Hiiraan Online

by Mohamed Hagi Ingriis
Monday, October 17, 2011

Somalia: The New Barbary? Piracy and Islam in the Horn of Africa
By Martin N. Murphy
Columbia University Press, 2011, 180 pp., £20.00

The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World
By Jay Bahadur
Toronto, Canada: HarperCollins, 2011, 266 pp., £12.99

Virtually every nation in the world was affected by piratical predation of Puntland pirates. In a sense, this was accounted for the fact that Somali piracy by itself is a sue generis compared to its global counterparts, primarily due to ‘the access to sanctuary’ on the ground which connects to the reliance on local clan-based population that provide them with the hotspot that sustains their survival. Evidently, stopping it altogether at sea, land or courtrooms has also constituted several legal challenges, for using military force to counter this criminal clan enterprise was contended to be a ‘criminal offence’.

The recent scholarship on Somali piracy, though massively extensive, is astoundingly ahistorical with piracy analysts limiting themselves to the period from the collapse of Somalia’s brutal military dictatorship onwards. It also lacks the early historical background of piracy, failing perhaps inadvertently to probe its origins and then put into Somali context that it has its etymology in the nineteenth century piracy of shipwreck booty off the coast of Cape Guardafui. Owing to this important gap, there appears to be an acute need for a historical study in explaining the Somali concept of ‘burcad-badeed’ (maritime bandits or sea robbers). This need intends to add a new perspective that unveils the roots of pirates and its birthplace, tracing back two hundred years ago when the sea robbery was common practice in the coastal villages of Puntland that was known at the time either as a clan name, Northeast Somalia or Nugaal Valley in both western and oriental literature.

However, the two most recent books about Somali piracy offer no new meaning in the early historical background of piracy. Consisting of twenty eight chapters and a conclusion, Martin N. Murphy’s Somalia, the New Barbary? Piracy and Islam in the Horn of Africa considers piracy as a new phenomenon which had begun in 1989. Though resplendent with brilliant academic examination on top of overreliance on media news reports, it provides no intellectual history of piracy, except well-known recent pirate activities, mostly ship hijacking incidents. While he attempts, and did somewhat shrewdly, to equate the contemporary Somali piracy with that of Barbers, he leaps into the seventeenth century Mediterranean piracy without noticing a nineteenth century burcad-badeed in Puntland. In acknowledging that the parallels are ‘pale at best’, he notes the British bombardment on Algiers in 1816, but apparently fails to detect a British bombardment on an area situated in Puntland in 1802 for a retaliation of the murder of British seafarers.

Murphy argues that similar to Barbary piracy, ‘the Somali piracy constitutes a significant part of [the] society. It has a human and geographic hinterland. Like Barbary it displays the features of a commercial system that shows signs of turning into a way of life’ (p. 178), recommending that there appears to be the need to deal with the leadership of Puntland ‘in full recognition’ with due care (p. 161). He cites that a ‘twelve-year-old interviewed in Garowe told his interviewer that when he finished high school he would become “a pirate man” working to bring home more money for his family’ (p. 111). This shows a testament that piracy has morphed into an unattainable goal, at least until now, for many young teenagers who would otherwise have opted to pursue a distinct profession. At least the man known in the western literature on piracy as Abshir Boyah claims that ‘we understand that [piracy] is wrong, but addressing hunger is more important than any other thing’ (p. 113).

Murphy is not delimited to the sphere of piracy. He attempts to explain the ‘rise and fall of the TNG [Transitional National Government] and the rise of TFG [Transitional Federal Government] as well as the ‘growth of political Islam’. For him, piracy has links with the state desolation that plagued Somalia over two decades, and it crippled every attempt by international community to tackle the phenomenon. In short, he astutely demonstrates that the United States image among Somalis ‘was compromised by its association with [Siad] Barre and various warlords over many years, and its more recently conducted air raids’ (p. 168). He is right on that account. But due to the ‘mess of the Somalis own making’ (p.164), he also suggests that a land campaign against piracy has to be avoided ‘at almost all cost’ due to the possibility that any inhabitant in Puntland who owned a gun would come to their defence, as occurred in Mogadishu in 1993 during the Black Hawk Down fiasco when Somalis resisted the attempts by the international community to reinstate law and order.

