The World's Most Dangerous Place (21 page)

The Farole family’s relationship with the outside world had never been easy, least of all when it came to the question of piracy. The allegation that they were profiting from it personally – an allegation repeatedly made by the UN’s Monitoring Group on Somalia – infuriated the Faroles, who emphatically denied it and pointed out, accurately, that there was no evidence for it. It was true that the family had built a large outdoor restaurant, the only secure restaurant in Garowe, called Ruqsan Square, but there was no reason to suppose that this was not honestly paid for. Farole senior had spent many years in the Australian banking sector. In any case, Ruqsan Square could hardly be called opulent, or even much of a commercial success. There were few customers on the two occasions I visited, and those there were seemed mostly to be Farole’s ministers escaping the heat of their offices downtown, who paid for their milky tea not with money but with a wink at the waiter. The tables and chairs were arranged into a bizarre approximation of a nomad camp, where each section was cordoned off by an open-sided bell tent. The desert wind blasting through this place was strong enough to toss the plastic chairs about. The pinned-down tablecloths snapped and strained at their moorings like pennants on the mast of a yacht.

Critics in Nairobi, including senior officials at the UN,
sometimes described Farole’s headquarters as a presidential ‘palace’, with the clear implication that it was corruptly funded. And yet the compound he occupied struck me as modest. It was certainly much less impressive than the nearby UN headquarters, which at four storeys high was easily the tallest building in Garowe. The UN’s building was also heavily guarded and painted white, giving rise to any number of sarcastic local jokes about out-of-touch officials living in ivory towers.

Less amusing was Farole’s growled observation one day, to a senior foreign official who had just arrived in Garowe, that there were ‘too many southerners’ among the UN’s local staff. As one of the few sources of a decent income, the UN was an important employer in the town. Farole didn’t want those jobs taken by anyone but northerners. The UN interpreted his remark as a scarcely veiled threat, and quietly transferred a number of its non-Darod Somali staff to positions elsewhere in the country. They were in no doubt: Farole’s Puntland was at bottom a mono-clan police state, where bad things could and sometimes did happen to people with the wrong tribal affiliation. Yet, that was a quite different complaint to the charge of complicity in piracy – and no matter what Farole did in this regard, the rumours refused to go away.

From the moment he assumed office in 2009, Farole had come under huge international pressure to prove his innocence by taking concrete measures against the pirates. The problem, however, was not just that Puntland was broke. In UN parlance, the state lacked the ‘capacity’ to deal with piracy on its own. For example, there were an estimated 5,000 pirates operating off Somalia, but with just 350 prison places in the whole of Puntland, there was often literally nowhere to put them when or if they were captured. There was
also a shortage of judges capable of trying them, and few courtrooms to hold a trial in. The UN Development Programme was funding dozens of judge-training scholarships at the university in Garowe, as well as building new prisons, notably a 254-cell facility at Gardho. But these projects would take time to mature, and until they did there were genuine limits on what the Faroles could do to oblige the West.

I saw Gardho prison for myself, later in the year. It was a forbidding place, even in its half-constructed state, out on the edge of a remote town half way between Garowe and Bossasso. The desert wind rattled the roofs of the empty watchtowers, and the unfinished cells were inhabited by geckos. The prison represented the first serious money that anyone had spent in Gardho since the Italians, eighty years ago. The former colonists were not forgotten in the town. One local family were even called Duce, thanks to a great-grandfather who adopted the name in honour of the regime that once employed him. The Italians had administered the surrounding region from a Beau Geste fort that still stood in the town, crumbling and forlorn.

Next to it, apparently still in use, was the town jail, a tiny, crenellated blockhouse containing a single, dank cell. Above the door was carved a date, 1933, together with the eroded bas-relief of what appeared to be a saluting fire-hydrant, but that on closer inspection revealed itself to be a
fasces
, the symbol from which the fascists took their name.
*

The jail, despite being the only one in Gardho until the new one was finished, was empty when I looked inside. The policeman on
duty explained with a shrug that its mud-brick walls were so old and rotten that the last prisoner – a ‘superthief’, he said – had managed to dig his way out with a tin plate. The escape hole was still visible, since no one had troubled to fill it in. Law and order, it seemed, was an optional extra in rural Puntland.

