SOMALI
PIRATES
JANE FERGUSON: Every morning is busy at Bosaso’s port,
with fishermen returning from the sea and delivering their catch right onto the
beach.
JANE FERGUSON: The waters off Puntland, a semi-autonomous region of Somalia, are
rich with massive tuna.
YUSUF ALI YUSUF: They migrate. They are coming mostly from Indian Ocean. They are
coming here.
JANE FERGUSON: So they migrate through Somali waters?
YUSUF ALI YUSUF: They migrate through Somali waters.
JANE FERGUSON: So Somalia is very blessed with these fish.
YUSUF ALI YUSUF: Too much.
JANE FERGUSON: It’s not just fish that pass through these waters. Commercial
ships do too. And just a few years ago this was the most dangerous place in the
world for them. Pirates operated along the coast in Puntland, attacking 237
ships in 2011 alone, costing billions of dollars in ransoms, higher insurance
premiums, and improving security and re-routing vessels. Since then
international naval patrols and better security measures on-board ships made
them harder to hijack.
JANE FERGUSON: International efforts to arrest pirates were stepped up by various
coast guards, and pirate prisons were built in Somalia and abroad, and soon
filled up. As business dwindled, many of the pirates here who used to hijack
ships went back to their old jobs as fishermen. Down at the port, we met
Zakaria Abouka and Abdikader
Samatar, two former pirates. They’re trying to earn
an honest living this time around. Zakaria was a pirate for five years before
spending a year in jail. He says he made over $100,000, but lost that money
when he was arrested. Even if piracy weren’t so risky these days, he complains,
it takes a lot of capital to get it off the ground.
ZAKARIA ABOUKA: It’s really very difficult to go back to piracy. You have to buy
food, oil, gas, diesel, guns, bullets, everything. You have to take a loan for
this. All of this money will go on your account and if you don’t pay it’s very
risky. But in fishing it’s very easy. You go out for a day and come back. You
will earn money and then you can buy your things.
JANE FERGUSON: But making a decent living from fishing is tough.
ZAKARIA ABOUKA: Whenever we go out fishing for around 4-5 days, when we come back
the money that we make is very little.
JANE FERGUSON: 22 year old Abdi Kader was just a teenager when piracy was at its
height. Unlike Zakaria, he never got caught by the coast guard, and there’s a
part of him that misses the thrill of it.
ABDI KADER: In piracy you are a risk taker. Immediately when you see a boat or
ship you risk yourself. You don’t care about anything. Your only aim is to
catch it, and you do whatever is possible to catch the boat. There are some
ships that will vanish and we cannot catch them, but mostly we catch them
because we use ladders, hand grenades, bazookas, so that when we fire they stop
immediately.
JANE FERGUSON: He’s hardly a fisherman by choice.
JANE FERGUSON: Given the chance would you rather be a pirate or a fisherman?
ABDI KADER: There is no chance to do piracy now – it’s closed. But it is
better than fishing.
JANE FERGUSON: Somalia’s ongoing civil war began in 1991 when the government
collapsed. Decades of chaos since then created an environment of lawlessness in
a country full of guns and desperately poor people. A NATO effort to tackle
piracy, Operation Ocean Shield, began in 2009, with war ships patrolling the
waters. They declared mission accomplished a year ago and stopped. Ben Lawellin works with the Colorado-based think tank Oceans
Beyond Piracy.
BEN LAWELLIN: A lot of on-the-scene mitigation efforts which were: international
naval coalitions, deployment of armed guards, and something called adherence to
best management practices or industry recommended best management practices,
which are things like reporting in vessels location going into what’s called
the high risk area, simpler things like driving ships faster, kind of hardening
the vessel. All that really brought down the incidents of Somali piracy, but it
really just kind of mitigated the problem at sea.
JANE FERGUSON: Despite all of those security measures, the conditions that
created pirates in the first place still exist. People here need jobs. Somalis
don’t traditionally eat much fish. As an animal herding culture, many prefer to
eat livestock like goats, cattle, or sheep. So fishing as an industry here is rudimentary
and often unprofitable. Efforts are underway to change that, and take advantage
of the country’s vast more than 1800 mile long coastline rich with fish. Access
to domestic and international markets could change lives, but to sell fish
internationally they will have to raise their standards.
JANE FERGUSON: There might be plenty of fish here but there is also plenty of
filth, and if people want to make money out of these fish and export them, they
are going to have to make this whole area much more clean
and much more professional.
JANE FERGUSON: The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization is trying
to do that. They are building a new fish processing plant next door. It’s not
being used yet but hopes to provide hygienic places to chop up fish and
chill-rooms to store it. Other changes will be needed in how the fish are
caught and brought in from the water too.
JANE FERGUSON: John Purvis is the project’s manager.
JOHN PURVIS: What is needed here is a transformation of the sector, and that’s
going to involve change at the point where the fish is caught, it’s going to
involve change where the fish is moved from the fishing ground to the land,
particularly the landing site, and then the whole marketing, processing, export
area. There needs to be change at every point in that value chain if you like.
JANE FERGUSON: Animal herders from inland are suffering from a devastating
drought. As their camels and goats die, they are fleeing destitute to refugee
camps like this one just outside the coastal town of Bosaso.
The UN is teaching the women from the camps to process and dry fish so they can
feed their families as well as sell it to make money. Boys from the camp are
also being taught to fish. These young men grew up around livestock and know
little about boats, so the experienced fishermen down at the port are passing
on their knowledge.
JANE FERGUSON: Eager to show us around their training vessel, they gave us a
tour. The hope is that one day they will make good wages from an export industry
here.
JANE FERGUSON: Are we likely to see Somali fish exported to Europe, to the
States?
JOHN PURVIS: Yea, why not? You look at the target here, it’s for the migrating
tuna that is caught by vessels in Kenya, Tanzania, Seychelles, Mauritius, and
that fish is handled well and it goes globally. You can find it in any market
across the globe. And there’s no reason that that same stock tuna fish coming
into Somali waters shouldn’t enter the same market.
JANE FERGUSON: That will take many years however. Years during which these
communities will keep struggling to develop, leaving the lure of piracy to
remain. Last spring, pirates in Puntland snatched their first commercial vessel
in years. It was a reminder that piracy might return if conditions on land
don’t improve, and security at sea continues to relax. And it’s not just
small-time piracy the world has to fear. There are more powerful figures
waiting in the shadows, says John Purvis.
JOHN PURVIS: The part that is not here active at the moment is the organized
syndicate part of it. That probably has businesses elsewhere on the continent
and in the world. But if they decide to see an opportunity to come back again
and reorganize their networks that’s still there. The kingpins, the so-called
kingpins are still active.
JANE FERGUSON: And that’s a warning for sailors worldwide, that the waters off
Somalia could once again become a pirates’ paradise.
###
|
TIMECODE |
LOWER
THIRD |
1 |
1:48 |
ZAKARIA
MOHAMMED ABOUKA FORMER
PIRATE |
2 |
2:32 |
ABDI
KADER ALI SAMATAR FORMER
PIRATE |
3 |
3:39 |
BEN
LAWELLIN OCEANS
BEYOND PIRACY |
4 |
5:02 |
JANE
FERGUSON SPECIAL
CORRESPONDENT |
5 |
5:35 |
JOHN
PURVIS U.N.
FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION |
6 |
7:40 |
JOHN
PURVIS U.N.
FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION |