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Summary
Summary
Somalia, on the tip of the Horn of Africa, has been inhabited as far back as 9,000 BC. Its history is as rich as the country is old. Caught up in a decades-long civil war, Somalia, along with Iraq and Afghanistan, has become one of the most dangerous countries in the world. Getting there from North America is a forty-five-hour, five-flight voyage through Frankfurt, Dubai, Djibouti, Bossaso (on the Gulf of Aden), and, finally, Galkayo. Somalia is a place where a government has been built out of anarchy.
For centuries, stories of pirates have captured imaginations around the world. The recent bands of daring, ragtag pirates off the coast of Somalia, hijacking multimillion-dollar tankers owned by international shipping conglomerates, have brought the scourge of piracy into the modern era.
The capture of the American-crewed cargo ship Maersk Alabama in April 2009, the first United States ship to be hijacked in almost two centuries, catapulted the Somali pirates onto prime-time news. Then, with the horrific killing by Somali pirates of four Americans, two of whom had built their dream yacht and were sailing around the world ("And now on to: Angkor Wat! And Burma!" they had written to friends), the United States Navy, Special Operation Forces, FBI, Justice Department, and the world's military forces were put on notice: the Somali seas were now the most perilous in the world.
Jay Bahadur, a journalist who dared to make his way into the remote pirate havens of Africa's easternmost country and spend months infiltrating their lives, gives us the first close-up look at the hidden world of the pirates of war-ravaged Somalia.
Bahadur's riveting narrative exposé--the first ever--looks at who these men are, how they live, the forces that created piracy in Somalia, how the pirates spend the ransom money, how they deal with their hostages. Bahadur makes sense of the complex and fraught regional politics, the history of Somalia and the self-governing region of Puntland (an autonomous region in northeast Somalia), and the various catastrophic occurrences that have shaped their pirate destinies. The book looks at how the unrecognized mini-state of Puntland is dealing with the rise--and increasing sophistication--of piracy and how, through legal and military action, other nations, international shippers, the United Nations, and various international bodies are attempting to cope with the present danger and growing pirate crisis.
A revelation of a world at the epicenter of political and natural disaster.
Author Notes
Jay Bahadur 's articles have appeared in The Times (London), The New York Times, the Financial Times, and the Globe and Mail (Toronto). He has advised the United States State Department and has worked as a freelance correspondent for CBS News. He lives in Toronto.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The inner workings of the world of Somali pirates are astutely explored by Bahadur, a journalist who embedded himself among them to detail how "a level of international naval cooperation unprecedented in human history has been unable to stop a motley assortment of half-starved brigands armed with aging assault rifles and the odd grenade launcher." It's an engaging account, full of solid analysis about the collapse of Somalia and the tight-knit clan and subclan networks that keep a failed state from dissolving into complete anarchy while fostering conditions ideally suited to ocean-going criminality. Few other economic options exist for young men along this harsh coastline, largely because of abusive fishing practices by foreign trawler fleets. The institutionalization of these hijackings has created an economic order among the pirates not unlike other forms of organized crime. Coupled with the widespread addiction to the narcotic herb khat, conditions for wiping out piracy may be impossible to achieve. Still Bahadur's interviews with the pirates reveal that they rarely relish criminality; it's genuine desperation that motivates them. What's especially impressive (aside from Bahadur's sheer nerve in insinuating himself among these dangerous men in a lawless corner of the world) is the amassing of multiple perspectives-of pirates and policymakers-that support a rich, suspenseful account. