The New Home of Modern Piracy

Conventional wisdom about Somali pirates focused on their cruelty: “Forget all the romance of eye patches and parrots—these guys are mean.” I thought: That must be wrong. I was as full of pirate romance as the next American kid, but it was clear that the glow of high-seas heroism clinging to Pirates of the Caribbean was a question of nostalgic Hollywood mistiness and lingering military kitsch. Pirates of old, I figured, were no less mean than Somalis. Of course I was right. What I didn’t realize was how much all pirates had in common.

In the 1980s, Lou Reed wrote a song about “video violence,” about an irrational pop-fueled world where people were in thrall to explosions and gunfire on TV. His prophetic bit of doggerel came before Columbine-style gun massacres were a routine irruption of evil in everyday American life. It came before the Twin Towers fell, before the Iraq invasion, before the most lurid scenes of cinematic imagination had oozed like gore into our headlines. The rise of modern pirates buzzing off Somalia was an example of entropy in my lifetime, and it seemed important to know why there were pirates at all.

***

Piracy had never vanished from the planet, but the last severe and famous phase of it was the Barbary era, when Ottoman rulers on the North African coast exacted annual tribute from European powers in exchange for restraining their corsairs from sacking Christian merchant ships.

By 1800, a number of American leaders wanted to raid the Barbary Coast and whack the “nests of banditti” instead of paying more tributes and ransom. First they had to establish a navy. But by 1815, a fleet of American ships threatened the dey of Algiers, a sponsor of Barbary pirates, with all-out war. The ships imposed a treaty on the pirate regency that exempted the young American nation from paying tribute. The dey relented, and the romantic era of piracy—still a matter of gunpowder, swords, and sail—began to fade.

The more I read, the deeper I sank. American colonists had passed through a startling pirate phase of their own at the end of the 1600s, but they recovered, through raw trade, less than a century later. I could smell a book. What if Somalia could move in the same direction? The parallels weren’t clean, but the Atlantic seaboard of North America had evolved from an underdeveloped haven for pirates to an antipirate world power within three generations. Americans ended large-scale piracy for most of the modern era after they built a trade of their own to protect.

I wavered about going to Somalia, until I began following the trial of the ten men in Hamburg. The event attracted media from all over Europe. Pirates in Germany! In this day and age! Ten Somalis sat in a single courtroom with twenty public defenders (God help them). The Somalis had been arrested after a gun battle with Dutch commandos while they tried to hijack the MV Taipan, a German cargo ship. Some lawyers insisted that their clients were poor, simple, press-ganged fishermen.

The notion of Somali pirates as frustrated fishermen was a cliché, but it seemed to work in court, where little could be verified about the men.

This trial tipped the balance. The Taipan was trundling south around the Horn of Africa in the spring of 2010 when officers on the bridge spotted a wooden fishing dhow some eight miles astern. A dhow is just a painted wooden boat, rigged with a sail or a diesel motor, common enough on the Indian Ocean. This one pulled off at a strange angle. Captain Dierk Eggers thought it wanted to spread fishing nets. Instead, a pair of skiffs launched from behind it and came speeding toward the ship. Eggers radioed for help. The approaching pirates fired on the bridge with Kalashnikovs. “The bullets came through the steel walls like butter,” the captain said in court. “We were in danger for our lives, no question.” The Taipan had an armored citadel, or safe room, so Eggers and his crew retreated there and locked the door. When the judge in Hamburg asked for a more precise location of the citadel, Eggers hedged. “It was the machine control room,” he said reluctantly, and when the judge asked him to be more specific, the old captain gave a long, baleful glance across the courtroom. It was the first time all day he’d looked at the young Somalis.

“It was our great luck,” he said, “that the room was so hard to find.”

Captain Eggers was long and gaunt, sixty-nine years old, with swept-back white hair still tinted blond. He had white stubble and a coarse, hollow, gentle voice. Because of his experience, he had great authority in court. He wore black jeans and a leather vest.

“There was no talking,” Eggers said. “I assumed they would find the safe room and kidnap us. I had no fear of death, but I also didn’t want to be a hostage somewhere on the coast of Somalia.”

The crew consisted of fifteen men: Russians, Ukrainians, Sri Lankans, and Germans. They listened as the pirates ransacked the ship. Eggers worried that the dim emergency lights might be visible under the door. Soon the throttle started to ease. The ship slowed and sped up again, “as if someone were testing the controls,” said Eggers, and then they felt a hard turn to starboard.

“That was to the west,” Eggers said. “Toward Somalia.”

The machine room had toilets and a computer that could read radar signals from the bridge. It also had an emergency stop mechanism.

