One Dead Somali Pirate's Uncle Blames Overbearing Naval Ships For His Death After He Collects Ransom Money

Ahoy, matey

One of the pleasures of foreign travel-- though not necessarily to places like London or Paris, but to the kinds of weird destinations Herman Melville and I like-- is that you get to meet other travelers. And when you're hitting places like Tierra del Fuego, Sidi Ifni, Yangon, Urgup and Timbuktu (each a kind of end of the road destination), you meet some pretty interesting folks. A few weeks ago, I was in a small and unnoteworthy town on the outskirts of the encroaching Sahara, Douentza-- where tourists stop to catch their breath on the way to Timbuktu from Dogon country (or going in the other direction). Either way, you're about to experience a road from hell and, even without any charms whatsoever, Douentza is a relief because your skeleton isn't being pummeled and jogged around. We stopped at a nondescript eatery and the most appetizing thing looked like the exit. Roland ordered spaghetti and we sat around with the flies and mosquitos for 90 minutes while they prepared it. But we met a family from Madrid, an architect, his intrepid wife and two daughters.

We swapped travel stories. Luckily I was able to pull out my 1969-era Afghan adventures. These folks had been everywhere. And their favorite place was Yemen. Why Yemen? Well besides the mud skyscrapers they had quite the adventure. They-- the husband and wife; I think it was before the daughters were born-- had been kidnapped and held for ransom by tribal bandits. In retrospect they say they loved the experience. I guess it's great for party chatter. Apparently all 25 crew members who were released along with the Liberian-flagged Saudi supertanker, Sirius Star, will have similar stories to talk about. And A.P. reports that "they are all in good health and high spirits."

They had been held-- as are another 300 or so crew members from the 100 or so hijacked ships-- by Somali pirates. The Saudis paid the pirates $3 million dollars for their (and the ship's and $100 million worth of oil on the ship) release. A Ukrainian ship, the Faina, hasn't been released and that one isn't full of oil, but tanks-- the kinds that shoot cannons and flatten buildings.

The sea off the huge Somali coast is being patroled by warships from France, Germany, Britain, the U.S., India and China. They haven't been very effective at stopping piracy although, according to a one pirate's uncle, they are being blamed for the death of several of the pirates who drown with their shared of the $3 million ransom.

Abukar Haji, uncle of one of the dead men, blamed the naval surveillance for the accident that killed his pirate nephew Saturday.

"The boat the pirates were traveling in capsized because it was running at high speed because the pirates were afraid of an attack from the warships patrolling around," he said.

"There has been human and monetary loss but what makes us feel sad is that we don't still have the dead bodies of our relatives. Four are still missing and one washed up on the shore."

Pirate Daud Nure said three of the eight passengers had managed to swim to shore after the boat overturned in rough seas. He was not part of the pirate operation but knew those involved.

"Here in Haradhere the news is grim, relatives are looking for their dead," he said.

Roland asked me to make sure his point of view is represented in this post and that is that things would be much grimmer if the French, German, British, American, Indian and Chinese navies decided to shell the coast of Somalia and see if they could make it uninhabitable for a few decades while the people further inland figure out that piracy has real consequences. The Somalis, by the way, actually justify their behavior.

“We just saw a big ship,” the pirates’ spokesman, Sugule Ali, said in a telephone interview. “So we stopped it.”

The pirates quickly learned, though, that their booty was an estimated $30 million worth of heavy weaponry, heading for Kenya or Sudan, depending on whom you ask.

In a 45-minute interview, Mr. Sugule spoke on everything from what the pirates wanted (“just money”) to why they were doing this (“to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters”) to what they had to eat on board (rice, meat, bread, spaghetti, “you know, normal human-being food”).

He said that so far, in the eyes of the world, the pirates had been misunderstood. “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” he said. “We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.”

...Piracy in Somalia is a highly organized, lucrative, ransom-driven business. Just this year, pirates hijacked more than 25 ships, and in many cases, they were paid million-dollar ransoms to release them. The juicy payoffs have attracted gunmen from across Somalia, and the pirates are thought to number in the thousands.

The piracy industry started about 10 to 15 years ago, Somali officials said, as a response to illegal fishing. Somalia’s central government imploded in 1991, casting the country into chaos. With no patrols along the shoreline, Somalia’s tuna-rich waters were soon plundered by commercial fishing fleets from around the world. Somali fishermen armed themselves and turned into vigilantes by confronting illegal fishing boats and demanding that they pay a tax.

“From there, they got greedy,” said Mohamed Osman Aden, a Somali diplomat in Kenya. “They starting attacking everyone.”

By the early 2000s, many of the fishermen had traded in their nets for machine guns and were hijacking any vessel they could catch: sailboat, oil tanker, United Nations-chartered food ship.

The Somalis are close kin-- oddly enough-- to the Yemenis across the Bab el Mandeb and the Gulf of Aden. Kidnapping and holding people for ransom are perfectly acceptable traditions. In the mid-1850s Sir Richard Burton, one of Britian's greatest explorers and a bit of a crackpot, became the first European to travel to the heart of Somali territory and live to tell the tale.

As Richard Burton journeys deeper into Somalia, the water gets bad, the people wilder and the danger greater. More than once the Bedouin feign an attack-- with the idea of making a real one if the target makes a run for it. Such challenges are usually dealt with when Burton draws his revolver, ‘the father of the six’ and fires a shot overhead. Then the aggressive Bedouin become flattering and hospitable, treachery and dissimulation, according to Burton, being essential characteristics of the African Bedouin.

Passing through hostile foothills with thorns and tribes bearing poisoned arrows, Burton arrives close to Harar and the village that hosts him also prays for him-- and here we hear more of the author’s dry wit:

“..all the villagers assembled and recited the Fatihah, consoling us that we were dead men.”

Burton continues, of course, though half his party is too terrified to join him. He comes to the city of Harar and discovers it to be an unremarkable pile of rocks, devoid of any charm or grandeur. He’s ushered into to see the Amir and begins to make speeches full of the oriental pomp suitable for the occasion, declaring the earnest will of the British Empire to re-establish friendly connections and trade with the great city of Harar. He continues in this flowery vein until the Amir smiles and Burton realises that he won’t be executed that day at any rate. He lies down to rest that night and is:

“..profoundly impressed with the poesie of our position. I was under the roof of a bigoted prince whose least word was death; amongst a people who detest foreigners; the only European who had ever passed over their inhospitable threshold, and the fated instrument of their future downfall.”