LAST Monday, Somali pirates seized two more prizes in rapid succession: a British-flagged chemical tanker and a Greek bulk carrier, bringing the current number of captive ships to 12 and the number of hostage mariners to at least 278. Despite the presence in the region of three multinational naval task forces comprising about 30 warships, there were 68 successful pirate hijackings in 2009, compared with 49 one year earlier.
If the New Year’s Day capture of an Indonesian tanker is any indication, 2010 will not herald an end to the attacks. As one Somali pirate told me last year: “Sometimes, we capture ships when [warships] are right around us. We don’t care about them. They’re not going to stop us.” Indeed, the pirates’ range has expanded to more than 1,000 miles off the Somali coast — as far as the Seychelles — and the futility of an exclusively naval strategy is increasingly apparent.
The situation is not without hope. There might be another way to make greater strides against pirates. However, it would involve allying ourselves with a place that doesn’t exist: the autonomous region of Puntland, Somalia.
To the ancient Egyptians, the land of Punt was a source of munificent treasures and bountiful wealth. Modern Puntland, a self-governing region in northeastern Somalia, may or may not be the successor to the Punt of legend. As I discovered when I first visited, last year, it contained none of the gold and ebony that dazzled the Egyptians, save perhaps for the color of the sand and the skin of the nomadic goat and camel herders who have inhabited it for centuries.
I arrived in Puntland in the frayed seat of a 1970s Soviet propeller plane. The 737s of Dubai, with their meal service and functioning seatbelts, were a distant memory; the plane I was on was not even allowed to land in Dubai, and the same probably went for the unkempt, ill-tempered Ukrainian pilot.
The state of the sole road running through Puntland’s north-south axis is symbolic of the neglect the region experienced under its former dictator, Siad Barre — who was overthrown in 1991 at the onset of the Somali civil war — and from the international community since. The three-decade-old Chinese concrete was crumbling and corroded, with craterous potholes turning my 150-mile journey from the airport into a four- or five-hour jolting ordeal. It was the dry season, and parched shrubs dotted the barren landscape; the dust clung to my skin until my shirt felt like fine sandpaper.
I spent the next six weeks living in the regional capital, Garowe, amid the boom and bustle created by the recent influx of pirates’ wealth from nearby coastal bases of operation. Conducting research with a local journalist — who is the son of Puntland’s president, Abdirahman Farole — I gained an inside view into the workings of this fledgling and largely autonomous state within Somalia.
Contrary to the oft-recycled one-liners found in most news reports, Somalia is not a country ruled by anarchy. Indeed, it is a mischaracterization to even speak of Somalia as a uniform entity. It is an amalgamation of quasi-independent regions like Puntland, which was founded in 1998 as a tribal sanctuary for the hundreds of thousands of Darod-clan people fleeing massacres in the south. Puntland comprises one-quarter to one-third of Somalia’s total land mass (depending on whom you talk to) and almost half of its coastline.
Straddling the shipping bottleneck of the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, it was the natural candidate to become the epicenter of the recent outbreak of Somali piracy. But inhabitants of Puntland enjoy a relatively violence-free existence, little troubled by the turmoil to the south. The region has experienced only one low-intensity civil conflict since its founding, a brief dispute in 2001 and 2002 between the presidential incumbent, Abdullahi Yusuf, and his challenger, Jama Ali Jama.
Jay Bahadur is currently working on a book about Somali piracy.
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