Eggers’s engineer cut the power. Meanwhile a German spy plane filmed events from a distance of seven miles. No one on the ship was aware of the plane, but we watched footage in court, and the color and detail were vivid. We saw spinning radar instruments, a violent wake, unmanned fire hoses pumping plumes of salt water.

A rushing cargo ship is like a moving city—it couldn’t have been easy to catch.

Eggers told me in private that he owed his liberty to the citadel’s odd location. The pirates raided the cabins for two hours, until the chop of a Dutch helicopter descended on the Taipan and Eggers heard “a terrible din of gunfire.” New people wandered the halls, yelling in English. “We want to help you, you’re safe.” But Eggers and his crew were cautious; they thought the Somalis might speak English. Not until they heard voices mumbling in Dutch did they decide to open the door.

By then the Somalis were lying on their bellies, blindfolded and bound, on an open deck of the Taipan. The Dutch photographed, questioned, and moved them to the Netherlands. From there they flew to Germany for trial.

I followed the Hamburg case throughout 2011 and made friends with a good-humored and intelligent court interpreter, Abdi Warsame, who also worked for German immigration agencies. He introduced me to Mohammed Sahal Gerlach, a Somali elder in Berlin. Many of the defendants had grown up in Galkayo, Gerlach’s hometown. A few months earlier, Gerlach had guided a TV journalist safely from Galkayo to Hobyo, a pirate nest on the coast, on a reporting tour of the Galmudug region. Ashwin and I were intrigued. We quizzed Gerlach over the next few months and waited for the trial to end. We settled on a fee for security. I found support from two magazines and a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. I wanted to see parts of Somalia relevant to my project that other journalists had seen: I wasn’t trying to overreach. But I was a writer, with a weakness for big ideas, and my ideas, more than anything, carried me off to Somalia.

***

When we arrived in the first days of 2012, our nominal host in Galkayo was Mohamed Ahmed Alin, the regional president of Galmudug. He lived in a beige villa set back from a dusty street, and when we visited him one afternoon, we found his guards leaning against a wall inside his compound, chewing khat under some wilted trees. Our bodyguards joined them. We walked around the president’s silver SUV and through a tall doorway. It struck me how much relative wealth and comfort could exist unseen from the desolate streets of Galkayo. The president’s compound had high, plain walls, and the raked metal roofs of even the largest homes were low-slung here, like the brims of fedoras.

He met us in his office wearing a pillbox prayer cap, an emblem of Sufi devotion. Galmudug was a self-governing swath of central Somalia that wanted to be a federal state. It had sworn allegiance to the weak Transitional Federal Government in Mogadishu—that is, to the idea of a united Somalia—so its leaders could assign government titles and receive government funds. Alin wore bifocals, a trimmed mustache, and a quiet, beleaguered expression.

“You are welcome in Galmudug,” he said. “I hope your stay here has been pleasant.”

“So far.”

Mohammed Gerlach sat with us, translating the Somali into German.

“You are in the Embassy Hotel?” said President Alin.

“Yes.”

“And you will soon go to Hobyo?”

Gerlach had arranged our trip, including the excursion to Hobyo, where we planned to interview a pirate. Hobyo belonged to Galmudug, territorially, but Alin said his government lacked both money and military force to keep the pirate gangs suppressed. “Unfortunately, we do not have much influence there,” he said. “We are trying, but it is difficult.”

Alin sat behind a plain wooden desk and an aging, off-white computer. We heard the guards’ chatter from outside. Alin was a cousin of Gerlach’s, and Gerlach was a deputy minister of something. They both belonged to the Sa’ad clan. During our interview, it became clear that all “deputy minister” titles attached to Somalis we had met so far, Gerlach included, had emanated along clan lines from this office.

Before the trip, Gerlach had sketched a development idea for Galmudug, a plan to create jobs by installing piers along the pirate coast. He thought legitimate landing spots for cargo would help the economy. This simple vision, practical or not, fit my idea for a book. Piracy was just a brutal form of trade, and it flourished where jobs were scarce, in modern Somalia as well as the colonial United States. When I mentioned Gerlach’s idea about piers, President Alin nodded.

“It is what we need in Somalia,” he said. Warlords already moved commodities like sugar toward the borders of Kenya and Ethiopia, where their networks could smuggle the merchandise across (and avoid tariffs). The flow of goods already existed. Gerlach and President Alin seemed to believe this illicit trade could develop into legitimate business, and jobs.

“But we cannot do it ourselves,” said Alin. “We need help from abroad.”

***

I promised to spread the word. But foreign aid could be tricky in Somalia. “Galkayo” means “where the infidel ran away,” and the name is a reminder of anticolonial hatreds, of war with the Italians and British.

