Somalia Pirates Key Player
Mohamed Garfanji, Somalia's top pirate boss
Fathi Osman Kahir, a pirate middle manager
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In the heart of a Somali pirates' lair
HOBYO, Somalia — Piracy off the coast of Somalia is booming despite a massive deployment of international warships, with an estimated combined coast of 40 million dollars a day.
NATO, the European Union, United States and other naval powers have sent warships to curb the hijacking of ships yet the number currently under the control of Somali pirates stands at 22, one of its highest ever levels.
Hundreds of suspected pirates have been captured but most had to be released immediately for lack of evidence.
On his first encounter with foreign journalists, Mohamed Garfanji, Somalia's top pirate boss, talks sparingly and has the edginess of a wanted man who never lowers his guard and is always planning his next move.
His eyes only stop scanning his surroundings when he breaks his silence, speaking with an intense gaze that is both menacing and playful.
Speaking to AFP in the town of Wisil in central Somalia, he thumbs through his mobile phone picture gallery for shots he and his boys took of foreign tuna seiners off the coast of Hobyo, their nearby base.
"See this one? Only a few months ago, 20 miles from Hobyo... And this one, a big Spanish ship," Garfanji says, raising his eyebrows expectantly.
"Now your armies have sent their soldiers so you can continue to take our fish," he says, clenched fist and gold wrist watch sticking out of the sleeve of a warm dark blue bomber jacket.
His sidekicks nod silently as they devotedly chew their daily bundle of khat, a narcotic leaf widely consumed in Somalia and whose stimulant qualities make it particularly prized by pirates.
His is a Robin Hood narrative of Somali piracy as a struggle by dispossessed fishermen against vessels from Europe and Asia violating Somalia's exclusive economic zone and poaching its abundant tuna under naval protection.
Three centuries before him, charismatic pirate Black Sam Bellamy railed against the powers "who rob the poor under the cover of the law" while "we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage."
In Hobyo the following morning, one of his top lieutenants, Mohamed, stands on the beach, clutching his machine gun behind his neck like a balancing pole, ammunition belts snaking down from his shoulders.
The sand-charged wind blows his black-and-white checkered keffieh and cigarette smoke into his face as he squints at the imposing figure of a hijacked Korean supertanker anchored on the horizon.
"This one is bigger than Hobyo," he says proudly.
The Marshall Islands-flagged VLCC Samho Dream is a third of a kilometre long, one of three largest vessels ever hijacked by pirates, and carries an estimated 170 million dollars of Iraqi crude destined for the United States.
"Enough to buy the whole of Galkayo," Mohamed quips, in reference to the region's largest city, which straddles the border with the neighbouring semi-autonomous state of Puntland.
Fighting a losing battle against the sand that has already completely covered the old Italian port, Hobyo's scattering of rundown houses and shacks looks anything but the nerve centre of an activity threatening global shipping.
"We have no schools, no farming, no fishing. It's ground zero here," says chief local elder Abdullahi Ahmed Barre. "And our most pressing concern is the sand, the city is disappearing, we are being buried alive and can't resist."
Gathered in the gloom of the council building, the elders haven't seen a foreigner in years and the list of grievances is long.
"The nearest hospital is an eight-hour drive on a rough road", "The water is undrinkable, too salty", "When the tsunami struck, nobody helped", "This is one of the most peaceful parts of Somalia, why is there no assistance?"
Leaning discreetly against the door frame, Garfanji is listening keenly.
Hobyo pirates have collected millions of dollars in ransoms over the past two years. They even have currency checking and counting machines for the bags of air-dropped cash they receive.
Key players drive well-equipped Land Cruisers, have built new, slightly more stately houses and married more wives.
Yet Hobyo is anything but a booming town, so where does all the money go?
Residents say a significant portion of their income is lavished on post-ransom binges of khat, alcohol and prostitutes but the pirate leaders insist much of the cash is re-invested to expand.
"When we get more money, we recruit more," says Fathi Osman Kahir, a key Hobyo-based piracy "investor", who acts as a kind of pirate treasurer.
When a ship is hijacked, he pays for running costs such as increased onshore security, diesel for generators and basic supplies for captors and captives. When a ransom comes in, he takes the lion's share.
"There's up to 500 people working with us in Hobyo, that's 10 percent of the population and I'm just talking about the people on the ground... We have a hierarchy. What do you think we do? We pay wages too," he says.
A visit to Hobyo by the secretary of state for security of the fledgling local administration of Galmudug, Ismail Haji Noor, doesn't send the pirates scurrying into hiding.
"What am I going to do? Arrest them all? Even if I had the means as security minister to challenge them, it's pointless if I don't have something to offer, if nobody can provide an alternative," Noor says.
A former military man and a successful businessman who spent half of his life in Britain, Noor is lobbying donors in Nairobi for elusive development aid he hopes could make the pirates lay down their grapnels.
"There is no difference between life and death if you have nothing to eat... Of course, what we do is criminal, it's undeniable. We don't love what we are doing but there is no choice," says Kahir.
While Noor would like to see Hobyo's pirate army turned into a legitimate defence force and a coastguard protecting Somali waters from both residual piracy and illegal fishing, foreign assistance has not been forthcoming.
Now the biannual inter-monsoon season favourable to piracy is just around the corner and September may be too good to sit out even for the least committed of pirates.
On the beach of Hobyo, Mohamed Ali, a shark fisherman, says his catches are meagre, his fuel costs high and his boat inadequate.
"Being with the pirates has advantages and disadvantages," he admits. "I have not yet decided whether to join or not."
