STATUS OF SEIZED VESSELS AND CREWS IN SOMALIA, THE GULF OF ADEN AND THE INDIAN OCEAN (ecoterra - 08. October 2011)
PROTECTING AND MONITORING LIFE, BIODIVERSITY AND THE ECOSYSTEMS OF SOMALIA AND ITS SEAS SINCE 1986 - ECOTERRA Intl.
ECOTERRA Intl. and ECOP-marine serve concerning the counter-piracy issues as advocacy groups in their capacity as human rights, marine and maritime monitors as well as in co-operation with numerous other organizations, groups and individuals as information clearing-house. In difficult cases we have successfully served as mediators, helped hostages to get medical or humanitarian relief and released, assisted in negotiations and helped the families of victims. Our focus to make piracy an issue of the past is concentrating on holistic coastal development as key to uplift communities from abhorrent poverty and to secure their marine and coastal ecosystems against any harm.
DECLARE INTERDEPENDENCE
STATUS-SUMMARY:
Today, 08. October 2011 at 23h00 UTC, at least 28 larger plus 18 smaller foreign vessels plus one stranded barge are kept in Somali hands against the will of their owners, while at least 479 hostages or captives - including a South-African yachting couple and two frail elderly ladies - suffer to be released.
But even EU NAVFOR, who mostly only counts high-value, often British insured vessels, admitted now that many dozens of vessels were sea-jacked despite their multi-million Euro efforts to protect shipping.
Having come under pressure, EU NAVFOR's operation ATALANTA felt now compelled to publish their updated piracy facts for those vessels, which EU NAVFOR admits had not been protected from pirates and were abducted. EU NAVFOR also admitted in February 2011 for the first time that actually a larger number of vessels and crews is held hostage than those listed on their file.
Since EU NAVFOR's inception at the end of 2008 the piracy off Somalia started in earnest and it has now completely escalated. Only knowledgeable analysts recognized the link.
Please see the situation map of the PIRACY COASTS OF SOMALIA (2011) and the CPU-ARCHIVE
ECOTERRA members can also request the Somali Marine & Coastal Monitor for background info.
- see also HELD HOSTAGE BY PIRATES OFF SOMALIA
and don't forget that SOMALI PIRACY IS CUT-THROAT CAPITALISM
WHAT THE NAVIES OFF SOMALIA NEVER SEE:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/05/fighting_for_control_of_somali.html
What Foreign Soldiers in Somalia and even their Officers Never Seem to Realize:
The Scramble For Somalia
PEACE KEEPERS OR BIOLOGICAL WARFARE AGENTS ?
SG Ban Ki-Moon (UN) and President Ram Baran Yadav (Nepal) should resign and take the responsibility for 4,500 Haitians having been killed by a Cholera strain introduced by unchecked, so-called UN Peace-Keepers from Nepal into Haiti.
LATEST:
STILL CLOSE TO 500 SEAFARERS ARE HELD HOSTAGE IN SOMALIA !
ECOTERRA Intl. has been the first group to clearly and publicly state that the piracy phenomenon off the Somali coasts can only become an issue of the past again, if tangible and sustainable, appropriate and holistic development for the coastal communities kicks in. Solutions to piracy have to tackle the root causes: Abhorrent poverty, environmental degradation, injustice, outside interference. While still billions are spend for the navies, for the general militarization or for mercenaries or conferences, still no real and financially substantial help is coming forward to pacify and develop the coastal areas of Somalia ir to help the Somali people and government to protect and police their own waters.
Updates and latest news on known cases of piracy - see the status section :
HOSTAGE CAPTAIN PLEADS TO THAI GOVERNMENT (ecop-marine)
The captain of the four surviving crew members of FV PRANTALAY 12, who are all still held hostage in Somalia, made a renewed plea to his government to come to their rescue. While the Thai government obviously drags their diplomatic feet, the company of the Thai vessel owner has not even repatriated the 14 Burmese sailors, who were released already months ago without ransom, but are still holed up in Garowe, the capital of Puntland, as local observers reported. Though still without any ticket to return to their homeland, these 14 seamen are, however, in a better situation than the four Thai crew members, who are held by the pirates, who demand now the ransom for all.
Captain Chanarong Nawara told a human rights monitor working with ECOTERRA Intl. in Puntland, that every month a lady from their company UNION FROZEN PRODUCT Co., Ltd., which is operating the PRANTALAY fleet under P.T. INTERFISHERY and makes millions out of their often clandestine fishing operations, calls the pirates and makes them furious by offering only 10 or 20 thousand dollar, while they had earlier offered a payment of 2 million when the ships were still part of the equation.
Chief Officer Ton Wiyasing meanwhile fell seriously ill, while Engineer Koson Duangmked and Oiler Tanakon Keaw Kimkong are hanging on, but are likewise desperate to at least hear from their government. All are depressed because their families are likewise held under duress by the vessel owner and the Thai government and apparently bound to not speak out to the media.
Thailand's largest newspaper, the Bangkok Post, has not even a single article concerning the fate of their country-fellowmen in Somalia, while they carry a business article about the new ready-to-eat meals from Prantalay. Thailand's overall export for frozen seafood products has an estimated value of around 2.3 billion dollar this year.
The Thai's, apparently used to brutal crew killings by their own Mekong River pirates, who are often involved in deadly drug-wars across the border with Burma, seem not too concerned about the horrible fate of their Thai crew in Somalia.
The actual operations in which the three Prantalay vessels were involved in the Indian Ocean before being seized by the Somalis is still under investigation. Sure is so far only that they didn't have a licence to fish there by the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission. While one vessel of the fleet of three was sunk by the Indian navy and one was rescued, the third one got stranded at the beach after fruitless negotiations by the owner.
The remaining four Thai crew members suffer now for all.
Naval Hearts and Minds Ops as Cover-up? (ecop-marine)
The pattern is always the same, be it U.S.American or European navies: After questionable operations or outright atrocities at the coasts of Somalia a spin on hearts and minds is published.
Trusting that it is extremely difficult to quickly counter-check inside Somalia, if not even the location is provided where the "rescued fishermen" were apparently set on land, the naval spin here fails again to provide clear information on what happened to the "whaler" [N.B.: "Whaler" is a ill-chosen and actually outright false term by which some navies fancy to describe the open, coastal transport-boats made of fibre-glass with a slow inboard motor.]
"Motor kaputt!" found the German mechanic, but it was not revealed what happened with the boat. Shooting-fest to "remove a hazard to navigation", as it is often described? Neither the Somali government nor local authorities have been informed by EU Navfor about the incident or were consulted if that might have been a stolen boat on an ill-fated piracy mission.
Some phonecalls coordinating with Somali authorities would have cost the taxpayer less than the PR release, which was quickly issued but is not saying anything concerning the crucial questions. Or was it a "gentlemen's agreement" between mariners and mariners? In order to this time not bragg about the destruction of a tiny coastal transport boat as pirate-vessel and to let the pirates go, because the Germans can anyway not arrerst them legally?
Kenyan security organs are likewise worried, because the logistical supplies to pirates and hostage takers affecting Kenyan tourism with two recent abductions and one murder, must come from somwhere to supply the fast boats of the criminals.
One can turn and twist it as one wants, but it remains clear that the money spent for costly European naval holidays on the Indian Ocean would bring much better results, if it would be used to improve the Somali navy and coast-guard to police their own waters by themselves.
The following media spin was distributed via an expensive press service:
EUNAVFOR Warship Saves Five Somali Fishermen By European Union Naval Force Somalia [press release]
On 4 October 2011, the EUNAVFOR warship FGS KA-LN came to the rescue of five Somali fishermen drifting in the Indian Ocean in a broken-down fishing whaler and returned them safely to the shore.
The Somali fishermen has been drifting for nine days following the breakdown of their engine and without any communication equipment available to call for help, had built a makeshift sail and try to head for land but were making little progress.
