Pirates’ Eyl
By Trends • Dec 18th, 2008The T-72s would give them immense firepower. But it’s unlikely they would be able to handle battle tanks anyway. Ultimately, the Americans’ biggest concern is that the booty the pirates extort from shipping companies could end up financing the Islamists, triggering a new offensive against the Western-backed government, now seemingly on its last legs. There is little solid evidence so far that the insurgents are taking any cut of the spoils, but it seems unlikely that they would ignore such a lucrative trade to fill their war chests.
There is a danger, too, that the insurgents could seek to control the flow of food aid shipped in to Somalia by sea. It could be used as a weapon, as the feuding warlords did in the early 1990s when 300,000 people starved to death. The Sudanese did the same in their seemingly endless civil war. Several food ships were hijacked in 2007, although that has abated.
‘Pack of wolves.’ John S. Burnett, a former relief worker in Somalia in the late 1990s and a yachtsman who experienced piracy up close and personal when his vessel was attacked in the South China Sea a few years back, gives a chilling account of how the pirates operate.
“Hijacking a huge cargo vessel or cruise ship is not difficult,” says the author of “Dangerous Waters – Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas.” “The pirate boats, small fiberglass skiffs, are launched from mother ships stationed far offshore that have plotted the course of their unsuspecting prey.”
“Pirates are armed with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns, and they are equipped with satellite phones, GPS [Global Positioning Systems] and small-boat radar. Merchant vessels – the lumbering, slow-moving beasts of world commerce – are soft targets; except for a few fire hoses blasting outboard, they are defenseless.”
“Pirates surround the target vessel like a pack of wolves, shoot up the ship, and if the master of the vessel is unable to evade capture, they swarm barefooted and screaming over the vessel and take control. With a gun at his back, the master is ordered to steer the ship into a den along the Somali coast.”
The pirates operate with relative impunity around the tiny cliff-ringed port of Eyl in the semi-autonomous region of Puntland in northeastern Somalia, or out of Xaradheere, a fishing village further south that’s long been a haven for smugglers. Intelligence services believe that more than 300-400 hostages, men and women taken by the Somali buccaneers, are held there, along with at least 14 captured tankers, freighter and other ships. The pirates are demanding ransoms of $1 million or more per ship.
Eyl, a grubby little town of one-storey stone and adobe buildings, and others like it along the lawless coast, are economically dependent on the piracy trade, which has become big business. There’s a boom in restaurants to feed the captives, the pirates and the industry that has grown up around their depredations – boatyards, accountants, merchants and the melee of hangers-on and parasites that organized crime invariably produces.
Many of the pirates who are operating in northern Puntland have become local heroes, flashing their newfound wealth and building palatial mansions. Their lifestyle has attracted many young men to the pirate’s trade. “Back in 2005, there were just five Somali pirate gangs, with fewer than 100 gunmen,” says Andrew Mwangura, who monitors the pirates’ depredations as head of the East African Seafarers’ Assistance Program south of Somalia in Mombasa, Kenya’s main port.
“Now that youths who used to work as bodyguards for warlords or as militia for the government now see the rewards available at sea, our estimate is that there are between 1,100 and 1,200 pi-rates,” he adds.
Pirate dens. Peter Beaumont, a correspondent for Britain’s Observer newspaper, reported in October after visiting Eyl that the port “has become the modern era’s equivalent of Tortuga, the historic Haitian base of the notorious Welsh pirate Henry Morgan. It suddenly bustles with the pirates’ go-betweens, the accountants and middlemen and negotiators in their four-wheel drives each time a new captive ship is sailed in…”
“Most of the big money, usually 10-20 percent of that demanded by the hijackers, is moved quickly along the line to the so-called ‘Big Fish’ in the clans – in the government of the provincial capital, in Mogadishu, and in the Somalian diaspora in Nairobi and Dubai where those behind the piracy are allegedly to be found.”
Puntland officials say there’s little they can do to curb the attacks. “These pirates are well armed groups with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons,” says Mohamoud Qabowsade, a Puntland government adviser. “Even superpower governments have been unable to chase away the pirates. What do you think a feeble, semi-autonomous Puntland government can do?”
But according to diplomatic sources, the entire governmental infrastructure of Puntland is geared to accommodate the pirates and smugglers who thrive along its desolate and dangerous coast.
