The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [95]
13
The Cadet and the Chief
IT WAS A FROZEN MID-DECEMBER DAY IN THE BLACK SEA PORT OF Constanţa, Romania. Trudging down to the harbour with Teddy, my Romanian translator, we were caught in a crossfire of icy blasts of ocean wind sweeping across the jutting peninsula and through the deserted streets of the Old Town. A statue of the poet Ovid dominated the central square, surveying with marble eyes the same place where, two thousand years ago, he had spent his final days lamenting the cruel fate that had seen him banished to this backward outpost at the very margins of the Roman Empire. My first impression was not much different from Ovid’s; after the bustling cosmopolitan streets of Bucharest, some 250 kilometres away, Constanţa’s grey tones and empty streets conveyed the feeling of a declining province. But first impressions were misleading: the city is a bustling mercantile centre—the fourth-largest port in Europe, and the biggest on the Black Sea.
Little about Constanţa, on this cold and sombre day, reminded me of the sunny desert plains of Somalia. Yet the two places were connected more intimately than one would expect, by way of the international shipping routes linking the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, and finally the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. Indeed, the city’s tenuous connection to Somalia had brought me here, in pursuit of the story of the MV Victoria. For Constanţa was home to seven of the eleven crew members held hostage aboard the vessel for seventy-five days.
In an American-style Italian restaurant, a welcome oasis from the bitter cold, I met with a young man I will call Matei Levenescu. We had never met, but I felt an oddly personal connection to him. Six months earlier, I had stood less than a kilometre away from him, separated by an unbridgeable stretch of hostile water lying between the Victoria and the beach at Eyl. For utterly different reasons, we had both ended up in a country that neither of us would have expected to visit in our lifetimes, viewing it from entirely divergent perspectives—I, desperately trying to get to where he was; he, wishing he were anywhere else on earth.
Spurning my invitation to order food, Levenescu contented himself with a Pepsi, which he proceeded to nurse over the course of the hour. In his early twenties, Levenescu was slender and thin-lipped, with eyes that told me he would likely command a ship of his own one day. Still a cadet, he was in the third year of a four-year program at Constanţa Maritime University, soon to complete his studies and become a full-time seafarer. His assignment aboard the Victoria, like the cooperative education programs offered by North American universities, had been intended to furnish on-the-job training. Levenescu ended up with far more first-hand experience than he had bargained for.
Almost as soon as we sat down, Levenescu launched into a straightforward warning about the dangers of overly detailed media coverage of pirate operations. “You have to be careful what you write,” he said. “The pirates can easily go on the Internet and learn how to adapt their operations based on your reports.” In a manner oddly patronizing for his age, Levenescu lectured me on the potential harm of publicly revealing the size of ransom payments. Such open reporting, he feared, would only increase the pirates’ leverage at the bargaining table.
“That’s what happened to the Hansa,” he said, referring to the MV Hansa Stavanger, another German-owned freighter held concurrently with the Victoria, further south at Harardheere. The crew of the Hansa suffered through an agonizing four-month ransom negotiation, during which the pirates continually revised their demands upwards. At one point the negotiators on both sides had agreed on $2.5 million,