The city was about a century old. After five years of high-profile piracy on the distant ocean, this baked-stone crossroads near the heart of Somalia—this loose affiliation of houses with little tradition of electricity, running water, or schools—had sprouted a pair of universities, more than twenty lower schools, competing cell-phone networks, a few ramshackle hotels, internet cafés, even alcohol. It was almost cosmopolitan. People called it a boomtown. There were medical clinics and modern, air-conditioned “hawala” shops with new computer systems.* The sudden prosperity corresponded with an upward arc in pirate fortunes. General opinion at the U.N. and elsewhere held that ransom cash had juiced the economy. “We’ve seen a lot of construction around Galkayo in the last few years,” a U.N. expert on Somalia told me before I left. “In satellite pictures, we can see a lot more lights.” New painted villas had sprung up like daisies.

Still, “boomtown” was an exaggeration. Galkayo had no paved streets. The Somali neighborhood of Nairobi known as Eastleigh was more fast-paced and bustling. Eastleigh had risen like a sudden, surprising corner of Manhattan during the same span of years—2005 to 2012—which suggested that the real pirate boomtowns could be found in other parts of East Africa. In Galkayo, lean men lounged outside the hawala shops in patterned skirtlike sarongs, holding weapons. Businesses advertised themselves with colorful paintings right on the walls, instead of shop signs or billboards. And ragged herds of goats bleated in the road, some with phone numbers spray-painted on their fur. The whole place felt cursed by the sun.

Later, we asked Gerlach to show us a power plant across from our hotel, which rumbled all day and night. Tangled power cables ran down every street. But the plant was nothing but an open space between some buildings where a single Somali tended six chugging engines, generators improvised from trucks or farm tractors. It was this man’s job to keep the pistons firing. He wore green overalls and smiled in the black-hazed sunlight, pouring diesel fuel from a jerry can into the decrepit, smoking machines.

“All of Galkayo runs on this?” I shouted at Gerlach.

“All of South Galkayo,” Gerlach shouted back in German. “North Galkayo has something similar.”

Gerlach and his assistant, Hamid, pointed down the road at some low buildings. “That is the line between the towns,” they said. Galkayo straddled a border between Galmudug state and Puntland, to the north, and the street represented an uneasy line of contention where the Sa’ad clan, from Galmudug, fought the Omar Mahmoud, in Puntland. The street was a front in Somalia’s ever-changing civil war. Occasional bursts of mortar fire thumped across it.

***

Piracy, like the civil war, had unfolded from the chaos following the federal government’s collapse in 1991. President Siad Barre, Somalia’s last dictator, was a figure like Muammar Qaddafi in Libya—nobody liked him, but no one else could hold the nation together. Without a national navy, Somalis couldn’t repel trawlers and other industrial ships from Europe and Asia that had started to rob fish from the coastal sea. Some regional leaders in Puntland organized “coast guards” in the 1990s—armed militiamen on speedboats who collected fees from the interlopers. Foreign fishing crews would sit idle for a day or two while a “license fee” was negotiated; the owners would pay (for example) fifty thousand dollars; and the clan leaders would sign a semiofficial “license to fish.”

This small-change arrangement flourished for years, until the armed men learned to nab larger vessels. A Somali gang hijacked a gas tanker in 2005 and held it for about two weeks. By 2007 the problem had international dimensions. The bands of gunmen had evolved into ruthless organized-crimenetworks with little connection to fishing, and powerful bodies like NATO and the EU arranged groups of warships to protect shipping lanes off the coast. We left the power plant and passed a khat stall. Robed women under an awning gossiped behind tables of the leafy drug—hundreds of dollars’ worth of it piled up like parsley in a supermarket. “Khat turns Somalis into pirates,” Gerlach commented. “Imagine how much an addiction costs. Twenty dollars a day! Most people here don’t have that kind of money.”

The main khat flight for Galkayo roared low across the rooftops each morning at sunrise. The leaf grows in mountainous parts of Kenya and Ethiopia, so the fresh stuff had to arrive in the flatlands of Somalia by plane.

Our guards, who had just been paid, lined up in front of a pretty young woman wearing a scarlet robe. She had fine brown skin and a quiet smile. She smiled at me, so I said, “Salaam-alaikum.” She asked the guards if I was married. “No!” I said, and laughed. The woman went very shy, very modest and still. When we returned to the hotel, both Gerlach and the guards said she “liked” me. It startled me that a Somali woman could be so frank about a stranger in public. The mood in Galkayo seemed weary, sarcastic, suspicious, but also freewheeling. In some ways the country felt hooded with traditional stricture and religion; in other ways it was like the Wild West.

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Excerpted and adapted from The Desert and the Sea: 977 Days Captive On the Somali Pirate Coast by Michael Scott Moore. Copyright © 2018 by Michael Scott Moore. Reprinted with permission from Harper Wave.