The fishing whaler was detected by a Spanish Maritime Patrol & Reconnaissance Aircraft (MPA) which was operating as part of the EUNAVFOR counter-piracy operations in the area and the German warship FGS KOELN closed from over 100 miles away to render assistance.
Technicians from the KOLN inspected the engine but it was beyond repair so the fishermen were taken aboard FGS KOELN, given food and fresh water and transported to the Somali coast where they have been landed safely. This incident demonstrates the versatility of the military presence provided by EUNAVFOR and the swift response by the crew of the MPRA and the KOELN undoubtedly saved the fishermen's lives.
[N.B.: The naval vessel "KOELN" has her name from the German industrial city, which during carnival days is often described as the "capital of fools".]
©2011 - ecoterra / ecop-marine - articles aboe ve are exclusive reports and, if not specifically ©-marked , free for publication as long as cited correctly and the source is quoted.
The maritime articles below are cleared or commented. If you don't find a specific article, it most likely was not worth to be republished here, but if you feel we have overlooked an important publication, please mail it to us.
What you always wanted to know about piracy, but never dared to ask:
SEARCH THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE INTERNET PORTAL ON PIRACY
NATO Chief Warns of Increasing Pirate Activity (NATO)
In the last few days the number of pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia has increased highlighting the fact that now the monsoon is weakening, the pirates are once again ready to attack merchant ships transiting through the Indian Ocean. MC Northwood’s Chief of Staff, Rear Admiral Hank Ort (NLD N) states, “in the last few years, it has been the case that come October when the South West monsoon weakens, the pirates have been able to put to sea and we have seen the number of attacks on merchant vessels increase. We are warning vessels that reports show that there are pirate groups operating already in the Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea and Gulf of Aden. Merchant vessels should ensure that Best Management Practices are followed and that vessels continue to make it as difficult as possible for pirates to board and take control of their ships. Our Naval forces are not complacent and remain vigilant. Despite the lull in pirate attacks over the Summer due to the monsoon they have continued to patrol throughout the region."
Fears grow over Somali pirates' 'new tactics' after kidnaps, killing (CNN)
Somalia's pirates have long made the country's coastline a no-go area for sailors, but two brutal attacks on resorts in neighboring Kenya have sparked fears the militants may have dramatically altered their tactics. In recent years, reports of ships large and small being hijacked in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean by Somali pirates have become commonplace, with dozens of seafarers and their vessels held captive, in some cases for months. But when the world's navies descended on the region in an attempt to protect shipping, the pirates found their grip on the area challenged. And rather than face off against the might of highly-trained personnel and warships from the U.S. and dozens of other countries, some appear to have begun looking for easier targets, switching their attention from ships off the coast to holidaymakers across the border. The golden sands and crystal blue waters of Kenya's Lamu Archipelago are straight out of the pages of a glossy travel magazine, the stuff of wealthy holidaymakers' dreams. Tiny, exclusive resorts nestle alongside deserted beaches from which tourists can spot turtles, whale sharks and dolphins. The toughest challenge most visitors face is deciding which hammock to settle in. But this slice of paradise exists cheek by jowl with the war-torn, lawless border region of Somalia, and last month the two worlds collided, with deadly consequences. On September 11, the idyllic calm of the luxurious destination was shattered, when armed bandits broke in to the beachfront cottage where Britons Judith and David Tebbutt, both in their 50s, were staying. David Tebbutt was shot dead while trying to resist the attack. His wife was grabbed and spirited away onboard the pirates' speedboat. She is believed to have been taken into Somalia. And on October 1, pirates made another cross-border raid, this time snatching a French woman in her 60s from the holiday home on Manda Island where she lived for part of the year. Kenyan officials said Kenyan navy personnel pursued the attackers in their high-speed boat, engaging in a shootout, but the gang managed to cross the border back into Somalia. In the wake of the most recent attack, Britain's Foreign Office changed its advice to tourists heading for Kenya, warning against "all but essential travel to coastal areas within 150km of the Kenya-Somalia border," and cautioning that beachfront accommodation in the region is particularly vulnerable. The U.S. State Department urges U.S. citizens to avoid travel all to Somalia, and warns American visitors to Kenya of previous incidents in which Westerners have been kidnapped and smuggled into Somalia. Kenya Police spokesman Eric Kiraithe said it was likely resorts close to the border were seen as "soft targets" -- despite the presence of police and security guards -- an attractive proposition given the clampdown on 'traditional' pirate attacks. "They certainly must have seen it as a soft target," he told CNN. "We know in the sea the entire international community has come to there, and it has become increasingly difficult for them -- and these are people looking for easy money." Security analyst Will Geddes said the pirates' apparent change of tack was a worrying one -- and not just for tourists, but for the authorities in Kenya and Somalia -- because it showed that the attackers felt they could not be stopped by the police. "The fact that the pirates are feeling that they are suitably uncontrolled by any infrastructure of law enforcement that [impedes] them from carrying out actions into tourist resorts," was of particular concern, he told CNN. Geddes said Kenyan authorities needed to take action -- quickly -- to protect tourists, and the country's valuable tourist industry. "Some big questions will now need to be asked to the Kenyan government as to what security measures they can now install to reassure the international community and also tourists visiting their country that they will be safe."
French Hostage Captors Allow Family to Send Her Medicine By Maureen Mudi & Fatuma Noor (NairobiStar)
The captors of 66-year-old French hostage Marie Dedieu who is being held in Somali's Kismayu region have said they will allow her to receive her medication but have made no demands for ransom. Sources said that her family has made contacts with her captors to request if they could provide her with the medication she needs.
Dedieu, who is disabled and requires the use of a wheelchair, is also fighting cancer. She is on several medications including one type which she has to take every four hours but which she has not been able to receive since she was kidnapped six days ago. "I'm not very sure just who is holding her yet. It must be one of the many unknown groups that want to benefit. Soon she will be in our hands if they agree to the exchange," said Abdirizak Ahmed, a spokesman of the Al Itihaad group which is holding the British national Judith Tebbut who was kidnapped last month from the Kiwayu Safari resort.
Her husband was shot dead when he tried to fight off the abductors. Abdirizak said the people who captured Dedieu and Tebbut had offered to turn them over to his group in exchange for money. It is not clear how the family made contact with Dedieu's captors or even how the medication will be sent to her.
Dedieu has since her kidnap been moved to three different locations by her captors. Mwangura said the decision by her captors to allow her family to send her medication was an indication that they may not want to kill her as they would have done by now. What is however puzzling is why there have been no demands for ransom for either Dedieu or Tebbut. Pirate gangs based in Somalia make millions of shillings a year by seizing ships and their crew and holding them until they are paid a ransom.
These gangs may have decided that kidnapping Westerners would be an easy way to make money. Yesterday, the Defence parliamentary select committee investigating the kidnappings said it will summon all police chiefs in Coast province and is expected to summon Internal Security minister George Saitot.
The committee chaired by Adan Keynan completed its fact finding tour at the Coast where they met with tourism stakeholders, local leaders as well as members of the public to try and understand the motivation behind the recent incidents which pose a threat to the tourism sector.
Keynan said they want the police and military bosses to explain whether the country has the capacity and ability to man the Kenya- Somalia border as well as the coastline. "We shall also meet with the commander of the General Service Unit and other heads of the security agencies so that they can give us an explanation before we make our recommendations," Keynan said.
He said Saitoti is expected to give the committee a full report of the investigations as well as give an explanation of the interventions that have been taken to stop a repeat of the incident. Foreign Affairs minister Moses Wetang'ula is expected to be among those summoned by the committee. Commissioner of Police Mathew Iteere is reportedly considering reshuffling police officers in the province following the incidents, sources at Vigilance House said.
New bid to free SA hostages By Tanya Waterworth (iol)
NEW HOPE: Vera Hecht, sister of captured hostage Bruno Pelizzari spoke with to Dr Imtiaz Sooliman from Gift of the Givers who has just returned from Mogadishu.
