The World's Most Dangerous Place (24 page)

Until 2007, hostages taken for ransom were rarely harmed by the pirates, even by accident. This was partly because the pirates were governed by the marine xeer, the customary law of fishing known as the
’Uruf Alba’hr
, a kind of honour-code of the sea which obliged its followers to respect the lives of other mariners – even foreign ones come to steal Somali lobsters. In 2007, however, as word of the pirates’ success spread and the size of the ransoms began to creep up, other Somalis began to get in on the act. The newcomers were not ex-fishermen, or even from the coast, necessarily, but chancers from the south-central interior who knew little and cared less about the ’Uruf Alba’hr. By 2011, the profile of the typical pirate had changed utterly.

‘They are really just criminal gangs in boats now,’ said
O’Connell. ‘The pirates used to be quite tightly organized along Darod clan lines, but we are seeing many more Hawiye now, and gangs that are much more clan-mixed.’

The consequences for the victims of the new pirate breed could be serious. It wasn’t only that their seamanship was often spectacularly poor. Men who didn’t know what they were doing in boats were more afraid of the sea, and fear, according to O’Connell, could make them lose their heads and become ‘trigger-happy’. Of the estimated 3,500 seafarers taken hostage by Somalis since 2007, sixty-five had been killed, according to the shipping industry lobbying organization SOS (Save Our Seafarers).

Perhaps even more troubling was evidence that, for the first time, an element of sadism had crept into the way that some pirates now operated. A crew member of the
Beluga Nomination
, a German-owned freighter captured in January 2011 off the Seychelles, was killed while being ‘punished’ in retaliation for a failed rescue attempt mounted by the Seychellois Coastguard. The crew of the
Marida Marguerite
, an Antwerp-bound chemical tanker, were beaten with iron bars, locked in the ship’s freezer, and had cables tied around their genitals. One crewman was even keelhauled – pulled beneath the barnacled hull on a rope, a traditional sailor’s punishment unheard of in Europe since the nineteenth century. The pirates reportedly did this ‘for fun’.

In January 2012 came the even more chilling news that Chao-I Wu, the Vietnamese skipper of the trawler the
Shiuh Fu-1
, had had his right arm sawn off, in the style of al-Shabaab. His frustrated captors, who had been holding him and his crew near Harardheere for over two years, then allowed his shipmates to phone home, in the hope that their descriptions of their captain’s suffering would increase the pressure on the ship’s owners to pay up.

And so I felt some unease as our convoy finally bumped its way on to the tarmac that marked the city limits of north Galkacyo. Earlier that week, according to a local radio report, a well-known pirate boss had been injured in a shoot-out between rival gangs, and was being treated at the city hospital, where I now hoped to interview him. August, I had been told, was a good month to find pirates on land, because the sea was too rough for them until September when the south-west monsoon abated. But I did not expect to see so many of them, so soon.

‘Look. There,’ said the driver as our convoy turned off the city’s main drag towards the UN compound. ‘Those men are pirates.’

I looked out at a row of tin shack cafés, all closed for Ramadan, where a number of macawiis-clad young men were nevertheless congregated, squatting idly along a wall or chatting in one of two standing groups.

‘What – all of them?’

‘All of them,’ the driver insisted.

I wondered how he could possibly know. They looked entirely ordinary, and no different from the unemployed young men one saw in every Somali town, hanging about on street corners. But the driver was adamant. This was Galkacyo, he said, and the moment the seas calmed down, these men would be off to the coast.

Their ordinariness was, I supposed, the point. Pirates didn’t wear tricorn hats or parrots on their shoulders except in the imaginations of small Western boys. Real pirates were part of the people, and so were bound to resemble the other members of the society from which they sprang. Piracy was not something to be conjured from a dressing-up box, but the product of deep social dysfunction and the failure of the Somali state.

