The pirates of the Horn of Africa have set their main base in Eyl, a town in Puntland, the region from which the former Somali President, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, is from He excitedly flaunts his courage but his stories now seem invented rather than actual events. As he chews fervently on “khat,” drinks Coca Cola and smokes cigarettes, he tells us all about his deeds, about seizing ships. Not at sea, where we are the masters, but when we were on dry land we constantly ran the risk of being killed: they burnt our houses down, they threatened us and I realized that my life was at stake, so I ran away.” He doesn’t seem to want to stop talking now. My friends and I tried continue on our own anyway but it was dangerous. “You either work for them or they kill you,” says Nur, “but I refused to because I didn’t like the idea of risking my life for so little money while working for an organization that’s getting richer and richer. They enlisted the fishermen through persuasion and intimidation. They paid a hefty ransom and we decided that it was an easy way to make money.” From fishing boats to cargo ships passing through the Gulf of Aden, “these were a more lucrative prey because the ship owners are more willing to pay to get their ships and cargo back without too much discussion.” But this profitable activity soon caught the eye of big criminal organizations: the “warlords” intervened as leaders of the most important local clans of rebels with small private armies at their disposal. Nur and his comrades had seized their first fishing boat. Now they call us pirates, but we were just protecting our sea.” It was 1998. We couldn’t fish anything anymore, so we organized ourselves to confront this threat since the government wasn’t doing anything to protect us. Then came the foreign fishing boats they would fish illegally and they didn’t hesitate to ram our ships if we got too close. “The sea was full of fish, we would get back to shore with the boat overflowing with tuna, sharks, lobsters and large prawns. He started going off to sea when he was 12 years old, just like his father and his brothers had done. He was born and grew up in a little fishing village on the coast of Somalia, not far from Bosaso. He is a little over forty years old, he speaks broken English and is constantly chewing on “khat,” leaves from a plant that grows in some areas of Kenya and Ethiopia which cause a mild state of euphoria and are commonly used in Somalia.Īlthough he was initially diffident and almost scared of my questions, he overcame his hesitation in front of a few banknotes and accepted my invitation to tell his story and his experience as a pirate.
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