GIFT of the Givers has started negotiations with Somali pirates for the release of Durban hostages Bruno Pelizzari and Debbie Calitz. The Pietermaritzburg-based aid organisation, which is supplying millions of rand in humanitarian aid to war-torn and famine-stricken Somalia, is now negotiating for the release of the two Durbanites, bringing a message of hope to the worried families.
Yesterday, chairman and founder of Gift of the Givers, Imtiaz Sooliman, who has just returned from Somalia, met Pelizzari’s sister, Vera Hecht, in Durban and told her they had been negotiating for the return of the two captured South Africans.
“We have been told the two are in good health and we have been negotiating for the release of the couple with the pirates through al-Shabaab. We are just identifying they are the right hostages,” Sooliman said yesterday.
Pelizzari and Calitz were taken off the yacht Choizil nearly a year ago, with the pirates demanding the huge ransom of $4 million (R31.5m) for their return. The families have since been trying to raise some form of ransom, launching a “Save Bruno and Debbie” sms campaign just over a week ago.
“It’s wonderful to hear Bruno and Debbie are fine,” said Hecht, who expressed the gratitude of the families to the charity organisation for taking on this mission of mercy.
Gift of the Givers have been working tirelessly in Mogadishu to save thousands of starving men, women and children who have streamed into the war-torn capital.
The organisation has since July flown in millions of rand worth of medication and goods, raised by South Africans, to the people of Mogadishu, where it has created a hospital base.
While they are primarily treating severe malnutrition and dehydration, Sooliman said measles and tuberculosis were also major problems for people there.
He appealed to the pirates to release the South Africans, saying “we are all African”.
According to Hecht, the family’s sense of desperation about the captured couple had been growing every day since they were kidnapped by the pirates.
To donate R10 to the fundraising appeal, just SMS “SOS” and your name (eg SOS John) to 38417.
Freed Pinoy seamen arrive in Manila (abs-cbn/ANC)
The 10 Filipino seafarers released by Somali pirates last September 30, arrived Saturday morning in Manila.
They arrived at 9 a.m. and were united with their families at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport.
The Pinoys seafarers were among the crew of Panamanian-flagged, Greek-owned ship MV Dover hijacked last February in the Gulf of Oman while en route to Yemen.
The ship was brought to Somalia where the pirates demanded a ransom in exchange for their release. Piracy, political unrest threaten Mideast ports, says Salalah port manager (Schednet)
PIRACY is threatening port investment and costing Middle East supply chains the value of US$12 billion a year to a region already badly hit by social and political unrest, said Oman's Port of Salalah Peter Ford. Despite best practices having room for improvement, the guile of pirates is never-ending. "The pirates are constantly changing their tactics and the area they work in is huge," he said at a recent Terminal Operations Conference (TOC) in Dubai. This was seconded by a London-based maritime security head Tim Stear of Control Risks, cited a report from London's Containerisation International: "We are seeing more mother ships with hostages on board being used in the attacks which make intervention more difficult and there are not enough navy vessels in the world to secure the area effectively." With political instability and social unrest affecting productivity levels and increasing labour costs, profitability has been worn down with non-oil "already feeling the pinch", said Mr Ford. There are concerns of foreign investment drying up, he added, with its Port of Salalah showing a slowdown of five per cent year on year in container throughput in the second half at 1.67 million TEU.
Taken by Pirates By Jeffrey Gettleman (NYT-Magazine)
“It wasn’t really a pretty night,” Rachel Chandler recalled. Small, sloshing waves were coming from the southeast, and a trickle of wind blew from the southwest. There was no moon, and the stars were shrouded by clouds.
The boat was slowly edging away from Mahé, the main island in the Seychelles archipelago, for Tanga, Tanzania, the beginning of a two-week passage across the Indian Ocean. The wind was pushing them farther north than they’d planned to be. With no ships or land in sight, the Chandlers’ 38-foot sailboat, the Lynn Rival, bobbed along all alone.
Rachel, who is 57, was on watch — it was her turn to do the four-hour shift — and her husband, Paul, was asleep below deck. It was about 2:30 a.m., and she sat in a T-shirt and light trousers at the stern, feeling seasick. Because the wind was so faint, Rachel turned on the sailboat’s small engine, which chugged along at five knots, just loud enough to drown out other noise. The boat was slowly edging away from Mahé, the main island in the Seychelles archipelago, for Tanga, Tanzania, the beginning of a two-week passage across the Indian Ocean. The wind was pushing them farther north than they’d planned to be. With no ships or land in sight, the Chandlers’ 38-foot sailboat, the Lynn Rival, bobbed along all alone.
By the time she heard the high-pitched whine of outboard motors at full throttle, she had only seconds to react. Two skiffs suddenly materialized out of the murk, and when she swung the flashlight’s beam onto the water, two gunshots rang out.
“No guns! No guns!” she screamed.
The crack of assault rifles jarred Paul awake. He had been sleeping naked — as he often does on tropical nights — and hesitated before jumping out of the cabin. “The first thing I thought,” said Paul, who is 61, “was pirates.”
Within seconds, eight scruffy Somali men hoisted themselves aboard, their assault rifles and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers clanging against the hull. Paul activated an emergency beacon, which immediately started emitting an S.O.S., and then went up on deck. The men stank of the sea and nervous musk, and they jabbed their guns at the Chandlers.
“Stop engine!” they shouted. “Crew, crew! How many crew number?”
One pirate was particularly concerned about anything flashing, and Paul’s heart sank when the pirate stomped below deck and discovered the emergency beacon, blinking like a strobe, and promptly switched it off. The pirates ordered the Chandlers not to touch anything else, and then they demanded a shower.
This was Oct. 23, 2009. The Chandlers would be held for the next 388 days. In the past few years, loosely organized gangs of Somali pirates, kitted out with Fiberglas skiffs, rusty Kalashnikovs and flip-flops, have waylaid hundreds of ships — yachts, fishing boats, freighters, gigantic oil tankers, creaky old Indian dhows, essentially anything that floats — and then extracted ransom in exchange for their return. As a result, the worldwide shipping industry now spends billions of dollars on higher insurance premiums, armed guards and extra fuel to detour thousands of miles away from the Gulf of Aden, a congested shipping lane just off Somalia’s coast leading to the Red Sea. Navies from more than two dozen countries patrol Somalia’s coast, burning around a million dollars of fuel per day. And yet 2011 is on track to be another banner year for piracy, with more than 20 ships already seized, hundreds of seamen in captivity and the average ransom now fetching upward of $5 million, a fortune anywhere but especially in a country with no government and an economy that has been decimated by decades of war. Of all the thousands of people who have been held for ransom, though, few, if any, would endure as long — and as intimate — an experience behind pirate lines as Paul and Rachel Chandler.
“I fell in love with her voice,” Paul says of his wife. And Rachel does have a beautiful voice, precise and soft. It was London, 1979. He was an engineer for a Brazilian company; she was working for a supplier of windows. They talked on the phone about some construction project, and Paul was hooked.
When they met, Paul discovered that Rachel was tall, actually a couple of inches taller than he was, and thin, with pale skin and a shock of red hair. They dated for a year and a half, married and soon moved to Doha, Qatar, where Paul found some work and where a Palestinian guy named Sammy taught Rachel how to sail. (Paul had been sailing since he was a kid.) When they returned to England a few years later, they started out by buying a share in the Lynn Rival, a modest yacht, if there is such a thing, just big enough for oceanic trips. They never had children, and when they retired a few years ago, they began sailing full time, exploring the Adriatic, the Red Sea, Egypt, India, Sudan, Oman and Eritrea, blogging about their adventures all the way.
They were fully aware that the Indian Ocean was a hunting ground for Somali pirates, but Paul is a Cambridge-trained engineer with a hyper-rational way of looking at the world, and he considered the risks of being hijacked to be equivalent to slamming into a partly submerged shipping container in the middle of the ocean — meaning theoretically possible but very remote. Technically, he’s right. A few dozen ships are hijacked each year, out of the tens of thousands that sail past Somalia, putting the odds of being captured at about 0.1 percent. And the Seychelles, a sumptuous vacation spot, were pretty safe at that time, though pirates have since discovered it.
