The Pirates of Puntland

[Jacaylbaro]

 

 

Over the last week, there has been quite a major development in the direction of my career.

 

With a group of friends, I have begun work on an online international news start up, YouNewsOnline.com. The site will feature video and other multimedia contributed by users, which will then be fleshed out and editorialized by our staff--transformed, in essence, from YouTube videos into news. Our basic aim is to create a worldwide nation of "citizen journalists," in which our correspondents will be ordinary people on the street--anyone in possession of a cell phone camera, a video recorder, or even a point-and-click.

 

We're currently attempting to generate an internet buzz and to solicit submissions for the site's launch. If you would like to support us, I strongly encourage you to visit the above link and become a follower of the blog, as well as our twitter and Facebook pages. And please don't forget to re-post and re-tweet--the more the better.

 

Lastly, if you have any advice, suggestions, or would like to assist in some other way, I would love to hear from you.

[Jacaylbaro]

HALKAN

[Amistad]

.

[Mr. Somalia]

I don't understand the significance of this, JB--but I do like this photo on that link. Isn't the sea just beautiful?

 

[Thankful]

This guy is coming out with a book called the Pirates of Puntland. I heard about it years ago, so I am not sure why it hasn't come out. (Or maybe it already has).

 

We will see what he says!

 

Jay Bahadur is working on a book The Pirates of Puntland, with news agency Garowe Online (garoweonline.com). E-mail:

piratesofpuntland@gmail.com

[Amistad]

His name is Jay Bahadur, six figure deal to have the book on the shelf this year. Nice guy, did some serious time in Puntland and visiting pirates....his book tells the pirate side and story.

 

I think it will be very fair and balanced from the conversations I have had with him.

[Thankful]

JB might want to invest in some pirates, because they would have done a better job stopping 300 armed fighters from travelliing by sea to his enclave!

 

His so-called navy needs to limit the khat breaks!

[Mr. Somalia]

^

lol...

[Mr. Somalia]

Originally posted by Amistad:

His name is Jay Bahadur, six figure deal to have the book on the shelf this year. Nice guy, did some serious time in Puntland and visiting pirates....his book tells the pirate side and story.

 

I think it will be very fair and balanced from the conversations I have had with him.

From reading Jay Bahadur's previous articles, I think his forthcoming book will do justice by shedding light on the true causes and consequences of piracy in the Horn of Africa.

 

'I'm not a pirate, I'm the saviour of the sea'

 

Who are the pirate bands menacing commercial and tourist shipping off Somalia? Our writer meets one of the leaders

 

by Jay Bahadur

 

Asking my first question through my interpreter, I hesitate to use the word “pirate”. Somali pirates are aware enough of themselves in the international media that the word has become part of their vernacular but its closest Somali translation is burcad badeed, which means “ocean robber”, a political statement I am anxious to avoid. Boyah likes to refer to him and his comades as badaadinta badah, “saviours of the sea”, a term that is most often translated in the English-speaking media as “coastguard”. Boyah jokes that he is the “Chief of the Coastguard”, a title he evokes with pride. To him, his actions have been about protecting his sea; his hijackings, a legitimate form of taxation levied in abstentia on behalf of a defunct government that he represents in spirit, if not in law.

 

His story is typical of many who have turned to piracy since the onset of the civil war. Fourteen years ago, he was still working as a lobster diver in Eyl - “one of the best”, he says. Since then, according to Boyah, these reefs off Eyl have been devastated by foreign fishing fleets - mostly Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean - using steel-pronged dragnets. He says that there are no longer lobsters to be found locally, a claim partially corroborated by a 2005 UN Development Project report into the depletion of local stocks.

 

From 1995 to 1997, Boyah and others captured three foreign fishing vessels, keeping the catch and ransoming the crew. He boasts that he received an $800,000 bounty for one ship. When the foreign fishing fleets entered into protection contracts with local warlords, making armed guards and anti-aircraft guns fixtures on ships, Boyah and his men went after commercial shipping vessels instead.

 

Boyah says that there are about 500 pirates operating in the area, over whom he serves as “chairman”. Eyl's pirate groups function as a loose confederation, and Boyah is a key organiser, recruiter, financier and mission commander, rather than a traditional crime boss, but he claims that all applicants for the position of Pirate (Eyl Division) must come to him. Boyah's sole criteria for a recruit are that he has to own a gun, and that he must “[be] a hero, and accept death” - qualities that grace the CVs of many local youth.

 

Turnover in Boyah's core group is low; when I ask if his men ever use their new-found wealth to leave Somalia, he laughs: “The only way they leave is when they die.” He adds that a member of his band departed last night, dying in his sleep of undisclosed reasons.

