat pulp and empty cigarette packs. Hersi seized the opportunity to remind me of my earlier promise. “Hey, man,” Hersi said, “it looks like the repairs to my car are going to cost $140, a bit more than I thought. Can I borrow that much?” As I only had hundred-dollar bills in my possession, I opted to round down his request, and went inside to retrieve one of the crisp bills I had just picked up at Dahabshiil. I handed it to him and he thanked me, promising to pay it back within a few days.
A few moments later, he presented a slightly stranger petition. “Hey, Jay, you know those pants you were wearing when I came in?” he asked.
“You mean my jeans?”
“Yeah. They were really nice, man,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“Can I have them, man? I’m going back to the coast soon and I need a really good pair of jeans, to protect me from the wind.”
Having but three pairs of trousers in my travel ensemble, I was sadly forced to refuse his request, and suggested that he take five dollars out of the hundred I had given him and buy a pair of knock-off jeans at the market.
He sighed. “Those won’t be nearly as good.”
Under the watchful escort of Said and Abdirashid, Hersi made his way out of the compound, soon to rejoin his comrades on the beaches of Eyl. A few weeks after our interview, on July 18, Hersi’s khat-fuelled vigil finally came to an end with the long-awaited delivery of the ransom money for the Victoria. It must have been a bitter-sweet moment—the final ransom turned out to be only $1.8 million, far short of Hersi’s $3 million prediction.
At the beginning of September,