“The idea of getting kidnapped and held for a long time was not in my mind,” Paul said. “It was very hard to believe anybody would be interested in us. And while we were aware of the broader dangers — ”
“It wasn’t deemed high-risk,” Rachel said, finishing his sentence, as each often does.
“It was a fluke of the wind that put us where we were,” Paul said.
Once the pirates were in control of the Lynn Rival, they ransacked it, flinging open cupboards, eating all of the Chandlers’ cookies and stealing their money, watches, rings, electronics, their satellite phone and clothes. There were now 10 men; two more pirates had scampered onboard to join the others. After showering and draining the Chandlers’ entire supply of fresh water, they started trying on outfits. A broad-shouldered buccaneer named Buggas, who appeared to be the boss, was especially fond of their waterproof trousers, parading up and down the deck wearing them, while some of the other pirates strutted around in Rachel’s brightly colored pants and blouses.
The pirates lashed their skiffs to the Lynn Rival and reset the course for Somalia. But with the winds so limp, it could take two weeks. Buggas needed a faster getaway, so he made contact with another group of pirates on the Kota Wajar, a Singaporean freighter that was recently hijacked.
“Speak this man!” he shouted at Paul, thrusting the satellite phone into his hand. “They rescue us.”
It was Paul’s introduction to the loose fraternity of Somali pirates and to one of the pirates’ newest strategic advances: the mother ship. Mother ships are larger vessels — also usually hijacked — that serve as floating bases, with weeks of food and fuel aboard. The mother ships prowl the ocean with the faster attack skiffs tied alongside, allowing pirates to commandeer vessels 1,000 miles offshore. Their strike zone is now more than two million square miles of water, which is virtually impossible to patrol. Jay Bahadur, author of a new book, “The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World,” likens the international naval efforts to “a losing game of Whac-a-Mole.”
Paul spoke to the freighter’s Pakistani captain, who had a gun to his head, and arranged a rendezvous. Right as the Chandlers’ boat was about to tie up to the hijacked freighter, a British Navy ship that had been trailing from a distance started to close in. Buggas jammed his Kalashnikov in Paul’s face, telling him in broken English that he had better radio the ship to back off.
The Kota Wajar — which already had more than a dozen captured crewmen on board — lumbered 150 miles or so to the Somali coast, where it soon joined several other hijacked ships anchored near the beach, a floating community of hostages. Being around fellow captives gave Rachel a trace of comfort, knowing she and Paul were not totally alone. Almost all hostages are kept on their boats, but Buggas deviated from the standard pirate script and grunted that it was time to go ashore. Rachel remembers stepping into a skiff, petrified, seeing some white faces looking down from a nearby hijacked Spanish fishing trawler and then slamming into a desolate beach.
“I remember it almost being like a shipyard,” Paul said. “It was like a little base.” Dozens of men — all of them carrying guns — were working on the beach with disc cutters, welders and other power tools, preparing a fleet of boats for future hijacking missions.
Right behind the little base were two freshly washed Toyota trucks parked in the sand. As they stepped in, Rachel saw Buggas wearing Paul’s Rolex and commented, “Oh, look, he’s wearing your watch.” One of the men sitting in the front seat overheard her and confronted Buggas, who then sheepishly handed the Rolex back to Paul. The man, who spoke English, was better-dressed than Buggas and wasn’t armed. He had an educated air about him, the Chandlers said, and they recalled this moment as the first of their endless attempts to decipher in whose hands their fate really rested.
“We didn’t know who these guys were,” Mohamed Aden said of the pirates who took the Chandlers. “They were nobodies, people we call cockroaches, gangsters, new to the system. It was the first time they had brought anybody to land, the first time they had ever captured anybody. It took us six months to establish who they were.”
Aden, who is better known by his childhood nickname, Tiiceey, is the president of the Himan and Heeb administration, a small, clan-based government recently established in central Somalia. Two decades of unabated chaos has resulted in these tiny statelets popping up across the country. By latest count, there are more than 20, formed by members of the same clan — the one fundamental element of Somali society that has not been totally eviscerated by civil war. There is the internationally recognized Transitional Federal Government in Mogadishu, Somalia’s bullet-pocked capital, which has received millions of dollars in support from the United States and the United Nations. But the T.F.G. was assembled outside the country and doesn’t have much grass-roots support. It barely controls Mogadishu and is completely irrelevant in central Somalia.
Aden works from a shell of a house in Adado, a trading town about 200 miles from the coast. He dresses and talks like a rapper, with Kangol caps and baggy pants and an iPhone clipped to his hip. He is a naturalized American and spent years in Minneapolis running a small health-care company before being drafted by elders in his clan, the Saleban, to spearhead the Himan and Heeb administration. In 2009, I spent two weeks observing his efforts to build a government from scratch, complete with a functioning police force, environmental laws and schools. But Aden had, and still has, a pirate problem. Technically, Himan and Heeb’s jurisdiction extends to the coast, but Aden has no authority there; the area is controlled instead by pirate gangs, most of them fellow Saleban.
“I don’t have the firepower to take these guys on,” Aden said. “I’d like to, but I can’t.”
Instead, Aden has become chummy with some of Somalia’s more notorious pirates, many of whom take nicknames like Son of a Liar, Red Butt, Red Teeth and Big Mouth. Big Mouth is considered one of the founding fathers of Somali piracy and recently branched into the business of distributing khat, the leaf millions of Somalis chew for a pleasant, mild high that provides a temporary reprieve from their bleak reality. Together, Aden and Big Mouth rebuilt Adado’s airstrip to bring in more khat, which has become a major source of income for Aden’s small administration (Aden taxes each flight) and Big Mouth’s growing enterprise.
After the Chandlers were taken, Aden went straight to Big Mouth to find out who the abductors were, but even Big Mouth didn’t know. In recent years, as ransoms have climbed, thousands of destitute, uneducated Somali youth have jumped into the hijacking business, and all anyone in Adado knew was that a young upstart named Buggas had taken the Chandlers to a desiccated smudge of a town called Amara, near the coast, and that Amara locals were backing him up. Local support is crucial, because holding hostages — especially for a long period — can become expensive. You need to keep them fed and most important, heavily guarded — so a rival pirate gang or Islamist militia doesn’t rekidnap them. Paul figures it was costing Buggas nearly $20,000 a month to hold them hostage: with around $300 per day spent on khat; $100 a day on goats; maybe a couple hundred more for tea, sugar, powdered milk, fuel, ammunition and other supplies. Then there’s payroll— in the Chandlers’ case, cash for the pirate raiding party and their 30 henchmen who rotated as guards on shore. On top of this come the translators, who charge a hefty fee to interact with the hostages and negotiate a ransom.
Pirates tend to operate on credit — borrowing all these resources from community members or other pirates, who will then get a cut, or in Somali, a sami, once a ransom is delivered. In Amara, rumors quickly began to fly that the Chandlers were rich — possibly even British M.P.’s — and were therefore the ideal sami opportunity.
“People were saying it would take just two months for a ransom and then they would get double,” Aden remembered. “They invest $5,000, they get $10,000 back. That’s a good return, right?”
Amara lies on a wind-raked plain, surrounded by sand dunes and scrub brush bristling with bone-white thorns. I passed through there in 2009 and remember hundreds of squat, little huts packed together, an incongruously tall cellphone tower and sandy roads littered with donkey dung. Buggas moved the couple around a lot, sometimes locking them in houses inside Amara, where they could hear goats bleating or children playing just outside the gates, other times setting up crude camps in the bush with plastic tarps stretched between the trees.
