The World's Most Dangerous Place (22 page)

On the other hand Farole had, in fact, begun to make progress against piracy. For all the shortage of prison spaces, over two hundred alleged pirates were presently locked up in Puntland. Bryden’s latest report acknowledged that, thanks to the Farole administration’s ‘firmer stance’ on piracy, the centre of pirate operations had started to shift away from Puntland towards Galmudug, the turbulent region to the south. It was particularly significant that the once notorious pirate port of Eyl was now completely clean of pirates, a development of which Farole, who was born there, sounded very proud.

‘It was the community themselves who rejected the pirates,’ he said. ‘I spoke to the elders and the religious leaders. It was a big campaign. I pointed out the enormous social cost of piracy – how the young men of the coast are in prison in twenty different countries, and how a great many others who put to sea are simply getting themselves killed.’

He was right on this last point. In 2012, the death rate among pirates was estimated by Nato to be as high as one in three.
⁷

Farole explained how important Eyl had once been to the Italians for the export of livestock, but that trade had dried up after independence. With the decline of their port, the citizens of Eyl had focused instead on fishing, particularly for lobster. To begin with, Siad Barre had helped with this initiative. The Soviet Union provided training and construction materials for a refrigeration plant, and fishing communities were organized into cooperatives. At the height of the boom, the industry employed as many as 60,000 people.
*

Yet after the Ogaden War, Farole went on, Siad Barre withdrew his support and concentrated government resources on the ‘golden triangle’ cornered by Mogadishu, Kismayo and Baidoa. All industries outside that triangle – he listed fisheries, minerals, oil, water and frankincense, as well as the husbandry of livestock – were neglected.

‘Whatever else happens, we can’t go back to the old system,’ he said.

The fisheries industry went into a steep decline. Further disaster struck in 1991, when the collapse of central government opened the door to unlicensed foreign fishing fleets, which devastated local stocks of fish and lobsters. The coastal reefs were
desecrated, too, by the unlicensed dumping of toxic waste. Farole explained with something like pride how Eyl had been among the first coastal communities to defend their livelihoods by attacking the illegal fleets. They called themselves, without irony, ‘coastguards’. It was the rest of the world, not them, who dubbed them pirates.

That, however, was then; he acknowledged that things were different now. There was no illegal fishing off Somalia any more, and with the re-establishment of authority in Mogadishu and Garowe, ‘piracy’ no longer served any useful purpose, and had become merely another criminal enterprise. Farole had found foreign funding for ‘community projects’ designed to entice the young men of Eyl away from the sea and back on to the land. One of the main backers, appropriately enough, was Italian. He described what he called an important ‘development opportunity’ just south of Eyl, where the commercial production of sorghum and potatoes was possible.

Enticement, however, could only do so much. Farole was adamant that the campaign could not have succeeded without local consent. Most effective of all, he said, had been the moral arguments put forward by the local religious leaders. It was they who had persuaded the people to turn against the pirates by convincing them that their behaviour was ‘unIslamic’. The key to defeating piracy, he was convinced, was moral rearmament through the mosques.

The campaign in Eyl, he confidently predicted, was just the start. Other notorious ports, such as Garacad, 130 kilometres to the south, had followed Eyl’s example and were driving their local pirates out, too. The whole area of pirate operations was being squeezed southwards and out of Puntland altogether. If I wanted
to see pirates for myself these days, he said, I would have to go down to Galkacyo or Hobyo or Harardheere.

There was at least no need to go so far to find the victims of piracy. The following morning in the UN canteen, all the talk among the breakfasting internationals was that the crew of a pirated Thai fishing boat, the
Prantalay 12
, had been rescued and brought into Garowe overnight, and were now resting at the Global Hotel, a run-down establishment barely 200 yards away up the street.