It wasn’t just small boys who misunderstood this. Piracy had an
extraordinary grip on the imaginations of Western adults, too. Between 2003 and 2011, Walt Disney’s four
Pirates of the Caribbean
movies grossed over $3.7bn at the box office, with merchandising and other spin-offs worth many millions more.
⁴
The Gulf of Aden was the modern version of the Spanish Main, and Western imaginations were still in full flight. Several Somali piracy-based thrillers were published in 2011, most of them far too lurid for children. Robert Louis Stevenson, who started the West’s romance with eye-patches when he published ‘Treasure Island’ in a magazine called
Young Folks
in 1881, would have been amazed by Elmore Leonard’s novel
Djibouti
, which turned on an al-Qaida plot to blow up a supertanker; or Michael Burns’s archly titled
The Horn
, which featured a mixed-sex team of US Navy SEALs hunting pirates from a decoy yacht; or Wilbur Smith’s
Those in Peril
which dealt with the kidnap and rescue of the beautiful (and oversexed) daughter of an American oil billionaire.

TV dramatists were no less fascinated. In September 2010, the BBC aired a truly fantastic episode of the drama series
Spooks
, in which an al-Qaida-affiliated gang of Somali pirate suicide bombers try to blow up Westminster using high-speed stealth submarines provided by Columbian drug smugglers. Not even Hollywood had managed to synthesize so many of the West’s demons into a single plotline, although it probably wasn’t far behind. In November 2011 Paul Greengrass, the celebrated director of two
Bourne
action films, began auditioning among the Somali exile community in Minneapolis for actors to play pirates in
Captain Phillips
, a retelling of the 2009 hijacking of the
Maersk Alabama
starring Tom Hanks. Not all Somalis were impressed. ‘I can tell you what the movie is going to be already,’ said a Minneapolis restaurateur, Abdi Ahmed. ‘They will have a bunch of white American people kidnapped, and
Tom Hanks will save them, and a bunch of skinny black guys will get killed.’
⁵

A bunch of skinny black guys: to me, in Galkacyo, that was exactly what the pirates looked like. We dropped our bags at the UN office – another prison-like compound with barbed wire on the walls and blast barriers at the gates – and at once headed out again, the SPU men in their vehicles ahead and behind us as before. We hadn’t gone far when we came across a cluster of people celebrating the inauguration of a new customs house. Calypso-style music blared from a pair of immense loudspeakers mounted on a van dressed in bunting. We stopped to pay our respects to Cowke, the mayor of north Galkacyo, our SPU men joining us as we mingled with the crowd of officials and onlookers. The mayor was in a grumpy mood despite the carnival atmosphere.

‘You’ve come from Garowe? That nest of vipers,’ he said.

And he plunged into an exposition of all the ways the Farole administration was neglecting his town.

‘Look at the new police station in Garowe. It is very beautiful. Here, the police sleep in the corridors. Please: take pictures.’

The police, Cowke explained, were appointed not by him but by Farole, according to their clan affiliation. But underinvestment from Puntland’s centre – which he called ‘an Omar Mahmud mafia’ – meant there wasn’t enough money to pay the police their salaries, let alone build new facilities. They had therefore turned to corrupt practices in order to survive, practices that even included collusion with pirates.

‘The police and the pirates are so intermingled now, but what can I do? The people here are fed up with the corruption. If Farole is not very careful, there will be a revolution here.’

We stayed for his inauguration speech out of politeness. Just as
he finished, one of the SPU men came worming his way through the politely clapping audience and tugged urgently on my sleeve.

‘We go. Now,’ he said with an anxious look over his shoulder, ‘quick, quick.’

Back in the safety of the vehicles, the SPU men described how they had been approached at the back of the crowd by two strangers, who asked if the gaalo they were working for were French. When they asked why, the men – who spoke, the guards said, with slurred voices – replied that they were looking for hostages to exchange for some clansmen of theirs who had been captured by a French warship, and were now in jail in Paris. They had even begun a discussion about how much it would cost for the SPU to look the other way while they grabbed us.