For Rachel, the days all blur together. She would get up around dawn, when the desert was just bearably cool. Paul would sleep a little later. They would try their best to ingest a breakfast of goat liver and then wash up with a jerrycan of well water. They would read the few books they were allowed to grab from the yacht and write in their diaries. Paul tended to focus on the here and now: “Overcast, a little wind,” reads one entry in neat blue ink. “Another sleepless night” was another. Rachel tended to be more introspective with longer entries in perfectly formed script. The smells they remember are sweat, the stinky perfume the pirates would douse themselves with and the scent of the charcoal, which had been soaked in diesel. Sometimes, in the morning, if they felt motivated, they did yoga together; once Paul turned around to see half a dozen gunmen earnestly following along. It seemed everyone was horribly bored.
“I was struggling,” Rachel told me in May, as she sat in her carpeted living room in a small home in Dartmouth, England, where the Chandlers have been living since being freed. “I’d get through the early part of the morning, and then the heat and humidity would build up, and I’d be lying there thinking, I don’t want to read, I don’t want to do anything, how am I going to get through the next 10 minutes, let alone 10 hours, let alone 10 days?”
Buggas appeared to be calling all the shots, which dismayed the Chandlers because he seemed uneducated, temperamental and crass. They kept hoping some wiser, more experienced pirates would show up and realize they were not rich and strike a deal for a more modest ransom. But that never happened. Buggas was supremely confident that he was on the verge of making millions — he had two white people in his hands, after all.
“British government pay big money, no problem,” he kept saying.
“He wasn’t an intelligent thug,” Rachel said. “He was just a thug.” She closed her eyes and drew a composite sketch of him in her mind: around 33 years old, fairly thickset, round, chunky face, low forehead, small eyes, fleshy lips that he tended to leave open. He was constantly threatening them: “No money, you dead, kill you.”
The problem was that the Chandlers didn’t have much money. They had spent around $75,000 to buy and fix up the Lynn Rival, and they owned a two-bedroom apartment in Tunbridge Wells, a London suburb, worth around $250,000, and some retirement accounts, which brought the total to $500,000. The pirates scoffed at such petty cash and demanded $7 million and told Paul to find a negotiator.
“Negotiator?” Paul said. “I don’t have a negotiator.” He suggested the pirates call Rachel’s older brother, Stephen Collett, a retired farmer back in England. Stephen, who is writing a book about the kidnapping, politely declined to discuss details about the 200 or so calls he made to the pirates. He still seems shaken up. “How would you feel if you got a phone call from a guy who says, ‘I got your sister and her husband at gunpoint so you better send us everything you got and more and you’ll be lucky if you get them back’?”
The Chandlers soon deduced that escape or rescue was unlikely. The pirates operated with total impunity in their patch of Somalia. People were always coming by the camp — young men, young women and, as Rachel put it, “elderlylike characters” who would sit for hours with the gang, talking, laughing, leisurely sipping little cups of tea, making it abundantly clear that the whole community was complicit and that no one would help them. For Paul, who is unfailingly polite and gentle, a man whose voice rarely clears a whisper, this is what brings out the bitterness.
“Everybody was in on it,” he said. “I’m angry at Somali society. I’m angry at a community.”
In a rough, industrial part of northeast London, next to an auto-body shop and behind an unmarked door, is Universal TV. It includes a suite of offices and a bare-bones TV studio with a black velvet curtain and a giant map of Africa. Veiled Somali women drift in and out, and prayer-capped Somali men make the run to the gas station up the street to get Fanta and potato chips. If there is any nucleus of the Somali diaspora, any glue holding together a people who have been scattered by war and settled everywhere from Sydney to Minneapolis, it is Universal TV, which broadcasts news and other shows worldwide in Somali and is seen as keeping a sense of nationhood intact while Somalia sorts out its mess.
Ridwaan Haji Abdiwali is one of Universal’s on-air news anchors, a 28-year-old refugee who was hit by a stray bullet during Somalia’s civil war before fleeing to England seven years ago. He has thoughtful, hooded eyes and his own weekly television show called “Have Your Say.” More than anything, he is deeply embarrassed about his homeland, which has lurched from crisis to crisis since 1991, when clan warlords tore down the central government and then fought among themselves.
But the hijacking of the Chandlers was especially shameful. It was all over the news, perfect tabloid fodder, one of the biggest-running stories of the time — two pensioner Brits “on the trip of a lifetime” now in the hands of Somali gunmen. Abdiwali remembers sitting with other students in the canteen at the University of Westminster when yet another Chandler update came on TV. “Oh, my God,” his friends groaned about the pirates. “They’re morons, they’re criminals.”
Abdiwali started focusing his hourly show on the Chandlers and even called up Buggas and his fellow pirates and berated them on the air. “They’re not rich ship owners,” Abdiwali told the pirates. “These people are innocent and you should release them.” His initial strategy, he told me, was to heap shame on the pirates for kidnapping two elderly people and to show England that not all Somalis were criminals and morons.
Abdiwali and some others at Universal TV then turned to Abdi Shire Jama, who was a freelance interpreter in London and a talented songwriter. Jama thought a music video would help spread the word, so he produced a song called “Release the Couple,” soon broadcast on Universal and YouTube. It begins with a Somali kid with a British accent saying, “I hope this message gets to the people who are responsible for holding Rachel and Paul Chandler.” Then, after a burst of synthetic drums and some squeaky Somali music, five Somali singers break into song.
“Our people fled their homes. . . . The host countries did not look at the color of our skins. . . . We need to show our debt to them, for it is the donkey who does not acknowledge the debt.”
But Jama’s song also captures an ambivalence many ex-pat Somalis feel about piracy. While it implores the pirates to release “Rachel and her husband, Paul, and his wife,” it also says: “This song is to remind you to fight those foreign vessels which come to illegally fish from our seas and to dump poisonous wastes in our seas. This is national defense.”
After Somalia’s central government collapsed 20 years ago, the 1,900-mile coastline became an unpatrolled free-for-all, with foreign fishing trawlers descending to scoop up Somalia’s rich stocks of tuna, shark, whitefish, lobster and deep-water shrimp. With no authorities to fear, the fishing boats were especially unscrupulous and used heavy steel drag nets that wiped out the marine habitat for years. Somali piracy was born when disgruntled fishermen armed themselves and started attacking the foreign trawlers. They soon realized they could attack any ship and get a ransom for holding the crew hostage.
“In the beginning, the pirates had a lot of support,” explained Kayse Maxamed, a Somali who works in mental health in Bristol and who organized a “Save the Chandlers” rally in front of a mosque in early 2010. “Everybody liked them. They represented the Somali Navy.”
The pirate gangs played on this sentiment, taking names like “Somali Marines,” “Defenders of Somali Territorial Waters,” “Central Somali Coast Guard” and “Ocean Salvation Corps.”
But the kidnapping of the Chandlers made many otherwise sympathetic Somalis realize the pirates were, at their most elemental level, simply seafaring extortionists who were giving all Somalis a bad name. Maxamed, Abdiwali and Jama said they had absolutely no trouble getting hundreds of other British Somalis to join their cause. At one big Save the Chandlers meeting in Camden in early 2010, someone suggested that every member of Britain’s Somali community, estimated to number anywhere from 100,000 to 500,000, contribute 10 pounds toward the ransom. But before this could get off the ground, the British Foreign Office contacted several community leaders, including Maxamed, and reminded them that British government policy was never to pay ransom. Maxamed and others said they were forced to drop the idea, which meant that the situation in Amara would drag on.
“Family no speak,” Buggas kept grumbling. “Family no speak.”
One day he marched to the entrance of the lean-to where the Chandlers were sleeping, a messy bush camp with mattresses lying in the dirt, ammunition tins carelessly baking in the heat and plastic sheeting stretched overhead.
“You go, one, one,” Buggas ordered. “Paul, bags, go.”
Buggas’s plan was to separate the Chandlers to make them as miserable as possible so they would urge their relatives to cough up the cash. But the Chandlers refused and roped their arms around each other. It was more than just the fear of being lonely, Rachel explained. “We didn’t want to die alone,” she said. “At the time, we couldn’t see how we were going to get out of this place.”
Buggas snatched up his gun and blasted three shots in the air.
“Come out!” he yelled. “Come out!”
The Chandlers clutched each other even tighter.