In The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World, Jay Bahadur encompasses a personal experience emanated from several weeks of observing with Puntland pirates to gather information, allowing himself to collude with the highest echelons of Puntland authority with whom he seems to accept uncritically most of their chauvinistic prevarication. His work is intended to examine pirates’ social interactions with the local society and he promises us to uncover ‘the hidden world’ of pirates, yet no hidden world is discovered at all except from what has been circulated by mainstream media over the years. Contra Murphy, he concedes that the ‘history of Somali piracy is still clouded in obscurity’, but continues to liken Puntland piracy to that of Western storybooks. In parallel with Richard Burton who had visited Somalia in 1854 and observed a country teemed with poets, Bahadur is apropos to underline that ‘Puntland teems with pirates’ (p. 46).

Bahadur quotes one local warlord who relates him that pirates have ruined families ‘by stealing women away from their husbands’ (p. 113). The warlord then goes on to accuse women hailing from ‘other places in Somalia’ of bringing a “lot of disease” (Ibid.). Bahadur is visibly comprehensive of the clan hatred disorder among Somalis when he writes:

The view that outside women were somehow tainted – which seemed to be based solely on raw clan prejudice – was shared by many of Garowe’s leading citizens... One cleric strongly warned his Friday congregation against the spread of HIV/AIDS in the community, as “prostitutes from everywhere” had been drawn to Puntland by the pirates’ money (Ibid.)

However, Bahadur’s accounts of Puntland pirates demonstrate to follow a pattern and paradigmatic recitation. In the course of two visits to the area, he was a guest of Puntland ‘president’, Abdirahman Farole. Bahadur’s host Mohamed and translator Omar where Farole’s sons, while his bodyguard ‘Colonel’ Omar Abdulahi Farole was a nephew of Farole (see pp. 98-99). Bahadur would later realise that Colonel Farole was not a real Colonel (p. 100), but local militiaman who promoted himself to Colonel and now waiting from Farole to promote him to General. The family interaction renders him at times in empathising with some of the alleged players of a pirate enterprise, as the Farole sons attempt to direct his mission, particularly when he discusses how the Puntland authorities deal with pirates, for he possesses no inkling about what was going on the inner circle. Here, he is not au fait with what was happening around him.

Bahadur seems onto something in recounting one interesting incident which ‘the two Omars had accompanied me, and I took a seat between them across the desk, the Colonel on my right, Kalashnikov slung over a shoulder, and Omar Farole to my left, serving as my interpreter’ (p. 112). He has illustrated that his interpreter had intervened, sometimes interrupted, a course of interviews with other people. This is reminiscent of engaging with politically-conscious informants that cynically attempt to exploit foreigners’ bereft of the political context and cultural gradation. In short, he admits that his interpreter ‘lacked the translational nuance to properly convey backgammon strategy’ (p. 130).

The author recognises that he was ‘made conscious of being under the wing of the Farole family’ (p. 112). But he continues to treat Abdirahman Farole passively (see p. 111), eventually conceding that the family attempted to use him (see p. 112). He recalls he was once taken to meet the Mayor of Garowe (Puntland’s capital) just to make a panegyric toward the ‘president’ of Puntland. He discerns that ‘with Omars [the interpreter and the bodyguard] seated on either side of me, it was apparent that much of [Mayor’s] monologue was being tailored for the ears of the President’s son and [his] cousin’ (p. 112). Not merely was this a typical family propaganda, but worse, Bahadur agrees with sycophancy, writing that ‘the security had improved since the days of the previous administration’ (p. 112). Perhaps due to his slight admiration of the Farole family, he repeatedly reminds us his naïve explanation that with a ‘paltry $20 million annual budget’ of Puntland (p. 109 and 125), it cannot afford to tackle piracy.

At times, the aim of the book appears to market the untenable Puntland regime to the international community, for Bahadur has the cheek to impute US Congressman Donald Payne and Matt Bryden, one of the most authoritative and highly-respected experts on Somalia, who had presented solid evidence revealing Puntland authorities were part of pirates’ ‘narco-state’. Nonetheless, Bahadur tries to mildly criticise Puntland officials to show the readers that he is not as partial as he appears (see, for example, p. 25). In a very striking way, he inadvertently correlates Puntland ‘president’ with other ruthless African warlords when he writes that Farole’s eyes ‘seemed to swallow anyone meeting his gaze’ (p. 70). After finding out the pervading corruption of Puntland regime, Bahadur, who is in awe of Farole family, posits his oddly never-thought perspective in this way:

On a personal level, these allegations came as a shock; it was difficult for me to accept that a man with whom I had shared a table on multiple occasions, a soft-spoken academic who seemed to have a sincere distaste for piracy, and whom I genuinely admired, could be guilty of such hypocrisy (p. 122).

