THE PIRATE CAPITAL  

IT was almost dusk and the sun was sinking on the horizon. A few hundred yards offshore, the freighter that had earlier dropped anchor was swarming with local Somali men. The ship's crew, however, were nowhere to be seen.

Some of the Somalis carried Kalashnikovs and stood guard, while others, like worker ants, busied themselves loading the ship's cargo on to barges that were then hauled to the beach by relays of sweating men pulling on ropes.

Noticing my curiosity, one of the staff at the tumbledown guesthouse in the port town of Merka where I was staying decided to offer an explanation as to what I was witnessing.

"Our coastguards," he said with a mischievous grin. "Some of them used to be fishermen, but today, with the war and no law or government, they have a more profitable catch," nodding towards the rusting hulk sitting offshore.

Until that moment, nothing I'd seen had struck me as being out of the ordinary. At Merka and other port towns along Somalia's coastline, ships often came close inshore to unload. As for the gunmen, Somalia was awash with weapons and arms smugglers. A few years ago, when I first went to the capital, Mogadishu, and visited its infamous "sky shooters" weapons market in the Bakara district, an AK-47 assault rifle cost a mere $150. Mortars, grenade launchers, heavy machine guns - all were readily available here.

As the ultimate "failed state", Somalia has been exposed to more than its fair share of man's evil ways. It has been neglected for years by the international community and let down by its fellow African nations. It is wracked with Islamic terrorism, suffering a largely ignored humanitarian crisis and is home to widespread organised crime, including the piracy that I witnessed in Merka that day that has now become a multi-million dollar business.

With their biggest hijacking yet last week, of an oil tanker, Somalia's pirates have suddenly drawn world attention to an ancient trade whose only recognisable modern-day practitioners until recently were Jack Sparrow and the crew of the Black Pearl in the Pirates of the Caribbean Hollywood movie series.

There are now serious concerns over the fate of crew members taken hostage by the Somali pirates. There is considerable disquiet, too, on behalf of shipping companies over the huge losses incurred. But pressing as these questions are, there are others regarding Somalia itself that need addressing.

For a start, why is it that piracy has flourished here? Who are these ocean-going bandits and how has their trade affected the local communities? More significantly perhaps, to what extent if any, is this vast money-making criminal activity bound up with Islamic terrorist groups such as al-Shabab that daily tighten their grip on Somalia?

On Wednesday, al-Shabab overran Merka, which lies just south of Mogadishu. On Friday they battled government forces on the streets of the capital.

To begin answering these questions is to realise the extent to which Somalia's problems stem from a tragic marriage of guns and hunger.

As hell-holes go, Somalia is almost in a class of its own. For years its cities, especially Mogadishu, have provided a glimpse into a post-apocalypse society where only the vicious survive.

This is a place where people live on less than $1 a day, and even rubbish is a commercial commodity to be fought over. It's a place where someone worth kidnapping or with anything worth stealing would need an escort of at least a dozen armed men for a journey of a few hundred yards.

In Mogadishu's canyons of bomb-blasted ruins, old Cinzano signs remain pinned to walls that resemble Swiss cheese and telephone poles lean at ominous angles like voodoo totems, the stubs of their severed tops long since stripped of wires to sell on the black market. The once languid boulevards are now awash with garbage and sand.

Here and there in the maze of dusty streets and alleyways, freelance militias, government soldiers, Africa Union "peacekeeping" troops and Islamic insurgents have all battled each other.

When I was last in Mogadishu, in the days when pirates and Islamic insurgents were a fledgling problem, many Somalis were at pains to warn of the price the international community would pay for its refusal to acknowledge and confront these growing threats.

"The problem is that much of the international community has lost touch with Somalia, and doesn't know who to deal with inside the country," said Abdul Khadir Yahya Ali, the director of the Centre for Research and Dialogue, a think-tank and part of the War Torn Societies Project funded by European cash and run then by representatives from what remained of Somalia's civil society groups.

"Somali people are very suspicious unless they have transparency. They are also very enterprising. You hear the same joke over and over that if bin Laden was here, someone would take his money to hide him, and his neighbour would take $25 million from America as reward for handing him in," laughed Ali at the time.

TODAY, just a few years on from that conversation, such jokes have a hollow ring. Osama bin Laden's allies are now on Somalia's streets, too powerful by far to be undermined locally. What's more, that enterprising streak for which Somalis are so renowned has manifested itself in organised crime, of which piracy is just a tiny part.

In this impoverished country long devoid of solid institutions or individuals worth looking up to, the pirates and in some cases even the insurgents have even become heroes with virtually celebrity status.

In pirate communities, the trophies gleaned from their trade sit brashly juxtaposed against the poverty. In pirate boom towns such as Harardhere, Eyl and Bosaso on Somalia's northern coast, along the breakaway Somali statelet of Puntland, sprawling new-build stone houses nestle next to shacks made of sticks and discarded plastic bags.

Like western urban drug barons, pirates cruise in luxury cars through unimaginable squalor. However, in these humid coastal dens, where life expectancy is just 46 years and a quarter of children die before they reach five, not everyone sees the pirates in a negative light.

"The pirates depend on us, and we benefit from them," said Sahra Sheik Dahir, a shop owner in Harardhere, the nearest village to where the hijacked Saudi Arabian supertanker Sirius Star is now anchored.

In these pirate-controlled areas of northern Somalia, people's hopes of a better future are firmly pinned on the prevailing maritime gangsterism.

"There are more shops and business is booming because of the piracy," said Sugule Dahir, who runs a clothing shop in Eyl. "Internet cafes and telephone shops have opened, and people are just happier than before."

In Harardhere, residents are said to have celebrated as the Sirius Star dropped anchor last week.

Businessmen gathered cigarettes, food and soft drinks, setting up kiosks for the pirates who come to shore to resupply almost daily.

"They always take things without paying and we put them into the book of debts," said Dahir. "When they get the ransom money, they pay us a lot."

Among the big men who run the pirate syndicates are an army of negotiators, spokesmen and accountants. The pirates take no chances with the cash, giving "clerks" the task of making sure the banknotes are not counterfeit, using machines like those housed in foreign exchange bureaux worldwide.

Ask Somalia's pirates why they turned to this lucrative trade and they will give a one-word answer: "Survival." They will tell of how, following the collapse of the government in 1991, their fishing grounds were opened to illegal harvesting by foreign fishing vessels from all corners of the world, and how the dumping of toxic waste destroyed so much of their livelihood. To some extent this is true, but some analysts argue it merely serves as a moral cover for their criminal activities.

More worrying perhaps is that the piracy trade might help fund and arm Islamic terrorists in the region.

Recent United Nations reports on arms smuggling in the Horn of Africa, suggest that groups like al-Shabab may have begun to use piracy as a means of bringing in arms or generating cash for weapons. But so far the evidence is sparse, and the pirates' commercial largesse seems directed mainly at those within their clan, families and friends.

Iqbal Jhazbhay, a Somali expert at the University of South Africa in Tshwane, said: "There may be some loose elements among the Islamist groups that have tie-ups with the pirates, because the movement is fractured into six or seven different groups, and each may have its own problems getting funding."

Somalia's recent history is in great part the tale of grave miscalculations made by foreigners in a very foreign land. Here the margins between death and survival are the narrowest imaginable. Given such unforgiving odds, is it really surprising that piracy is considered a sure bet to a better life?

"Regardless of how the money is coming in, legally or illegally, I can say it has started a life in our town," said Shamso Moalim, 36, a mother of five from Harardhere. "Our children are not worrying about food now, and they go to Islamic schools in the morning and play soccer in the afternoon. They are happy."

David Pratt

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