“You crazy,” said one of the guards, whom the Chandlers had nicknamed Mr. Fastidious for the exacting way he always folded up his ratty little bed roll.
Paul snapped back, “You crazy.”
Buggas raced over to a tree and yanked out a root. With a big knife he stripped it smooth. He started ferociously whipping the Chandlers, aiming for Rachel’s head. They crumpled to the ground, and the other pirates pulled them apart. Until this point, though they had been threatened many times with loaded assault rifles, the Chandlers had never been beaten. It seemed that the pirates were reluctant to even touch them — until now.
As several gunmen dragged Paul away, he turned around to catch a glimpse of Rachel on her knees, screaming: “Bastards! Murderers!” That’s when Buggas ran up to her and smashed the back of his rifle into her jaw, shearing off a tooth.
Thus began three long months of solitude. The Chandlers were stuck in little huts in Amara only a few miles away from each other but weren’t allowed to communicate. Paul tried to keep himself occupied, sketching in his journal and making a phrase book of Somali words — “bowl,” “banana,” “knife,” “bald.” There was one man, the cook, who occasionally spoke to him. “I did have moments when I sat in that chair and cried,” Paul said. “I knew it wasn’t productive. I was just treating myself to a few moments of it. I knew I could survive.”
At this point Paul began his “begging calls” to relatives. While Rachel had qualms about leaning on family members, Paul said he saw the whole ordeal “purely as a commercial transaction. I would pay every penny I could scrimp, borrow or steal to get me and Rachel out of there.”
But even accessing their savings was complicated. The Chandlers were officially under duress, the family’s solicitor informed Stephen, and therefore not considered mentally fit to hand over control of their accounts.
Paul dealt primarily with a translator named Ali, who was negotiating with Stephen. Ali didn’t fraternize much with the guards, who were mostly in their early 20s. Ali was a bit older and wore crisp button-down shirts, sunglasses, a gold wristwatch and gold chains. According to lawyers who handle piracy cases, pirate translators tend to be educated men from within the community who work for several different pirate gangs and are typically paid a flat fee, which can reach $200,000 — they are essentially white-collar pirates.
Rachel, meanwhile, was completely isolated. Buggas had instructed the guards not to talk to her. Rachel’s cook would throw down a bowl of food and then just pad away. She started talking to herself and chanting, sometimes mimicking the call to prayer. “Shut up or I beat you!” Buggas would yell. It tormented her to think that Buggas and his gang were actually going to profit from her misery. She wanted to deny them that and felt spite bubbling up inside her. She was completely powerless to control her fate — except in one way. She had hidden a couple of razor blades in her hut and fantasized about slitting her wrists at night so the pirates would wake up to find her sprawled in a pool of blood.
“But the problem was I wouldn’t be able to see their faces,” she ultimately realized. “So what’s the point of that?”
In late January, a doctor, Abdi Mohamed Elmi, known as Dr. Hangul, was allowed to see the Chandlers. Mohamed Dahir, a Somali journalist, tagged along and filmed the visit, selling it to Sky News in Britain. Dahir was shocked at how bad Rachel looked.
“She was sitting under a tarp in a bush camp, completely out of it,” he said. “She had gotten even skinnier. She had trenches under her eyes. She kept saying: ‘I need my husband. I want to see my husband before I die.’ ”
Mohamed Dahir’s footage deeply unnerved the Somali community in Britain. People began to worry that the Chandlers might die in captivity. Of course, the pirates wouldn’t intentionally kill them and spoil their chances of a ransom. But as the Somali diaspora knew, the desert is unforgiving.
Abdiwali and the other members of the informal Free the Chandlers coalition began to recalibrate their strategy. It was time to play the clan card, they decided. Somalia is one of the most homogeneous countries on the planet, with nearly everyone sharing the same religion (Sunni Islam), the same language (Somali), the same race and same ethnicity, but Somalis are divided into a dizzying number of clans. Most areas, except for the big towns, are dominated by a single clan. Though pirates aren’t totally responsive to clan structure, they are not immune from it either. Clan elders still have some authority across Somalia — even if they don’t have the militias to back it up — and they can marshal community pressure and make it difficult for pirates to continue to operate in their areas.
Abdiwali used his television show to focus pressure on the Saleban, the dominant clan in Amara and the clan of Buggas and his men. “I said this could be bad for your clan,” remembered Abdiwali, who is from a different clan. “Actually,” he corrected himself, “this is sensitive. I didn’t actually say ‘clan.’ I said this could be bad for the name of your area, because if I say ‘clan,’ some people are going to say, ‘Ridwaan, you hate this clan.’ ”
Before long, the pirates were threatening to kill Abdiwali. But he was no stranger to death threats. He had been harassed countless times before by the Shabab, an Islamist militant group in Somalia that routinely beheads people, so he shrugged off the pirates’ threats.
“There was this huge debate,” recalled Mursal Kadiye, a Saleban businessman who has been involved in several hostage negotiations, including helping resolve the hijacking of the Sirius Star, a Saudi supertanker seized with $100 million of oil inside. “People were saying: ‘How can you guys let them do this? Don’t you have political leaders? Don’t you have clan elders? How can you let them hold two elderly people in Saleban territory?’ It was embarrassing.”
For Kadiye’s brother, Dahir Kadiye, a former taxi driver who recently set up a branch of an international security company in Mogadishu, it was even worse. Dahir’s teenage son, Yusuf, was being teased at his school in London. Kids were calling him pirate.
Dahir Kadiye started reaching out to fellow clansmen in Amara and Adado, warning them that if the Chandlers died, the world wouldn’t just hold Somalia responsible; it would hold the Saleban responsible. In Amara, elders were hitting a similar note. Ali Abdi, who owns a small general store, tried to persuade the pirates that keeping the Chandlers was now becoming a risk for the entire community.
“A lot of people came, including a father whose son was a pirate, and told the pirates that these people might die in their hands,” Abdi remembered.
But Buggas and the gang didn’t budge. They needed their money. Their operating expenses were growing daily, and by this point they had many creditors — some of them heavily armed — who were expecting to be paid back.
By the spring, after the Chandlers had spent six months in captivity, local opinion was turning against Buggas and his crew. “People were making fun of the pirates,” said Mohamed Dahir, the journalist. “Everybody was saying they have this big debt and they’re holding an old couple who don’t have any money.” Dr. Hangul, the physician who made that first visit with Dahir, said, “The pirates were afraid to even walk around Adado.”
Dr. Hangul also told me that Buggas was not actually in charge. “He was just the chief of security, chief of the militia,” he said. “He was working for three or four investors who were making the decisions.”
In many Somali piracy cases, a committee of investors or creditors fronts the cash for the piracy mission, and it’s up to the head gunman to deliver a tidy profit. But finally it seemed to dawn on Buggas and his creditors that they weren’t going to make much of a profit on this one. Stephen and Ali were negotiating a payment under a half-million dollars, all the Chandler family could afford and, for the pirates, a humiliating fraction of what corporate shipowners typically pay. (One pirate gang operating not far from Amara made $9.5 million last year by hijacking a Korean oil tanker called the Samho Dream.)
Stephen started looking into chartering a plane in Nairobi to package the money and deliver it to Buggas. Because of the profusion of hijackings over the past several years, several companies now specialize in making money drops.
Buggas agreed to reunite the Chandlers while the arrangements were being finalized. As we sat in her living room, Rachel described seeing Paul for the first time in three months as he stepped out of a truck with his dusty bags to move back into her hut. Her usual composure cracked for a moment, and she began to cry.
“I thought, My goodness, he looks so old and frail,” she said. “But then he smiled. And it was just Paul’s smile. Even Buggas was standing benevolently by and saying, ‘Are you happy?’ Can you believe it?”