I looked out at the dispersing crowd but could still see nothing unusual. Any one of them could be a pirate. It was uncomfortable to consider how utterly dependent we were on the integrity of our SPU men. How ‘special’, in reality, was the protection they offered? The fact that they were employed by the UN meant nothing. The pirates could easily trump their paltry salaries, and every man has his price. In October 2011, two staff of the Danish Demining Group, Poul Thisted and an American, Jessica Buchanan, were kidnapped by their own guards on the way to Galkacyo airport.
*
I later heard about an SPU man, one of the trusted regulars at the Galkacyo UN office, who had vanished from work a few months previously. Not long after his disappearance he was arrested at sea by the Royal Thai Navy; he was currently awaiting trial for piracy in a jail in Bangkok. I supposed it was simply lucky for us that our guards today had more honour.

If the mayor of north Galkacyo could do nothing about piracy, the powerlessness of the administration to the south turned out to be greater still. Nick Beresford, the Garowe UN Development Programme chief, was keen to show his face in Galmudug, especially as President Alin had recently appointed a new cabinet. And so our little convoy made its way south towards the so-called Green Line, although the only sign of greenery as we approached it was the Somali rose, the local nickname for the shreds of plastic that snag on the thorns that grow in all the country’s abandoned urban spaces.

There was no better demonstration of the crazy power of clanism than at the border post, where our guards from Garowe flatly refused to go any further. Instead we were handed over to another, Hawiye, SPU team, employees of President Alin, who were waiting for us at the barrier. I had expected tension, but in fact the handover was weirdly amicable. Indeed, there was so much smiling and back-slapping between the SPU men that I felt certain that we were the focus of a business arrangement of some kind, although I did not actually see money change hands. The new guards then escorted us along a straight, raised stretch of road that ran through a buffer zone of derelict housing to another sandbagged checkpoint on the far side. It felt a little like crossing from West to East Berlin in the days of the Cold War.

The process felt absurd as well as corrupt. It was not just because I was a foreigner that it was impossible to distinguish between the Darod and Hawiye men. In truth, there was no meaningful difference between them. The author Nuruddin Farah made the same point in his 2005 novel
Links
, the action of which is dominated by two rival Mogadishu warlords, characters based on real people, although Farah refuses to name them. He also avoids mentioning
which clans they represent, because to do so would be to dignify the absurd cause for which they are fighting. Instead he refers to them throughout the novel simply as ‘Strongman North’ and ‘Strongman South’. It is a piece of satire reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels
, in which the people of Lilliput are divided into ‘Big-Endians’ and ‘Little-Endians’ according to how they think a boiled egg should be eaten – a dispute, wrote Swift, that had given rise to ‘six rebellions . . . wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown’.

We found Mohamed Alin, Galkacyo’s Strongman South, waiting for us in a darkened municipal debating chamber with half a dozen of his newly appointed ministers, who sat in a line on a bench to the left of their president with their backs hard up against the wall. Alin, small and bald and spritely looking, introduced them one by one – the Commander of Police, the Minister of Fisheries, the Governor of Mudug, a general called Sed – and explained that they represented all the clans in Somalia, because he had appointed them according to the 4.5 clan formula used in Mogadishu. This, he wanted us to know, was progress; it was the reason he had fired his old cabinet, whose members had all been Habr Gidr Sacad, like him. We sat down on the bench against the wall opposite the ministers. A ceiling fan chugged above, throwing complex shadows from the only light source, a window high up in the wall behind the president. The ministers eyed us in silence, as wary as young teenagers at a school dance. A brown floral coffee table was marooned in the wide space between us, cut into the shape of a five-pointed star.

‘Piracy is a
particular
problem in Galkacyo,’ said Alin, in a thick English accent, when our conversation finally began. ‘Pirates have more militia, more vehicles and more money than we do. No one
can fight them at sea. We need assistance to fight them on land, but no one in the international community is listening.’

He wanted help with the funding of schools – ‘to educate the young men about the perils of piracy’ – and with skills training to provide alternative livelihoods, such as carpentry and electrical engineering. The courts needed restructuring. There was no proper prison in Galmudug. The few police available to him were under-trained, they had no transport or communications equipment, and their uniforms were worn out. The shopping list went on and on in a tone that suggested it was not the first time he had itemized it. Nick Beresford, a man with a UN budget and thus the main intended audience, nodded extravagantly and took copious notes.