The town jail in Garowe, by contrast, was full to overflowing when I visited. With its two heavily armed soldiers patrolling a parapet around a sandy courtyard that contained a lone, spindly acacia tree, it had a distinct Spaghetti Western atmosphere. Mohamed Abdirazak, the wiry, suspicious captain of the guard, was even wearing a cowboy hat. He led me to the main cell, designed to hold perhaps a dozen prisoners but which now contained forty. It was supposed to be a holding jail, a place to put prisoners in transit to the much larger facility at Bossasso, but due process being what it was in Puntland, most of the inmates here had already been locked up for nine months or more.

They were all young men, most of them under twenty. As I approached, their arms came through the bars of the door like the waving tentacles of a sea-monster. Up close, they pressed their faces into the gaps and protested their innocence, shouting over each other, desperate to be heard. The cell beyond them was a windowless cave, fetid with condensation and stinking of sweat and human waste. You could feel the waves of heat generated by this heap of humanity from ten feet away. Not all the prisoners were shouting. I glimpsed more of them squatting in rows in the darkness at the back, each man shackled to the other by the ankle, mute and depressed.

Captain Mohamed explained that his jail was once notorious for its escapes, but no longer, now that he was in charge. The biggest problem caused by the overcrowding, he said, was that the inmates
had to sleep in constant physical contact, shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor, which led to lesions of the skin that became infected. I asked if there were any pirates among them, a question that produced a renewed scuffle by the door.

‘Yes! Yes! I’m a pirate!’ said one young man, forcing himself forward. ‘Can you get me out of here?’

His name, he told me, was Abdikadir, although the details of his story changed so much in the telling that it was impossible to trust anything much he said. At one point he asserted that he was not, actually, a pirate, but a cold chain technician at a Galkacyo maternity clinic. He was like the crucifixion victim in Monty Python’s
Life of Brian
who, desperate for a last-minute reprieve, cries out, ‘I’m Brian and so’s my wife!’

He described how he and his cousins had been travelling the previous year in two cars towards the notorious northern pirate port of Bargal – ‘For health reasons,’ he said – when they were ambushed by police acting on a tip-off. There was a short shoot-out, in the course of which a cousin was wounded, and all of the travellers were arrested.

‘They took three Kalashnikovs and destroyed both of our cars,’ he added, still bitter at the memory.

‘But what were you doing with three Kalashnikovs?’

Abdikadir ignored this question and merely repeated that he was innocent. He saw no contradiction: why would a cold chain technician
not
be armed, and up for a shoot-out with the police? There was no sense or logic to the way he bent the truth. I was reminded of Richard Burton’s frustrated observation that ‘these people seem to lie involuntarily: the habit of untruth with them becomes a second nature. They deceive without object for deceit, and the only way of obtaining from them correct information is to
inquire, receive the answer, and determine it to be diametrically opposed to fact.’

The interpreter I had borrowed from the UN office offered a different explanation, which was that Abdikadir was crazy. This did not seem unlikely after nine months locked up in such a terrible place.

‘Now do you see how difficult it is for judges to deal with this problem of pirates?’ he said.

Establishing the rule of law was crucial to the fight against piracy. That much was understood in every Western capital in the world. And yet in 2009, when President Farole announced plans to arm and train a new ‘Puntland Marine Force’ strong enough to take on the heavily armed pirate bases, no foreign donor could be found to fund the programme. The truth was that, despite local help from agencies like the UN Development Programme, the international community still didn’t fully trust the Faroles.

In 2010, when Farole turned for help to what was then called Saracen International, a shadowy organization said to be backed by, and based in, the United Arab Emirates (and not to be confused with other organizations and/or companies with the same name), he was publicly denounced by the UN and even the US State Department, who accused him of evading a regional arms embargo. The Puntlanders complained that they were damned if they didn’t act against the pirates, and damned if they did. Suspicions were even voiced that the Marine Force’s true purpose was not to combat piracy but to secure the state’s territory in the north-west, much of which is contested by Somaliland.