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Bored with his job in marketing research, Bahadur decided to travel to Somalia in 2008-09 to investigate maritime brigandage. His boldness results in an insightful report based on interviewing pirates in their lairs, educing their rationales for hijacking ships, figuring out the finances of piracy, and embedding the whole phenomenon in the clan-based society from which it emanates. He alighted in the Puntland region, whose bleak landscapes and crumbling buildings he economically describes as he recounts jouncing trips on pot-holed roads through trackless desert. Conducted during hours-long sessions of chewing the stimulant drug khat, Bahadur's conversations captured pirates' life stories and their apologia for buccaneering. They cynically claimed to be protecting Somali territorial waters. For their hostages' views, Bahadur went to a pirate cove, in which a captured ship lay at anchor. Not permitted to speak with the captive crew, he gathered its members' accounts after they were ransomed and released. Bahadur's revelatory journalism and astute analysis of causes and solutions prove far more informative than any TV footage about the contemporary piracy problem.--Taylor, Gilber. Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ON April 8, 2009, the Maersk Alabama, a 17,000-ton United States cargo vessel, was hijacked by four Somali pirates several hundred miles east of Mogadishu. Bobbing in a lifeboat with the skipper, 53-year-old Richard Phillips, they began negotiating with the ship's owners via cellphone for a multimillion-dollar ransom. For five days, the pirates and their hostage drifted in the Indian Ocean, shadowed by the U.S.S. Bainbridge, a destroyer that arrived at the scene not long after the hijacking. At dusk on April 12, Navy snipers killed three of the Somalis, and Phillips was rescued unharmed. The surviving pirate was seized and taken to the United States, where he pleaded guilty in a Manhattan courtroom to a host of charges and was sentenced to 33 years and nine months in a federal prison. The hijacking of the Alabama, the first seizure of an American-flagged vessel in 200 years, drew the country's attention to the return of a scourge once associated with plank-walks, treasure chests and peg-legged marauders. But, as Jay Bahadur makes clear in "The Pirates of Somalia," buccaneering has evolved into a very modern activity, complete with night vision goggles, GPS units and even investment advisers. In the fall of 2008, Bahadur, a young Canadian, quit his job writing market-research reports in Chicago and flew in an aging Russian Antonov to Puntland, a breakaway region of northeastern Somalia that has become, as he puts it, "the epicenter" of the piracy business. Braving the constant threat of kidnapping, he ingratiated himself with pirate bosses and their crews and made a risky trip through the desert to Eyl, the remote enclave where present-day Somali piracy was born. Bahadur has gone deep in exploring the causes of this seaborne crime wave, charting its explosive growth and humanizing the brigands who have eluded some of the world's most powerful navies. The way Bahadur tells it, the piracy industry gained force in the 1990s, after the outbreak of Somalia's civil war. The first targets, commercial lobster-fishing vessels, were trawling off the coast of Puntland. Because they used steel-pronged drag fishing nets, Bahadur explains, "these foreign trawlers did not bother with nimble explorations of the reefs." Instead, "they uprooted them, netting the future livelihoods of the nearby coastal people along with the days' catch." A small group of aggrieved fishermen, led by a pirate called Boyah (whom Bahadur interviewed at a farm near the flyblown Puntland capital, Garowe) began capturing the trawlers and holding the crews for ransom. But after the commercial fishermen cut deals with southern warlords for protection, Boyah and his fellow pirates switched tactics, indiscriminately assaulting vessels that sailed into the vicinity of Eyl. As Somali piracy increased, resourceful characters like Mohamed Abdi Hassan, known as Afweyne ("Big Mouth"), from the central coastal town of Harardheere, brought a new sophistication to the business. Afweyne raised venture capital for his pirate operations, Bahadur writes, "as if he were launching a Wall Street I.P.O." Criminal gangs like his became highly organized, and the deployment of "motherships" allowed them to operate hundreds of miles from the coast. When a radical fundamentalist movement called the islamic Courts Onion seized control of the southern half of Somalia in 2006 and declared war on pirates in its territory, the Puntland operations gained unchallenged supremacy. And dodgy coast guard outfits hired by the Puntland government inadvertently provided on-the-job training to aspiring pirates, familiarizing them with sophisticated weapons, assault tactics and advanced navigation systems. In 2009, Puntland's newly elected president, Abdirahman Farole, a low-key former professor who seemed, Bahadur says, to abhor the pirates, ended the laissez-faire policies of his predecessors. But while he authorized the arrest and imprisonment of pirates, Farole has proven unwilling to attack their bases. To do so would risk plunging clan-fractured Puntland into civil war. It wasn't until October 2008 - when NATO, the European Union and the United States committed significant naval forces to patrol the