 

When it comes to targets, Boyah's standards are not very exacting. He says that his men go after any ship that wanders into their sights. He separates his prey into “commercial” and “tourist” ships. The commercial ships, identifiable by the cranes on their decks, are slower and easier to capture. Boyah has gone after too many of these to remember. He claims to employ different tactics for different ships, but the basic strategy is that several skiffs will approach from all sides, swarming like a waterborne wolfpack. If brandishing their weapons fails to frighten the ship's crew into stopping, they fire into the air. If that doesn't do it, and if the target ship is incapable of outperforming the 85 to 150 horsepower engines on their skiffs, they pull alongside their target, toss hooked rope ladders on to the decks and board the ship. Resistance is rare.

 

Boyah guesses that 20 to 30 per cent of attempted hijackings succeed. Speedy prey, technical problems, and foreign naval or domestic coastguard intervention account for the high rate of failure.

 

Captured ships are steered to Eyl, where guards and interpreters are brought to look after the hostages during the ransom negotiation. Once secured, the money - often routed through banks in London and Dubai and parachuted directly on to the deck of the ship - is split: half goes to the hijackers, a third to the investors who fronted cash for the ships and weapons, and 20 per cent to everyone else, from the guards to the translators (occasionally high school students on a summer break). Some money is also given as charity to the local poor; such largesse, Boyah tells me, has turned his merry band into Robin Hood figures.

 

When I ask where his men have obtained their training, he pithily responds that it comes “from famine”. This isn't the whole truth. Beginning in 1999, the government of Puntland launched a series of ill-fated attempts to establish an (official) regional Coastguard, efforts that each time ended with the dissolution of the contracting company and the dismissal of its employees. The new generation of Somali pirates - better trained, more efficiently organised and possessing superior equipment - can be traced in part to these failed experiments. When pressed, Boyah confirms that some of his men are former coastguard recruits, and he reveals another detail of the interwoven dynamic between pirates, coastguards and fishermen. He claims that the Puntland Coastguard of the late 1990s and early 2000s worked as a private militia for the protection of commercial trawlers in possession of official “fishing licences”, alienating local fishermen. Sometimes the situation escalated into confrontation and Boyah recounts that in 2001 his men seized several fishing vessels “licensed” by President Abdullahi Yusuf and protected by his coastguard force. Almost a decade before the rise in pirate hijackings hit the Gulf of Aden, the conditions for the coming storm were already recognisable.

 

Boyah's moral compass, like his body, seems to be split between sea and shore. “We're not murderers,” he says, “we've never killed anyone.” He warns me, half-jokingly, not to run into him in a boat, but assures me that he is quite harmless on land. He insists that he is not a criminal but that he knows what he is doing is wrong.

 

Boyah hasn't been on a mission for more than two months, for which he has a two-pronged explanation: “I got sick and became rich.” He has called for an end to hijackings albeit from a position of luxury that most do not enjoy. I ask him whether his ceasefire was motivated by the recent deployment to the region of a Nato task force. “No,” he says, “it has nothing to do with that. It's a moral issue. We realised that we didn't have public support.” That support, according to Boyah, took a plunge last summer when a delegation of clan and religious leaders visited Eyl and declared that dealing with pirates is haram - religiously forbidden. Nato deliberations regarding possible missile strikes on Eyl, though, do not worry Boyah: “Only civilians live there, it would be illegal for them to attack. If they do...that's OK. We believe in God. Force alone cannot stop us,” he says vehemently, “we don't care about death.”

 

Throughout our interview, Boyah has looked uninterested but when I ask him to recount his most exhilarating raid, he brightens up, launching into the story of the Golden Nori. In October 2007, he captured the Japanese chemical tanker about eight nautical miles off the northern Somali coast, only to be surrounded by the US Navy. Boyah recalls seven naval vessels encircling him. He recites by rote the identification numbers marking the sides of four of the vessels: 41, 56, 76, and 78 (the last being the destroyer USS Porter). Fortunately for them, the Golden Nori was carrying volatile chemicals, including the extremely flammable compound benzene.

 

The stand-off dragged on for months and he claims that they “almost abandoned the ship so we wouldn't start eating the crew”. Eventually, Boyah ordered the ship into the harbour at Bosasso, Puntland's big port and most populous city. In case the Nori's explosive cargo proved an insufficient deterrent, Boyah added the defensive screen provided by the presence of the city's civilian population.

 

His perseverance paid off. After extensive negotiations, a ransom of $1.5million was secured for the ship and its crew. The US military guaranteed Boyah and his team safe passage off the hijacked ship and Puntland's security forces could only watch as US gunships escorted the pirate skiffs to land and allowed them to disembark. Why did he and his men trust the Americans? “Because that was the agreement,” Boyah says. But I already know the real answer. Like many Western nations, the Americans wouldn't have known what to do with Boyah and his men if they had captured them. According to international law - to the extent that international law has any meaning in an utterly failed state - the Americans were not even supposed to be in Somali territorial waters.