I hurried along there with two UN officials and soon discovered that the rumour was true. There were fourteen fishermen in all. Although the boat they had crewed was Thai-registered, the men were all Burmese – some of the million or so mostly undocumented migrant workers who, over the years, had fled the junta in Rangoon and made Thailand their home. This presented both the Garowe government and the UN with a problem, for these crewmen carried no passports. What country should they be repatriated to, and who would bear the cost? Alan Cole, a British ex-navy officer with the UN Office for Drugs and Crime, had already spoken to the Thai embassy in Nairobi, since there was no Burmese one. The Thais had told him they had never heard of the
Prantalay 12
. Cole shook his head grimly: he had seen this kind of diplomatic farrago before. He recalled an occasion when he had been presented with some pirates who had been shot dead. He had been obliged to organize their burial himself, and even paid for it out of his own pocket.

‘The Somalis just aren’t set up for this type of thing,’ he said. ‘I just had to get it sorted.’

The crew of the
Prantalay 12
, he reckoned, could be stuck in Garowe for some time to come.

The crew emerged from the hotel door, blinking in the sunlight and looking comically short next to their lanky Somali hosts. They were fine-boned and caramel-coloured, with tousled hair and light blue food-worker shirts bearing the Prantalay company logo – the only shirts they owned, it turned out. They shook hands with each of us in their demure, super-polite Asian way, the left hand on the right forearm, their eyes cast to the ground. For a group of liberated hostages they seemed very subdued. I guessed they were suffering from a form of shock.

Only one of them, Hassan Pan Aung, spoke any English, but eventually the outlines of an extraordinary tale of suffering and adventure emerged. They had been in captivity for fifteen months, and had only been freed following pressure applied by some local elders. Ducaysane Ahmed, a government official in a smart jacket and tie with a Puntland flag in his lapel, was on hand at the Global Hotel to take credit for that – although it was clear that the poverty of these Burmese had played its part. The pirates had concluded, eventually, that these men were worthless as hostages. Five Thai crew members, the master and his four officers, were less fortunate, and had not been released.

‘We were so lucky to be Burmese from a shit-poor country like our Burma,’ as Pan Aung later put it to an interviewer from the
Myanmar Times.
⁸

Pan Aung recounted how, in early 2010, his boat and two sister ships, the
Prantalays 11
and
14
, had left the Thai port of Ranong on the Andaman coast bound for the fishing grounds off Djibouti, 6,000 kilometres away across the Indian Ocean. Their trip was certainly not illegal, as apologists for piracy used to claim. Pan Aung was even able to produce a licence issued by the Djibouti Ministère de l’Elevage et de la Mer for the trapping of lobster, mud crab and
blue swimming crab. At 106 tons and 27 metres long, the wooden-hulled
Prantalay 12
was small and slow, with a low freeboard designed for the easy recovery of traps and nets. She was the easiest kind of prey for the pirates, of whom there were twenty-five, in two speedboats. They were wearing camouflage uniforms and were so heavily armed that the fishermen thought at first they must be a legitimate naval patrol.

‘It was only when they were on our boat that we knew they were mother-fucking Somalis,’ said Pan Aung in the same interview in the
Myanmar Times
(a weekly international journal published, in English, by editors evidently untroubled by profanity).

All three boats in the fleet were taken, along with about seventy crewmen, sixty of whom were reportedly Burmese.

And so their adventure began. Pan Aung’s captors were based near the port of Garacad on the southern edge of Puntland. They didn’t stay there for long, however, but put the Prantalay fleet to use as ‘motherships’, with the hostage crews kept on board for use as human shields. Until 2009, the pirates tended to restrict their attacks to their home waters and the Gulf of Aden, but international naval patrols had made that old hunting ground less attractive than before. Motherships allowed them to range much deeper into the Indian Ocean – a response that the world’s admirals apparently never anticipated. Pan Aung and his shipmates found themselves travelling half way home again. Their captors took the
Prantalay 12
as far as the coast of Sri Lanka. Eight months after the boat was pirated, they were cruising for a target in the Lakshadweep Islands, 200 kilometres south-west of Kerala, when one of the Burmese, 28-year-old Yan Aung Soe, managed to jump overboard and was rescued by the Indian Navy.