A Marine Force had nevertheless come into being, and was said by 2011 to number over a thousand men. They were much in evidence at the parade, easily discernible by their light blue uniforms and a regimental flag displaying a gold anchor and rope.
Their marching was better and their weapons seemed cleaner than average. They were discreetly accompanied by two drill instructors whom I presumed to be employees of Saracen, South African-looking white men sporting beards and bush hats, who scowled and looked the other way when I tried to speak to them, pressaverse according to type.

An evening or two after the party, I was finally granted the private audience with Farole that I had been looking for, and returned to the presidential compound, which looked even less impressive now that the crowds had gone and the hay and the pretty lights had been removed. Several members of Farole’s innermost circle were lounging in plastic chairs by the entrance to his private quarters, chatting and joking with each other. This was always a good time during Ramadan, when the fast-breaking meal,
iftar
, was over, and the cool of the night relieved the tension of the super-heated days. I recognized several of the men here: General Khalif, the Security Minister, Ilkajir Jama, the Interior Minister, Isse Dhollowhaa, the Director of Puntland Petroleum. On a fourth chair, inexplicably, sat the dwarf from the parade, with his legs poking horizontally over the edge. He smiled up at me briefly and shook my hand in a serious way before resuming his conversation with the minister to his left.

The inner sanctum smelled of boiled pasta. An ornate ceiling fan slowly stirred the heavy air. Farole, sitting stolidly in the centre of a huge brown leather sofa, looked more Godfather-like than ever. His eyes, now that he was no longer wearing sunglasses, seemed small and myopic, while his spoken English seemed surprisingly accented for a man with a PhD from a university in Melbourne. From time to time his utterances were spontaneously interpreted by a small, bald, obsequious man on the adjacent sofa who spoke English like an Oxford grammarian.

‘What I think the president is trying to say . . .’ he would interrupt.

I wondered who this unlikely court attendant could be. When I found a way to ask he said only that he was a ‘friend’, newly arrived from Leicester in the English Midlands, where he practised as a fully qualified family doctor.

Farole’s antipathy to piracy seemed genuine enough. The damage to Puntland’s reputation and to the fabric of Somali society meant that there was ‘no alternative’ but to fight it. Ignoring the pirate problem was not an option, he said, because it would only spread in a way that could overpower the Puntland government in the end, affecting not just Somalia but the entire world.

‘The pirates take drugs and drink alcohol,’ he said. ‘Both these things were very unusual before they came because they were unaffordable . . . Puntland could become a nation of alcoholics.’

‘There’s the risk of STDs too, such as AIDS,’ chipped in the GP from Leicester.

Farole nodded gravely.

‘I have always been against piracy,’ he went on. ‘Taking young girls by force has never been popular, you know?’

I asked why, if this was his view, the international community persisted in suspecting he was involved. The blame, he said, rested with the UN Security Council’s Monitoring Group, whose annual reports had repeatedly alleged that his officials were on the take. In particular he questioned the impartiality of Matthew Bryden, the Monitoring Group’s Canadian coordinator. He explained that Bryden’s wife, Ubax, was a well-connected Isaaq, the dominant clan in Somaliland, and that Bryden supported Somaliland’s bid for independance. That often meant Bryden painting their neighbours, and particularly Puntland, in a bad light as that would
encourage the international community to think likewise. The Monitoring Group’s allegations, according to Farole, were not objective but ‘politically motivated’. Bryden, he noted, had not once visited Garowe while he was president.

‘But in the end it doesn’t matter what foreigners think. It’s what Somalis think that counts.’

Whether Bryden was biased or not, the fact was that in the first quarter of that year, some ninety-seven ships were attacked off Somalia, almost triple the number in the previous first quarter. Even as the new Puntland Marine Force was parading through the centre of Garowe, pirates were holding around six hundred sailors for ransom on board twenty-eight ships.
⁶