 

The Golden Nori hijacking took place before the international community had become aware of the piracy problem, when foreign navies tended to give them a slap on the wrist. More recently, concerned states have begun to use the international legal instruments available - particularly a UN Security Council Resolution allowing entry into Somali waters - more rigorously. Foreign warships are increasingly excluding, detaining and rendering suspected pirates to neighbouring countries to face justice.

 

In April 2008, Boyah's gang seized a French luxury yacht on route from the Seychelles to the Mediterranean - what he refers to as a “tourist” ship. Boyah calls it the “Libant,” a clumsy fusion of its French name, Le Ponant. After delivering a ransom and freeing the hostages, French helicopters tracked the pirates to the village of Jariban. On the orders of President Sarkozy, French commandos laun ched “Operation Thalathine”: Special Forces snipers disabled the pirates' getaway vehicle and captured six men, later flying them to Paris to face trial. Such a determined pursuit was once a rarity but that incident, along with US use of navy SEAL snipers to kill pirates holding Captain Richard Phillips hostage this week, illustrates that the international community is now taking piracy more seriously. But a military solution alone is incapable of completely eradicating piracy off the Somali coast-certainly not one which is economically or politically feasible. Boyah's men have been captured or killed with increasing frequency (his brother is sitting in a local prison), yet imprisoning them is almost useless: for each pirate captured, there are dozens of young men desperate to replace them.

 

If there is a solution to the problem, it lies in economic principles: the cost-benefit analysis for these men must be shifted from piracy to more legitimate pursuits. Naval battle fleets can do their part to boost the “cost” side, but without the “benefit” of meaningful occupations on land, there will be no permanent resolution.

 

Boyah may have accumulated a small fortune, but how long his current state of affluence will last is unclear - he announces with pride how he has given his money away to his friends, to the poor and how he didn't build a house or a hotel like many of his more parsimonious co-workers. When asked about his future plans, Boyah is evasive. “That is up to the international community,” he says, “they need to solve the problem of illegal fishing, the root of our troubles. We are waiting for action.”

 

Jay Bahadur is working on a book

The Pirates of Puntland

, with news agency Garowe Online (garoweonline.com). E-mail:

piratesofpuntland@gmail.com

 

Source:

 

[Amistad]

You need some new material Mr Somalia , no offense Amigo! That appears to be a little old.

 

It is a well known fact that this international war flotilla is having the reverse effect of protecting these Spanish poachers. And now talk of a British sponsored Mercenary Navy....thats just great. I hope some Intl Lawyers tear them a new Asshole.

 

I propose an Amnesty program to all pirates and give them paying jobs as the new Somalia Coast Guard. Easy thing for the Intel Comm to do if they would just get off their proverbial Asses and do it !

[Amistad]

Sorry JB....not trying to Hijack your thread ! );

[Mr. Somalia]

^

Oh, don't apologize to JB-- the man initiates a million pointless threads every single day. If you doubt me, check out his post count!

 

Amistad, all this brouhaha about fighting piracy off the coastline of Somalia is a western scheme to establish a permanent military armada afloat in that part of the world. We all know that AFRICOM has been in search of a place to set up shop in africa, and because of all the post-colonial implications that it can possible have, this excuse of theirs of fighting piracy in Somalia is just that-- an excuse: An excuse to give a home to AFRICOM. And the funny thing is the rest of the world is not buying it, especially China and other Asian countries, who have decided they too have the same right to use the same excuse of fighting piracy to send troops to that strategic zone of the horn of Africa.

 

Asia, Europe and America don't give a damn about piracy in Somalia. All they want is to use it as a cover to justify their strong military presence in that part of the world. But the good news for Somalis is...how long can all these countries sustain such a competition with their huge budget deficits and turmoil in their respective home economies?

[Jacaylbaro]

^ ^ That is the problem when a pirate wants to speak about Anti-piracy operations. Why don't u stop the piracy and see if those "westerns" go away ?? ,,,

[Mr. Somalia]

^Sxb, no such thing as piracy going on. Only a bunch of hardworking coastguards protecting the sea resources of their homeland from illegal fishing vessels and toxic waste dumpers.

 

Now come again, or must I illuminate it for you even further, considering the fact that khat has irreversibly impaired your faculties of comprehension.

[Jacaylbaro]

Originally posted by Mr. Somalia:

no such thing as piracy going on. Only a bunch of hardworking coastguards protecting the sea resources of their homeland from illegal fishing vessels and toxic waste dumpers.

Protecting by hijacking ships, getting ransom then releasing them ?? ,,, come on u can do better lad, try again.