main shipping route - that the international community began to respond. The Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor, a heavily patrolled safety zone, now runs for about 400 miles along the Yemeni side of the Gulf of Aden. Yet lumbering destroyers are often no match for small groups of marauders in nimble skiffs. "Hunting pirates," Bahadur remarks, "must seem like playing a losing game of Whac-a-Mole." Moreover, what the pirates sometimes lack in technology and firepower, they have compensated for in adaptability. After Western nations began positioning naval vessels outside key harbors, the pirates simply tied their skiffs to the backs of 4x4s and set sail from remote beaches. The payment of seven-figure ransoms, an inexhaustible supply of unemployed young men, a highly romanticized pirate culture and continued Somali chaos have undermined efforts at interdiction. From 2008 to 2010, Bahadur reports, the number of attacks nearly doubled, with only a small drop in the rate of success. Bahadur captures the inner workings of Somali piracy in extraordinary detail. The organizational structure of typical pirate cells, he explains, includes not just attackers, interpreters, accountants and cooks: almost every group also has its supplier of khat, a plant flown into Somalia by the ton every day from Kenya and Ethiopia and chewed for an addictive high. Like low-level urban crack dealers, the pirates at the bottom rung of the hierarchy make barely enough to survive. But, high or low, these brigands practice some peculiar rituals. After receiving his cut of the ransom on the captured ship, one pirate tells Bahadur, each man must toss his mobile phone into the ocean - a precaution to make sure no one can call ahead to his kin to arrange an ambush of his fellow cell members. Bahadur seems to admire the pirates' audacity and resourcefulness, yet at the same time he avoids glamorizing them. If the first wave of Somali pirates consisted mostly of "fishermen vigilantes," Bahadur writes, the new generation is far more cynical, exuding "cold ruthlessness" and demonstrating a proclivity for torture and violence. NOT all of Bahadur's encounters are edifying. There are too many long-winded conversations with desperadoes who present the same tire-some self-justifications (they were pushed into their crimes because of abuses carried out by commercial fishing vessels) and the same dubious assertions that piracy would disappear if illegal fishing were halted. A lengthy excursion to meet low-level pirates in a maximum security prison in Kenya - a dumping ground for outlaws captured in international waters - doesn't add much to the narrative. But the book ends with a flourish, with Bahadur's account of his road trip to Eyl, a hellhole by the sea where swaggering young pirates lord over a cowed population. Sitting immobilized in the harbor is the MV Victoria, a German freighter hijacked while transporting rice to the Saudi Arabian port of Jeddah. For the captive crew, weeks of boredom and terror end the way such episodes usually do, in this case with a $1.8 million ransom dropped by parachute. A solution to the scourge of Somali piracy, as Bahadur's brave and exhaustively reported book makes clear, won't fall into place so easily. Jay Bahadur, a Canadian journalist, has gone deep in exploring Somalia's seaborne crime wave. A Somali pirate in January 2010, with a captured Greek cargo ship anchored offshore. Joshua Hammer, a former Newsweek bureau chief, is a freelance foreign correspondent. He is writing a book about German colonialism in southern Africa.
Kirkus Review
AToronto-based journalist debuts with a rare inside look at the pirates preying on tourist and commercial ships off the coast of Somalia.Present-day piracy in the region began two decades ago, writes Bahadur, at the onset of a civil war in the impoverished, Muslim state of Somalia. At first, coast dwellersrebel groups, militias and warlordsextorted "fines" from foreign fishing vessels that had devastated the lobster population. When such vessels armed themselves, the pirates began attacking commercial fishing fleets. By 2009, the buccaneers won world attention with hijackings of three vessels: a Ukrainian transport ship with a cargo of tanks; a Saudi supertanker carrying $100 million in crude oil; and the American cargo vesselMaersk Alabama, an incident that ended with action by Navy SEAL snipers. Winning entrance to pirate enclaves through the son of Abdirahman Farole, president of the autonomous region of Puntland, the author spent six weeks conducting interviews. Traveling with bodyguards and sharing a supply ofkhat, a popular drug, Bahadur talked with pirate leaders, officials and former hostages. "We're not murderers," said Abdullahi Abshir, who has hijacked more than 25 ships. "We've never killed anyone, we just attack ships." Another pirate explained how he turned piracy into a business by introducing investors, guidance technology and motherships from which pirates operate deep into the Indian Ocean. Bahadur captures the private lives of the pirates as well as their increasingly organized and sophisticated ways. A 2010 hijacking garnered a $9.5 million ransom for an oil tanker. Attacks now occur over such a huge ocean area that the multinational naval task forces patrolling off the 1,000-mile Somali coast remain "unable to stop a motley assortment of brigands armed with aging assault rifles."A nicely crafted, revealing report.