Bahadur seems to rewrite Somali history by re-inscribing what Liisa Malkki coined as ‘mythico-history’. Without locating truth or ensuring rhetoric from reality, he swallows what was related to him by Farole’s sons that their father was the only ‘third Somali civilian leader since 1969’ (p. 270). Simply put, it should have behooved him to challenge the specious, conflicting versions that since the late Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke, Farole was the only civilian that assumed Somali leadership. When did Farole become a national leader? The truth lies in the fact that he is none other than a clan leader tantamount to the likes of other warlords borne out of the Somali civil war. To set the record straight, Farole’s peers in Somalia included the many notorious warlords that now turned to be members of the Transitional Parliament. Evidently, Farole’s political career had begun in Puntland, and presumably will end out there.

Bahadur is no different here from those who are sold to be a mouthpiece of warlords to the international forums. Since he resided their compound in Garowe, he was unable to extricate himself from the Farole family. However, his lack of Somali political history, combined with naïve outlook, may cost his impartiality about the intricate, sensitive Somali politics. Rather than engaging with pirates seriously (or critically), he follows from one pirate who ‘admonished me to tell the story of him and his men exactly as they had given it to me’ (p. 107). That pirate warned him that ‘something good has to come back to us from all of this’. Surely, ‘something good’ has returned to the pirate’s ear as Bahadur praises the local war profiteers for making blood money and for promoting themselves to army Colonels. But he is so eager that he could not wait to share the readers that he was ‘struck by the chilling realisation that I had shared tea with murderers’.

To some surprise, Bahadur contradicts himself by recounting his observation of one pirate named Garaad who has several wives, stressing that ‘probably the most stunning Somali woman I had ever seen was Garaad’s rumoured harem of wives’ (p. 95) and then he saw no pirate who had more than one wife, contending ‘each of [pirates], as far as I had been able to discover, had but one wife’ (p. 106). He goes on to cite and concur with one observer on Puntland piracy who reveals to him, ‘Once [pirates] become pirates they don’t go back to their wives’. It is here where Bahadur adds his opinion: ‘[Pirates’] lives with their new wives, however, did not typically lead to matrimonial bliss’ (p. 199).

Perhaps one of the most interesting chapters of the book is ‘Pirates Insider’ where a madcap man returned from North America recounts to Bahadur about a psychic pirate leader better known as Computer who appears to be elusive, indefinable and mysterious. In a sense, readers would wonder whether Computer is a character created to puzzle Bahadur himself or he is truly a human-being. However, Bahadur also meets up one local clan chief who welcomes him with friendly words: ‘Foreigners are always welcome here’ (p. 174). But strangers were not welcomed humanly during the early nineteenth century when shipwreck booty was so prevalent in Puntland that one British explorer who visited the area exclaimed ‘to be killed was the fate of nearly every white man who ventured’ into Puntland.

Another intriguing part of the book is when Bahadur travels to Romania to meet several Romanian crew members of MV Victoria that were held hostage in Puntland in 2009 (pp. 205-21). Collecting pirates’ strange behaviour and how they once stole each other aboard the hijacked ship (p. 217), he stresses that pirates sent an email to the German company that owned the ship, threatening that ‘if you don’t send us the money we’ll start randomly executing the crew, starting with the Captain’ (p. 220).

Both Bahadur and Murphy seem to agree that tackling piracy entails to glance in history, but they do not do so at local context, but in a global – African, Arab and Islamic – context. All in all, these otherworldly writers add some politics to their works, corroborating that the concept of failed state should not be applied to whole Somalia, but merely to the southern part of the country. Not just does this claim seem inconsistent with symbolic logic, it conflicts with syllogistic logic. If, for instance, Canada collapses with Quebec and Nunavut enjoying a relative peace, it does not mean that the latter two represent a successful case, while the rest of Canada should be regarded as an epitome of failed state. The future of a whole Somali country is at stake here and the success depends on how people on board the ship are saved from the wreck.

Even though both books aim to demystify Somali piracy, none does add a fresh insight to the scholarship on Puntland piracy, but it may be a good point of start for maritime analysts wishing to study the contemporary piracy in Somalia. In this regard, Murphy’s work proves to be the must-read book for both laymen and piracy experts.