The World's Most Dangerous Place (23 page)

*
The others are the Marehan, the Dolbahante and the Ogadeni.

*
Although the digit referred to was absent not from the speaker’s hand, but his father’s. In Somalia, even nicknames are sometimes passed down the generations.

*
The ‘Somali champagne’, as it is known, is as important to nomadic culture as the camel itself. According to the ethnographer I.M. Lewis, the country may even derive its name from the words
soo
and
maal
, which together form an instruction to ‘go and milk’ – the first words a foreign visitor might hear on the lips of his nomad host.
⁵

*
Mussolini’s adopted insignia – actually a bundle of birch rods with an axe-head protruding from it –was a symbol of legal authority carried by magistrates’ attendants in Roman times.

*
In 1974, Siad Barre relocated large numbers of northern nomads stricken by the so-called ‘long-tail’ drought to the coast. His idea was to feed the starving pastoralists with the bounty of the ocean, but the experiment ended in failure because the camel-oriented nomads stubbornly refused to eat fish, a foodstuff that they still regard as beneath them. See, for example, Nuur Ciise’s poem in Faarax Cawl’s 1974 novel
Ignorance is the Enemy of Love
:

The grunting grumbler pours tea between his lips
,

His nose dribbles as he fills his jaws with fish
,

He lives in debt while the man of mettle milks Debec, his she-camel

*
The probable cause of death was later identified as beriberi, a vitamin deficiency disease.

*
The
Prantalay 12
’s sister ship, the
Prantalay 14
, was sunk off the Lakshadweep Islands by the Indian Navy in January 2012 following a battle in which ten pirates were killed. The
Prantalay 11
was captured nearby a week later, after its captors attacked an Indian Coastguard vessel they had mistaken for a merchantman.

9

Galkacyo: Pirateville

Galmudug, August 2011

President Farole said I would need to go south to see pirates, so I took his advice and joined a UN field trip from Garowe to Galkacyo, Puntland’s second city. The surface of the old north–south highway had long since eroded, and for the most part was as rough as a farm track, so that it took well over three hours to cover the 200 kilometres in between. Our white-painted Toyota travelled in the routine UN way, in a convoy between two truckloads of heavily armed SPU. The dust thrown up by the vehicle in front made it hard at times to see out. The desert on either side, dimly perceived through ochre-coloured clouds, was a Henry Moore sculpture park of termite mounds. Here and there we passed an acacia tree, often with a ragged tent pitched in its handkerchief of shade: refugees, the driver said, who had paused in their northward flight from the drought. There was little traffic on the road during the hot mornings, apart from the occasional lorry lumbering towards Bossasso with a cargo of offended-looking
camels, their protruding necks and heads swaying in time as their vehicle lurched into another disconcertingly deep pothole.

I was curious to see Galkacyo, one of the great crossroads of Somali trade and an important city in its own right. One of its traditional nicknames was ‘the place where the White Men ran away’,
¹
a reference to a battle won against European troops in colonial times, although its modern reputation was hardly less fierce. Galkacyo lay on the front line between the two main clans of central Somalia, the northern Darod and the southern Hawiye, which made it one of the tensest places in the country. The civil war had not really ended here. The city remained physically divided by an uninhabited no-man’s-land, a ‘green line’ connected by a single road with heavily armed checkpoints at either end. Each side was governed by separate administrations. North Galkacyo was part of Puntland. South Galkacyo was the capital of the autonomous region of Galmudug, presided over by a Hawiye ex-colonel, Mohamed Alin. Those were the basics; it took me some time with a large-scale map to understand the details.

‘Galmudug’ was a neologism, a composite of the two old provinces from which it was carved, Galgaduud and Mudug (either of which could easily be confused with the nearby town of Galdogob). President Alin, who had returned from exile in Northolt in Middlesex, was a member of the Sacad sub-clan of the Hawiye Habr Gidr. To his south-west was an even smaller regional administration, Ximan & Xeeb, run by Mohamed Aden ‘Tiiccey’, a returnee from Minneapolis, and a member of the Habr Gidr Suleiman, a Hawiye sub-clan that did not always see eye to eye with the Sacad. Beyond
that
was territory controlled – most of the time – by the ASWJ, the multi-clan Sufi militia, who were battling al-Shabaab to their south. I was not about to attempt it, but anyone
driving from Garowe to Mogadishu in mid-2011 was obliged to cross territory controlled by at least six different armed clans or factions, and three active front lines. Galkacyo lay at the sucking edge of a political maelstrom, and that was before taking into consideration the fickle pirate gangs, for whom unstable central Somalia was a true haven, with this city at its hub.

I recalled my visit, earlier that year, to the Northwood, north London headquarters of EUNAVFOR, the naval force spearheading the European Union’s counter-piracy mission in the Indian Ocean. I was shown a map marked with blue dots for the pirates’ suspected desert camps, around thirty of them in all, with codenames borrowed from Charles Schultz’s
Peanuts
cartoons like ‘Great Pumpkin’ and ‘Red Baron’. Galmudug had noticeably more blue dots than anywhere else. The EUNAVFOR operations room resembled the set of a James Bond film. The main feature was a giant electronic wall map, on which the movement of shipping was updated by satellite in real time. At an array of desks facing it worked two dozen officers from twenty different navies, many of them speaking purposefully into the microphones of their headsets.

‘When there’s an attack on, this place gets as sweaty as a Royal Marine at a spelling test,’ said a spokesman, Paddy O’Kennedy, a former RAF Tornado navigator.

