Free Pirates of Somalia by Jay Bahadur Page A

mentor” a “Puntland Marine Force.” 12 Even by the standards of the murky Hart and SomCan deals, Puntland’s agreement with Saracen had all the transparency of a muddy lake. The firm—whose Ugandan subsidiary has been fingered by the UN Security Council for training rebel paramilitary forces in the Congo—is headed by Lafras Lutingh, a former officer in the Civil Cooperation Bureau, a notorious apartheid-era internal security force. 13 Several months after the announcement of the Puntland deal, Saracen was revealed to be covertly backed by Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater (now Xe Services), the much-maligned military contractor implicated in the 2007 deaths of fourteen Iraqi civilians. Saracen is currently in the process of training a one-thousand-strong anti-piracy militia in Puntland, equipped with 120 pickup trucks, four armoured vehicles, and six patrol aircraft. 14 The funding for this ambitious program, Somali officials initially announced, would come from an unnamed Middle Eastern country (later revealed to be the United Arab Emirates) with a vested commercial interest in keeping the Gulf of Aden shipping lane pirate-free.
    The Puntland government, it seems, is yet to learn the lesson of the last decade. Far from being an impartial government actor, the coast guard operated as a business enterprise, generating its own revenues through the sordid sale of fishing permits to private clients. Instead of preventing violent confrontations between the locals and foreign fishing fleets, the coast guard took sides, posting armed guards on the decks of a select group of foreign vessels. In doing so, it accentuated the grievances that were driving the local fishermen to commit feats of piracy.
    After doing its bit to accelerate the rise of piracy in Puntland, in 2005 the SomCan Coast Guard itself took a turn at hijacking. When the company subsequently dispersed, many of its former employees, trained to combat piracy, themselves joined the burgeoning ranks of pirates sweeping into the Gulf of Aden. In early 2009, SomCan completed the circuit, actively recruiting so-called “reformed pirates” into its ranks.
    First in line was one of Eyl’s most notorious sons, the infamous Garaad Mohammed.

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    Garaad
    I N THE EVER-SHIFTING WORLD OF PIRATES, COAST GUARDS, AND fishermen, the movement amongst the three professions has never been in only one direction. As some coast guards have transitioned to piracy, so have some pirates made the shift into coast-guarding. Of this latter trend, there is no better example than Garaad Mohammed.
    Like many pirate pioneers, Garaad grew up as a fisherman in Eyl, joining his comrades in the struggle against illegal fishing. Beginning in 2003, Garaad, along with Boyah and the other Eyl veterans, travelled south to Harardheere to provide training to Afweyne’s Somali Marines. Garaad’s bloodline made him an ideal inter-clan go-between; his father belonged to the Isse Mahamoud of Eyl, but his mother was born Habir Gedir, the same sub-clan as Afweyne and the other Harardheere pirates.
    Shortly after he began joint operations with the Marines, Garaad founded his own group, the National Volunteer Coast Guard (NVCG), an organization based in the southern city of Kismaayo that specialized in targeting small boats and fishing vessels. But even after the formation of the NVCG, Garaad’s affiliation with Afweyne and the Harardheere gangs did not end, and he continued to finance gangs operating out of central and northern Somalia.
    On April 8, 2009, four of Garaad’s henchmen, operating from the commandeered Taiwanese fishing vessel Win Far 161 , attacked the MV Maersk Alabama several hundred kilometres off the central Somali coast as she was steaming towards Mombasa. In what was the first piracy of a US-registered vessel in two centuries, the hijackers boarded the vessel and took Captain Richard Phillips and two other American citizens hostage on the bridge. As the leader of the attackers attempted