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Few people go searching for pirates, but Canadian freelance journalist Bahadur traveled to the Puntland region of northeast Somalia, a self-governing area not officially recognized, to interview some of today's deadly pirates. With two bodyguards, a Somali host, and a reporter's remarkable ability to set aside fear to find a story, Bahadur ventured into this African locale known to most of us for war, famine, and piracy. His accounts of his time are remarkably unbiased by the reports of piracy we hear through Western news outlets. Through a mix of interviews, regional history, and political statistics, Bahadur debunks myths about the roots and practices of Somali pirates and presents a remarkable analysis of piracy along the coast of the Horn of Africa. He gets bogged down in statistical detail from time to time, but his reports of his exchanges with these buccaneers are gripping enough to carry his narrative through. Verdict This intrepid reporter's fascinating account of piracy is a worthwhile read for scholars of Africa and general audiences alike.-Veronica Arellano, St. Mary's Coll. of Maryland Lib., St. Mary's City (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Prologue Where the White Man Runs Away It was my first trip to Africa. I arrived in Somalia in the frayed seat of a 1970s Soviet Antonov propeller plane, heading into the internationally unrecognized region of Puntland on a solo quest to meet some present-day pirates. The 737s of Dubai, with their meal services and functioning seatbelts, were a distant memory; the plane I was in was not even allowed to land in Dubai, and the same probably went for the unkempt, ill-tempered Ukrainian pilot. To the ancient Egyptians, Punt had been a land of munifi cent treasures and bountiful wealth; in present times, it was a land of people who robbed wealth from the rest of the world. Modern Puntland, a self-governing region in northeastern Somalia, may or may not be the successor to the Punt of ancient times, but I was soon to discover that it contained none of the gold and ebony that dazzled the Egyptians--save perhaps for the colours of the sand and the skin of the nomadic goat and camel herders who had inhabited it for centuries. The cabin absorbed the heat of the midday African sun like a Dutch oven, thickening the air until it was unbearable to breathe. Sweat poured freely off my skin and soaked into the torn cloth of my seat cover. Male passengers fanned themselves with the Russian-language aircraft safety cards; the women fanned their children. The high whine of the Antonov's propellers changed pitch as it accelerated along the Djibouti runway, building towards a droning cres cendo that I had not heard outside of decades-old movies. The stories I had heard of these planes did nothing to put me at ease: a vodka-soaked technician banging on exposed engine parts with a wrench; a few months prior, a plant-nosed landing at Bossaso airstrip after a front landing strut had refused to extend. Later, in Bossaso, I saw the grounded craft, abandoned where it had crashed, a few lackadaisical guards posted nearby to prevent people from stripping the valuable metal. This fl ight was like a forgotten relic of the Cold War, a physical testament to long-defunct Somali-Soviet geopolitical ties that had disintegrated with the countries themselves; its Ukrainian crew, indentured servants condemned forever to ferry passengers along this neglected route. Over the comm system, the Somali steward offered a prayer in triplicate: Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, as the plane gained speed. The whine heightened to a mosquito-like buzz and we left the ground behind, setting an eastward course for Somalia, roughly shadowing the Gulf of Aden coastline. ∫∫∫ As I approached my thirty-fifth weary hour of travel, my desire to socialize with fellow passengers had diminished, but on purely self-serving grounds I forced myself to chat eagerly with anyone throwing a curious glance in my direction. I had never met my Somali host, Mohamad Farole, and any friend I made on the plane was a potential roof over my head if my ride didn't show. Remaining alone at the landing strip was not an option; news travels around Somalia as fast as the ubiquitous cellphone towers are able to