Somali pirates Rich Returns

Liquid assets: on 26 March, the MT Polar sat moored off Jason Florio Hobyo, Somalia

By Robert Young Pelton

Hidden behind the scream dockworkers and fishermen their nets on the quayside in Bosaso, on the Gulf of Aden, cleaning, there is a row of worn gray skiffs and patrol boats. Littered with rusted anti shells and old mattresses, watching this dead ships as floating homeless shelters than vehicles of terror. Out on the water though, they played a starring role in a thriving criminal enterprise. These are the vessels of the amount of attack used by Somali pirates to hijack passing cargo ships, private yachts and even huge oil tankers.

A few hundred metres to the West riding along the beach, and is there, just beyond the presidential compound, a well-behaved and overcrowded prison, with 248 pirates under the 400 prisoners. Mohamed Abdirahman Farole, President of Puntland, insisted that I go to jail to prove that his hard line on maritime kidnappers was not just talk. (Somalia has not had an effective central Government since 1991; Puntland is one of seven autonomous regions of the country.) Minutes after entering the prison, I was face to face with the 51-year-old Farah Hirsi Kulan, or "Boyah," the unrepentant John Dillinger of the Indian Ocean.

Halfway into an eight-year sentence for piracy, Kulan — an arrogant, flash well-tempered stick-insect of a man — lounged outside a packed cell block with another famous bandit, Omar Bagaley. A new 13-year-old arrested, Saynab, sat cross between Bagaley knees on a concrete slab. Back in November 2008 Kulan was the first public face of Somali piracy. Not only was he chief villain of the region — he was the seizure of 25 ships, coordinated as he to the BBC in 2009 boasted — Kulan began a second career as a "reformed" pirate, plead for pirates to exit, stop the violence, and go to the mosque. Some believed him, to Kulan was arrested while a major pirate planning meeting in Garowe, Puntland's central city, on the flight and thrown in jail.

Our conversation was short and loud. Bagaley stabbed the air with his finger, warning me and my interpreter to back off, while Kulan case, insisting that he had ceased to be a pirate for his arrest, anyway, he was only a fisherman, invoked in order to ward off poachers. What money he earned, he shared with friends. This is a common refrain among Somali pirates: that they are just poor fishermen with weapons to defend the seas of the predatory practices of foreign poachers — the real piracy, in their eyes. Some will tell you that they go to sea to prevent toxic dumping, also à la Greenpeace.

It is a romantic angle — and it is wrong. The UN Monitoring Group on Somalia estimates that only 6.5% of the attacks by gangs of Somali men against fishing vessels have been. According to the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), a London-based non-profit specializing in international trade, was the estimated $ 150 million to $ 300 million in ransom money paid out last year provided to the crew of bulk carriers, container ships and other vessels with unglamorous (and light protected) charge free. Some of that was spent on restoring private sailors. And while a pirate's take down to friends drip may, President Farole said most burning through cash prominently on Land Cruisers, lavish parties and a steady supply of qat (a mild stimulant chewed like tobacco and imported from Kenya).

Saynab, the 13-year-old aspiring pirate, clearly admired his elders in the garden. His unlikely story was that he sail with the pirates to learn how to fish. It was Friday, and he was visited in prison by his 32-year-old mother and 2-year-old brother. His mother gave himself the blame for the dire situation Saynab: "I only started looking for him 22 days after he disappeared. I thought he just sailed away. "