In mid-June, Ali the translator showed up at the bush camp with a typed-out sheet of paper, in English, essentially a pirate contract. “It’s standard pirate procedure,” Stephen told me. The letter stipulated that the Chandler family would pay $440,000 and “the pirates” — this word was used in the contract — would promptly release them. Ali signed the contract and faxed it to Stephen, who then spoke to Rachel. “The plane is on its way,” Rachel remembers Stephen saying about the aircraft that would drop the money. “See you in Nairobi soon.”
“Our hopes were sky high,” Paul told me.
But then nothing happened. The Chandlers stayed in their bush camp. When they asked their guards what was going on, all the pirates would say was, “No fly today.” Or tomorrow. Or the next day. Dejected, they wondered whether Stephen got cold feet and backed out.
Around this time, Aden, the president of the Himan and Heeb administration, was trying to cut his own deal. He was just on the verge of attracting aid groups — word was beginning to spread that Adado was an oasis of stability in otherwise-violent central Somalia — and the last thing he needed was his little domain to be associated with the imprisonment of Western hostages. He raised $50,000 from local businessmen and says he nearly persuaded Buggas and the gang to take it. But then some people called from Nairobi and London and told Buggas to hold out for more. Aden wouldn’t be specific about who these meddlers were — maybe he didn’t know. But often in pirate cases, strangers — typically Somali businessmen — insert themselves into the delicate negotiations, offering their services to the families of captives or to the pirates in hopes of getting a slice of the ransom.
“This is a funny business,” Aden said. “Everybody wants to get a benefit for themselves and not for Paul and Rachel.”
By this point, Paul was sick of playing the good hostage. When the gunmen would ask to use his radio or deck of cards, he’d simply refuse. What were they going to do to him, anyway? He remembers one night when the gang had just received some new cellphones, and while he was trying to go to sleep, they were making a racket. He stood up in his underwear and yelled, “Shut up!” After a stunned silence, one of them said weakly, “Problem?”
In November, Dahir Kadiye, whose son was teased in school, decided to go to Adado. His plan, he said, was to use the contacts he had made through his small security company to bring the Chandlers home. But what exactly happened after that remains murky. Aden and several others told me emphatically that Kadiye, along with Dr. Hangul and other Saleban elders living abroad, cobbled together several hundred thousand dollars to pay off the pirates. The money was collected secretly, Aden said, and a rich Somali woman living in the Persian Gulf contributed $100,000 to make sure the deal went through.
Dr. Hangul has a somewhat different version. He recently told me that the Somali government, through Kadiye, paid the pirates several hundred thousand dollars after Somalia’s president, Sheik Sharif, met with the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, in March 2010. Somali officials wouldn’t comment on whether they paid a ransom. A British diplomat familiar with the Chandler case said that his government “doesn’t pay ransom, doesn’t condone the paying of the ransom and doesn’t encourage the paying of ransom,” adding that if the Somali government “did contribute to the ransom — and I heard that too, though I can’t say it’s a fact — it certainly wasn’t the result of any meeting or conversation with us.”
Kadiye vehemently denies that any additional money was paid. He says that all he used to lubricate the final deal was “systematic community pressure.”
The Chandlers said they had the impression that a second payment was made. One day, Buggas came up to them, when there were no other gunmen in earshot, and said something like, “My Somali family give two hundred,” referring to his clan. (The pirates always spoke in thousands.)
On Nov. 13, 2010, more than a year after they were taken, the Chandlers were told to pack their bags. They climbed into the Toyotas, and it seemed as if the whole village of Amara piled into the sandy road to wave goodbye. “We weren’t letting our hopes rise too high,” Paul said. “But we had this sense.”
They drove for hours, heading west, deep into the desert. Buggas sat in the back of their truck, cheeks bulging with khat, a machine gun on his lap. His last words to them were, “Rachel, you go London tomorrow.”
“I thought, What’s this guy doing here?” Rachel said. “We had no idea who he was.”
But then Kadiye hugged them. “It was just extraordinary, this Somali hugging us,” Rachel recalled giddily. “I just thought, this guy is for real, he must be a kind man, because we had not experienced that sort of true kindness that you can recognize in that way, somehow, in a hug.”
It was at that instant, with Kadiye’s arms around them, that the Chandlers realized they were finally free. But Kadiye said they were still in danger — other pirates or bandits might be lurking around, and they needed to move fast. They finally made it to Adado, where Aden served them tea, toast and eggs — “a full English breakfast,” he joked — and then some officials with Somalia’s transitional government helped fly the Chandlers to Mogadishu and on to Nairobi, Kenya.
After they arrived in London a few days later, they slept a lot. Paul found it therapeutic to immerse himself in simple tasks, like checking the air in his tires and getting a new ATM card. To his distress, he learned that his 99-year-old father died while they were in captivity and now, in addition to reclaiming their affairs, they had to straighten out his dad’s too.
But they were energized by an especially bright and surprising piece of news: the Lynn Rival had not simply drifted away to disappear into the ocean; the British Navy had recovered her and brought her back home. She’s now in a boatyard near Dartmouth, a quaint English town full of fudge shops, the opposite end of the universe from Somalia. That country seems to only go from bad to worse. A famine is sweeping the southern regions, Islamist militants have recently gone on another beheading spree and the pirates are growing more ambitious and more violent. In September, they struck on land in Kenya. In the middle of the night, they zoomed up in a speedboat to a fancy beach resort in Kiwayu, burst into a bungalow and attacked a British couple, killing the husband and then bundling up the wife and disappearing with her. Recent reports indicate they are now holding the woman hostage hundreds of miles away from the Kenyan border, deep inside Somalia, in — it turns out — Amara. Kadiye says he’s trying to get involved.
The Chandlers insist they have had no lasting damage from the experience, physical or psychological, except, in Paul’s words, “We’ve spent 2 percent of our lives in Somalia.”
Shortly after they returned, the Chandlers agreed to a series of interviews with a London tabloid and a TV station for around $275,000 and then started working on a book, “Hostage,” which was published last month in England. They did this with one goal in mind, they told me: make enough money to pay back their families and fix their boat, which still has a bullet hole in the boom. But spending their time in such a sedentary way is clearly frustrating to them. They had planned to while away these years seeing the world, and they don’t know many people in Dartmouth. Their community is each other and perhaps the wider world of equally passionate sailors who have devoted their lives to floating on the ocean.
Profiting from their ordeal, Rachel says, is “just a means to an end, and the end will be getting back on the Lynn Rival,” though they are going to stay out of the Indian Ocean for the time being. The Caribbean will probably be their first trip, next summer. “If you’ve got a nice breeze and you’re just creaming along and if you’ve got a clear sky and nobody else is out there,” she said, her voice trailing off. “I just love it. I do feel truly that I’m on my own, this little speck in our universe.”
British police to launch Seychelles pirate hunting base By Colin Freeman (SaturdayTelegraph)
Profits from piracy may line the pockets of Somalia's al-Shabaab Islamist movement
Britain is to boost its fight against Somali piracy by creating a new intelligence cell with the job of tracking the multi-million dollar money flows generated by buccaneering "kingpins".
Profits from piracy may line the pockets of Somalia's al-Shabaab Islamist movement
Britain is to boost its fight against Somali piracy by creating a new intelligence cell with the job of tracking the multi-million dollar money flows generated by buccaneering "kingpins".
A financier who offers as little $10,000 to equip a gang with skiffs, fuel and guns can easily expect a return of 10 or 20 times his money in the event of a successful hijacking.
But while such profits are now believed to run into tens of millions of dollars a year, relatively little is known about exactly where the cash ends up, beyond a widespread acknowledgement that it makes the gangs ever more powerful, and may also line the pockets of Somalia's al-Shabaab Islamist movement.
"Pirate financiers are the kingpins of piracy," said Henry Bellingham, Foreign Office minister for Africa, who will announce details of the new centre in a speech to the Chamber of Shipping in London on Wednesday. "Effectively targeting them will have a huge impact on the ability of pirates to terrorise the high seas."
The new unit will be based in the Seychelles Islands, nearly 1,000 miles east of Kenya, which have now become a key forward operating base against pirate gangs as they spread their reach across the Indian Ocean.