transmit it, and a lone white man bumming around the airstrip would be public knowledge sooner than I cared to contemplate. When he learned that I was travelling to Garowe, Puntland's capital city, the bearded man sitting next to me launched into the unfortunate tale of the last foreigner he knew to make a similar voyage: a few months previous, a Korean man claiming to be a Muslim had turned up in the capital, alone and unannounced. Not speaking a word of Somali, he nonetheless succeeded in fi nding a residence and beginning a life in his unusual choice of adoptive homeland. He lasted almost two weeks. On his twelfth day in Puntland, a group of rifle-toting gunmen accosted the man in broad daylight as he strolled unarmed through the streets. Rather than let himself be taken hostage, the Korean made a fight of it, managing to struggle free and run. He made it several metres before one of his bemused would-be captors casually shot him in the leg. The shot set off a hue and cry, and in the ensuing clamour the gunmen dispersed and someone helped the man reach a medical clinic. I later learned from another source that he was a fugitive, on the run from the Korean authorities. His thought process, I could only assume, was that Somalia was the last place on earth that his government would look for him. He was probably right. ∫∫∫ Just a few months earlier, I had been a recent university graduate, killing the days writing tedious reports for a market research fi rm in Chicago, and trying to break into journalism with the occasional cold pitch to an unresponsive editor. I had no interest in journalism school, which I thought of as a waste of two of the best years of my life--years that I should spend in the fray, learning how to do my would-be job in places where no one else would go. Somalia was a good candidate, jockeying with Iraq and Afghanistan for the title of the most dangerous country in the world. The country had commanded a soft spot in my heart since my PoliSci days, when I had wistfully dreamt of bringing the astounding democratic success of the tiny self-declared Republic of Somaliland (Puntland's western neighbour) to the world's attention. The headline-grabbing hijacking of the tank transport MV Faina in September 2008 presented me with a more realistic opportunity. I sent out some feelers to a few Somali news services, and within ten minutes had received an enthusiastic response from Radio Garowe, the lone news outlet in Puntland's capital city. After a few long emails and a few short phone calls with Radio Garowe's founder, Mohamad Farole, I decided to buy a ticket to Somalia. It took multiple tickets, as it turned out. Getting to Somalia was an aerophobe's nightmare--a forty-five-hour voyage that took me through Frankfurt, Dubai, Djibouti, Bossaso, and finally Galkayo. In Dubai, I joined the crowd of diaspora Somalis, most making short visits to see their families, pushing cart upon cart overfl owing with goods from the outside world. Curious eyes began to glance my way, scanning, no doubt, for signs of mental instability. I was in no position to help them make the diagnosis; by the first leg of my trip, I had already lost the ability to judge objectively whether what I was doing was sane or not. News reports of the numerous journalists kidnapped in Puntland fixated my imagination. I channelled the hours of nervous energy into studying the lone Somali language book I had been able to dig up at the public library; I scribbled answers to exercises into my notebook with an odd sense of urgency, as if cramming for an exam that would take place as soon as I set foot in Somalia. The last white face disappeared at Djibouti's dilapidated, near-deserted airport, as American F-16s performed eardrum-shattering training manoeuvres overhead. By the time the plane landed in Galkayo, I was the only non-Somali passenger on board. Excerpted from The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World by Jay Bahadur All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Map of Somalia | p. ix |
| Map: Expansion of Pirate Operations | p. x |
| Prologue: Where the White Man Runs Away | p. 1 |
| 1 Boyah | p. 13 |
| 2 A Short History of Piracy | p. 25 |
| 3 Pirate Lore | p. 45 |
| 4 Of Pirates, Coast Guards, and Fishermen | p. 57 |
| 5 Garaad | p. 77 |
| 6 Flower of Paradise | p. 89 |
| 7 The Land of Punt | p. 109 |
| 8 Momman | p. 127 |
| 9 The Policemen of the Sea | p. 137 |
| 10 The Law of the Sea | p. 155 |
| 11 Into the Pirates'Lair | p. 171 |
| 12 Pirate Insider | p. 189 |
| 13 The Cadet and the Chief | p. 205 |
| 14 The Freakonomics of Piracy | p. 223 |
| 15 The Road's End | p. 235 |
| Epilogue: The Problems of Puntland | p. 243 |
| Appendix 1 Simplified Somali Clan Tree | p. 256 |
| Appendix 2 The Victoria Gang | p. 259 |
| Appendix 3 Piracy Timeline | p. 267 |
| Acknowledgements | p. 271 |
| Notes | p. 273 |
| Index | p. 289 |