----------In Somali Civil War, Both Sides Embrace Pirates
1 Sep 2010, By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/world/africa/02pirates.html
HOBYO, Somalia - Ismail Haji Noor, a local government official, recently arrived in this notorious pirate den with a simple message: we need your help.
With the Shabab militant group sweeping across Somalia and the American-backed central government teetering on life support, Mr. Noor stood on a beach flanked by dozens of pirate gunmen, two hijacked ships over his shoulder, and announced, From now on we’ll be working together.
He hugged several well-known pirate bosses and called them brother and later explained that while he saw the pirates as criminals and eventually wanted to rehabilitate them, right now the Shabab were a much graver threat.
Squished between the two, we have to become friends with the pirates, Mr. Noor said. Actually, this is a great opportunity.
For years, Somalia’s heavily armed pirate gangs seemed content to rob and hijack on the high seas and not get sucked into the messy civil war on land. Now, that may be changing, and the pirates are taking sides both sides.
While local government officials in Hobyo have deputized pirate gangs to ring off coastal villages and block out the Shabab, down the beach in Xarardheere, another pirate lair, elders said that other pirates recently agreed to split their ransoms with the Shabab and Hizbul Islam, another Islamist insurgent group.
The militant Islamists had originally vowed to shut down piracy in Xarardheere, claiming it was unholy, but apparently the money was too good. This seems to be beginning of the West’s worst Somali nightmare, with two of the country’s biggest growth industries — piracy and Islamist radicalism joining hands.
Somalia’s pirates are famous opportunists we just want the money is their mantra so it is not clear how long these new alliances of convenience will last. But clan leaders along Somalia’s coast say that something different is in the salty air and that the pirates are getting more ambitious, shrewdly reinvesting their booty in heavy weapons and land-based militias, and now it may be impossible for such a large armed force the pirates number thousands of men to stay on the sidelines.
You can’t ignore the pirates anymore, said Mohamed Aden, a clan leader in central Somalia. They’re getting more and more muscle. They used to invest their money in just boats and going out to sea but now they’re building up their military side.
Take the elusive and powerful pirate boss Mohamed Garfanji, who surfaced briefly two weeks ago wearing a belt of bullets strapped across his chest in an X and a purple rain jacket to guide a group of foreign journalists to Hobyo, his base of operations. The journalists had been invited by the Galmudug State administration, a clan-based local government trying to gain a foothold in the region. But Hobyo is a fully engulfed piracy community, where 10-year-old boys with Kalashnikovs hang out in the sandy streets and glare at outsiders, and the visit could happen only with Mr. Garfanji’s blessing. During a meeting with Hobyo elders, Mr. Garfanji stuck his head through the door and grunted: It’s O.K. for you guys to speak to the journalists. And for them to take pictures. After that, he vanished.
Mr. Garfanji is believed to have hijacked a half-dozen ships and used millions of dollars in ransom money to build a small infantry division of several hundred men, 80 heavy machine guns and a fleet (a half dozen) of large trucks with antiaircraft guns not exactly typical pirate gear of skiffs and grappling hooks.
While some of his troops wear jeans with Play Boy stitched on the seat, others sport crisp new camouflage uniforms, seemingly more organized than just about any other militia in Somalia.
Mr. Garfanji’s original motivation was probably profit, pure and simple by mustering a formidable force on land, nobody could squeeze him to pay protection fees. But now his associates claim that their pirate army was created to stop Hizbul Islam and the Shabab.
Sometimes, explained Fathi Osman Kahir, a pirate middle manager, you commit crimes to defend your freedom.
Somali pirates lead rise in ship hijackings
18 October 2010 Last updated at 11:40 GMT
Ship hijackings hit a five-year high in the first nine months of 2010, with Somali pirates responsible for the majority, says a maritime watchdog.
From January to September this year 39 hijackings were reported - up from 34 in the same period of 2009 and 11 in 2006, it said.
Somali pirates - who were striking as far away as the Red Sea - were responsible for 35 of the hijackings.
It also reported a three-fold increase in attacks in the South China Sea.
"Somali pirates intensified attacks away from their own coast" in the first nine months of 2010, said the International Maritime Bureau in a news release accompanying the release of its report on Monday.
It said a strong foreign naval presence in the Gulf of Aden off the Somali coast had actually led to a drop in the number of piracy incidents there, from 100 in the same period last year to 44 this year.
But Somali pirates were moving away from such well-patrolled areas to larger adjacent seas. In June 2010 a chemical tanker was hijacked in the southern Red Sea - the first such hijacking reported in the area, the IMB said.
"The actions of the navies in the Gulf of Aden and the Somali basin have to be once again commended," said Capt Pottengal Mukundan, director of the IMB.
From Jan-Sept 2010:
* Pirates boarded 128 ships
* They fired at 52
* 70 vessels said they thwarted attacks
* Pirates used guns in 137 incidents and knives in 66
* One crew member was killed, 27 were injured and 773 were taken hostage
Source: IMB
"Increased intelligence gathering coupled with strategic placement of naval assets has resulted in the targeting of suspected Pirate Action Groups before they become operational.
"However, this is a vast area and the navies cannot realistically cover it. The naval presence does however remain vital to the control of piracy in this area."
Hot spots
Overall, the number of piracy incidents globally - comprising attacks and boardings - dropped slightly from 306 in the first nine months of 2009 to 289 in the same period this year.
But the IMB reported concern about the South China Sea, where there has been a resurgence in piracy incidents once virtually eradicated by naval patrols. Recorded incidents there this year so far have tripled to 30 from 2009.
"The pirates in this area use almost identical methods of attack, suggesting that a small number of groups is responsible," said Capt Mukundan.
The IMB also warned of a rise in piracy around the Bangladeshi port city of Chittagong, and around Indonesia.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11566184