Throughout their ordeal, according to Pan Aung, the pirate
bosses back in Garacad were in touch with the bosses of the Prantalay Marketing Company, in whose name the boats were registered, demanding a cool $9m for each of them. Prantalay was a fair-sized frozen seafood specialist with profits of $49m in 2011, but the company refused to pay. The pirates steadily lowered their demands as the months went by, yet Prantalay wouldn’t even enter into negotiations. The frustrated pirates began to starve their captives, and kept them hydrated with water contaminated by filth and salt. Pan Aung betrayed no emotion as he described how, one by one, his shipmates succumbed to strange swellings in their limbs and developed breathing difficulties. The sickness was so severe that five of them eventually died and were buried at sea.
*

Their troubles were not over yet. One night, back at last on their remote Garacad anchorage, an argument broke out between the crews of two pirated vessels. The anchorage was small and crowded with captured fishing boats, and there weren’t enough mooring spaces to go around. The squabble turned into a firefight that only stopped when one of the shooters was hit. Pan Aung, who was thirty-six, said the pirates were ‘young boys, like my sons’. He added that they were ‘always’ high on qat, although on that night many of them were drunk as well.

In the melee, a drunken pirate at the controls of the
Prantalay 12
selected the wrong gear and crashed into another boat, splitting her bow. No longer seaworthy, she was moved to another village anchorage where she had languished until one night the previous month, when strong winds had caused the anchor cable to give way. Pirates and captives abandoned ship as the
Prantalay 12
drifted on to rocks and sank. The recriminations on the beach quickly turned violent, and lasted all night. Pan Aung described how the hostages had dug themselves into the sand as the gunfire zipped back and forth above their heads. The following morning they were marched for two days through the desert, where they were held first at one pirate camp, then at another. This was another fraught period when they thought they might be killed at any minute; no one had told them that the pirate chiefs had in fact begun the negotiations that led to their eventual release.
*

The other crewmen sat in patient silence as Pan Aung talked, understanding nothing. I handed them half a packet of cigarettes which they fell upon ravenously, passing it back and back until it was empty. Four or five of them missed out on the windfall, yet I saw no disappointment in their faces or even any change of expression. We sent out for a box of two hundred Marlboros, and asked if they had eaten recently. Not since yesterday, they said; and in any case the hotel kitchens were now closed for the day because it was Ramadan. Ducaysane, embarrassed, went to find the manager, and soon the ship’s cook from the
Prantalay 12
was hard at work in the outdoor canteen, cheerfully preparing a tureen full of macaroni.

I asked if any of them had had a chance to contact their families yet, and again they shook their heads. They had been free for nearly 24 hours, but none of them had thought to ask to borrow a phone, and none of the Somali officials had offered. We foreigners produced our mobiles, and a minute or two later Pan Aung was speaking to his wife
in Ranong for the first time in fifteen months. It was the sort of golden emotional moment that in a Hollywood movie would be accompanied by the full string section of an orchestra. Pan Aung, however, merely smiled. He did not weep or dance for joy or even raise his voice much, and he kept his conversation short and matter-of-fact. Alan Cole, the UNODC man, shook his head in awe at this display of reserve and self-control.

‘It’s extraordinary, isn’t it?’ he murmured. ‘Any European would be in bits after what they’ve all been through.’

It was three months before the crew of the
Prantalay 12
were able to leave Garowe’s Global Hotel. After long negotiations Thailand refused to take them, and they were returned to Rangoon, even though they had been employed by a Thai firm when they were captured, and most of them had families residing in Thailand. Hassan Pan Aung had lived in Ranong for over nineteen years. Their treatment by the Prantalay Marketing Company was disturbing by Western standards, although Alan Cole said it was not unusual.

These Burmese were not high-profile victims like the rescued British yachting couple, Paul and Rachel Chandler, or the proselytizing Californians, Scott and Jean Adam, who were murdered aboard their yacht, the
Quest
, in early 2011. They were stateless, impoverished migrant workers of a sort often found below decks in the Far East’s under-regulated and poorly paid fisheries industry. The firms who employed them commonly treated them as expendable. With no family money behind them and no one to champion their cause, trawler crews from the Far East could languish for years in pirate captivity. Or, far from the gaze of the media, unnoticed and unloved, they could just as easily die of abuse, as five crewmen of the
Prantalay 12
had done.