The EUNAVFOR operation, although an undoubted triumph of high-tech, international cooperation, seemed a sledgehammer for the nut of Somali piracy. Its size, its expense, the sheer professionalism represented by so many gold-braided hats and shoulder pips, stood in hilarious contrast to the amateurism of their opponents, the drunk young men who crashed and fought over the
Prantalay 12
. The challenge, O’Connell explained, was not the
pirates per se, but how to locate and then deal with them quickly enough.

‘We’re trying to police an area the size of Western Europe with twenty-five military vessels. Once the pirates are aboard their target, it’s generally too late to intervene without jeopardizing the lives of the crew. Yet the average time between the first distress call from a boat under attack and the pirates going aboard is about ten minutes. We can’t get there fast enough. If we had all the ships of all the navies in the world, we still wouldn’t have enough.’

The pirates’ success rate had declined recently as merchant ships had learned to defend themselves: by sailing in escorted convoys, by turning their bridges into fortified ‘citadels’ and, increasingly, by employing armed guards who knew how to repel a boarding party by force. And yet the pirates were not deterred. Indeed, the number of attacks was still increasing: 189 attempts in 2011, up from 152 the year before, according to the shipping industry’s Oceans Beyond Piracy project. The main reason, everyone agreed, was that the rewards on offer were bigger than ever. Marine insurance companies paid out $146m in ransoms in 2011, an average of $4.8m per ship, compared to just $5m and $600,000 per ship in 2007. April 2011 saw the highest ransom payment ever recorded: $13.5m for the Greek-flagged tanker
Irene
, which at the time had $200m worth of crude oil on board.
*

EUNAVFOR could go on trying to contain piracy by ‘altering the risk–reward ratio’ – O’Connell pointed out that over a thousand pirates had in fact been imprisoned – but there would be
no lasting solution to the problem while the insurance industry effectively colluded with the pirates’ mission of self-enrichment. Western governments could legislate to outlaw the paying of ransoms, but O’Connell suspected they would not do that, or indeed take any other truly decisive action against the pirates, until they were forced to. There were a handful of potential ‘game-changers’. An obvious one was the emergence of evidence of a financial link between the pirates and al-Shabaab. The payment of ransoms would have to stop then because it would mean that insurers were indirectly funding a proscribed terrorist organization, which was of course illegal. Conclusive evidence of such a link had so far proved elusive, however. A likelier possibility, according to O’Connell, was ‘a really big hijacking’ in the Indian Ocean.

‘A gas or oil tanker arrives in the UK every three days. If two of those get taken, Britain’s lights go out,’ he said.

The capture of a big cruise liner might also force a change in policy. A handful of liners had in fact already been attacked, but had so far always managed to escape.

‘Three months ago, we received intelligence that a mothership had put to sea with three hundred pirates on board. We can only think they are going after a big cruise ship. Why else would they need so many people?’

In January 2011, the Saga Holidays-owned
Spirit of Adventure
was attacked in the Mozambique Channel on its way from Madagascar to Zanzibar. Its 350 mostly elderly passengers, who had paid £2,000 a head for their cruise, were sitting down to a black-tie dinner when a pirate attack skiff was spotted. Dinner interrupted, they were shepherded amidships to a lounge deck that was then locked from the inside. The atmosphere, according to a lady
passenger I later interviewed, was remarkably calm. The passengers drank champagne and listened to the ship’s pianist play
Rule Britannia
. It was fortunate that their captain, a former Australian Navy gunnery officer who had seen service in Vietnam, was prepared for this event. Unseen by the pirates, his crewmen deployed a wire trap designed to be towed in the ship’s wake below the aft tender deck. This was the point on the ship where the freeboard was lowest, and thus where the pirates were likeliest to try to board. Sure enough, the propellers of the pirates’ attack skiff became hopelessly entangled as they closed in, allowing the
Spirit of Adventure
to make its escape at full speed. It was a clever ruse that the pirates were unlikely to fall for again in future.

As President Farole had maintained, the original pirate gangs were dominated by disgruntled fishermen seeking to protect their livelihoods from illegal foreign operators. The coastal communities they came from were made up of skilled old seafaring families, whose ancestors had plied the Indian Ocean’s trade routes for centuries in their high-sterned wooden sailing dhows, a boat design that had barely changed. Puntland’s sailors still put to sea without echo-sounders, and calculate the ocean’s depth at night by going down into the hold, putting an ear to the hull, and listening for the knocking sound of rockfish picking at insects in the ship’s planking, an indication of shallow waters. The ‘aristocratic’ nomads of the interior traditionally looked down on the coastal communities, but that did not prevent the fishermen from taking great pride in their own distinct heritage. Shuke Osman, the director of the Puntland Development Research Centre in Garowe, noted: ‘In the same way that nomads sing songs of desert hardships to their camels, fishermen sing to their canoes and boats of the dangers of the sea.’

Dark that which dark is

Stormy sea

Morning rain

A woman’s veil is dark

You, my horned canoe

May your wood never break up

Fly over the sea

Skim to the shore

Speed us to land

Driven by our oars and paddles
²

Their marine subculture was so distinct that until very recently, coastal Somalis used a different calendar to the rest of the country, the Nayruus system, which has its roots in ancient Zoroastrianism. This calendar’s most notable feature is that it has no leap year, which meant that the people of the coastal communities had fallen badly out of sync with the rest of the world over the centuries. The first day of 2001, for instance, was on 23 July.
³