Its creation comes amid growing concern at the pirate gangs' ability to evolve their tactics against the efforts of the international anti-piracy fleet, who have now been pursuing them for three years with only limited success. Most recently the gangs appear to have branched out into kidnappings on the mainland of neighbouring Kenya, with two foreign tourists separately seized in the past month.
Marie Dedieu, a disabled Frenchwoman in her sixties, was snatched from a holiday home in northern Kenya on Oct 1, not far from where British tourist Judith Tebbutt was snatched in early September.
Much of the counter-piracy efforts to date have been hampered by the lack of courts willing to try suspects arrested by foreign navies.
European courts fear pirates will try to seek asylum after being released, while Kenyan courts are often already overburdened - hence the much-criticised practice of "catch and release", in which suspects are simply disarmed and then allowed to sail back to Somalia.
However, Mr Bellingham will claim that it is a "fallacy that pirates are not prosecuted or imprisoned", pointing out that more than 1,000 pirates are now held in custody in over 20 countries, including three prominent leaders and financiers.
Arrangements are now also in place that will allow convicted pirates to be transferred back to prisons under construction in Puntland, the semi-independent region of northern Somalia from where much of the piracy is conducted.
Critics, though, fear that Puntland's justice system is wide open to bribery, and say that in the past, many pirate financiers have simply "bought" their underlings out of jail.
They also point out that the prospect of a share of a multi-million ransoms means even the risk of a long sentence in a Somali jail is unlikely to deter many pirates from putting out to sea.
Marie Dedieu, a disabled Frenchwoman in her sixties, was snatched from a holiday home in northern Kenya on Oct 1, not far from where British tourist Judith Tebbutt was snatched in early September.
Much of the counter-piracy efforts to date have been hampered by the lack of courts willing to try suspects arrested by foreign navies.
European courts fear pirates will try to seek asylum after being released, while Kenyan courts are often already overburdened - hence the much-criticised practice of "catch and release", in which suspects are simply disarmed and then allowed to sail back to Somalia.
However, Mr Bellingham will claim that it is a "fallacy that pirates are not prosecuted or imprisoned", pointing out that more than 1,000 pirates are now held in custody in over 20 countries, including three prominent leaders and financiers.
Arrangements are now also in place that will allow convicted pirates to be transferred back to prisons under construction in Puntland, the semi-independent region of northern Somalia from where much of the piracy is conducted.
Critics, though, fear that Puntland's justice system is wide open to bribery, and say that in the past, many pirate financiers have simply "bought" their underlings out of jail.
They also point out that the prospect of a share of a multi-million ransoms means even the risk of a long sentence in a Somali jail is unlikely to deter many pirates from putting out to sea.
OPEC: Rejects Use of Armed Guards on Ships,
Onshore Solution to Piracy Needed [REPORT] (Dow Jones)
Somali piracy could spread further unless an onshore solution is found, the secretary general of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said in an interview published Tuesday. Abdalla Salem el-Badri said in an interview with shipping daily Lloyd’s List that Somalian piracy would evolve into “a moveable industry,” threatening shipping beyond its waters in the absence of “a solution not only offshore but also onshore.”
However, in OPEC’s first official comments on piracy, el-Badri rejected the use of armed guards on tankers as potentially “very dangerous.”
Asked if he stood by his view that about 1 million barrels a day in Libyan output would come back on-stream within six months, El-Badri said he is “more confident of Libya production.”
On oil demand, the OPEC secretary general acknowledged economic stagnation in Europe and the U.S. were “a real concern” to OPEC. But he added that strong Chinese demand meant “we should not panic” and release sharp downgrades on growth estimates just yet.
Cyprus to allow armed guards on board ships (FinancialMirror)
Cyprus is preparing legislation that will allow armed guards to board merchant ships to protect the crew, vessel and cargo from pirate attacks. Details of the new law will be discussed at the “Maritime Cyprus 2011” conference in Limassol that starts on Monday where some 700 delegates will also debate on trade issues such as energy costs, environment-friendly transport and the freight markets where costs have risen due to piracy and increased insurance.
With the third biggest maritime fleet in the European Union and the tenth biggest in the world, Cyprus also boasts itself as the world leader in shipmanagement companies, all of whom are concerned about the safety of their ships.
The government is at the final stage of concluding the draft bill which, when passed, will make it one of the most comprehensive of its kind and help restore some order in the maritime industry that relies on navies and private security companies for its safety. Of the 200-300 piracies that take place every year, only two Cyprus-flag ships were hijacked by pirates and both were released, one of which last week after being held in the eastern Atlantic, off the coast of Nigeria and Benin,” Serghios Serghiou, the Director of the Department of Merchant Shipping, told a press briefing this week. “We are in the same situation as all the other maritime nations. We cannot rely on navies to protect ships all around the world,” he said, adding that “even charterers are demanding to have security personnel on board.” International law is very basic and does little to safeguard crews or prosecute would-be pirates. Serghiou explained that the new law will overcome past legal obstacles and will help define issues such as the transfer of weapons on board ships and the protection of seamen in cases of conflict. This will also send out the message that Cyprus is willing to defend its ships, crew and cargoes,” even though the Republic does not have a navy that would patrol pirate-filled routes in the Indian Ocean or elsewhere. Cyprus does, however, participate in the EUROFOR patrols off the coast of eastern Africa with two naval officers. “Shipping accounts for 90% of all world trade and is the cheapest method of transport. Piracy is causing major problems to the stability and costs in world trade,” said Thomas Kazakos, chief executive of the Cyprus Shipping Chamber. “Imagine what would happen if global shipping were to come to a halt for three days alone,” he said. Alecos Michaelides, Acting Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Communications and Works explained that piracy has also pushed up labour costs. “The industry is having to pay higher wages for seamen in order to make the profession more attractive fro new recruits,” he said, adding that the theme of the conference will be “The Questions in shipping – Is it safe enough? Is it Sustainable? Is there enough Confidence?”
The official opening of the conference will take place on Sunday evening when the “Cyprus Maritime Awards” will be announced. The working part of the conference will be held at the “Evagoras Lanitis Centre” in Limassol from Monday to Wednesday. President Demetris Christofias will give a welcoming address to the delegates that will include IMO Secretary General Efthimios Mitropoulos, EU Transport Commissioner Siim Kallas, and 40 other speakers. The conference will also discuss industry issues such as capital markets as a new perspective in ship financing, energy sustainability and the use of energy resources in a manner that would not cause environmental damages, freight market and forecasting, the global financial crisis and the prospects of recovery. Michaelides added that an afternoon session will take place on “Maritime Cyprus: Young Executives” for young professionals under the age of 40 to discuss and analyse current issues of international shipping and to broaden the network of their contacts.
Most of the Western governments own or sponser - directly or indirectly - one of the Somalia reporting websites to stay in charge of reporting, just like in the real world of the mainstream media. Now South Korea gets on top of the counter-piracy spin.
CYPER-SPIN's LATEST REMOTE CONTROLLED PRODUCT ON PIRACY:
Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia Launches New Website By Office of the Spokesperson (MMD Newswire)
The U.S.American State Department announces the launch of the new official website for the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia , www.thecgpcs.org.
The new website, operated by the Republic of Korea with support from the United States and United Kingdom, serves as a repository of Contact Group documents and other counter-piracy related materials; a cyber secretariat offering a virtual workspace for Contact Group participants; and a real-time information center for industry, academic researchers, and the general public regarding the Contact Group's ongoing efforts.
The Contact Group, established in January 2009 pursuant to the UN Security Council Resolution 1851, is a voluntary ad hoc international forum of more than 70 countries, organizations, and industry groups with a common interest in combating piracy in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, and bringing pirates, as well as their financiers and facilitators, to justice. The Contact Group is the premier international forum for coordinating action against piracy, which is a transnational criminal enterprise that threatens commerce and humanitarian aid deliveries along one of the world's busiest shipping corridors.
Among its accomplishments to date, the Contact Group has:
- Facilitated the operational coordination of an unprecedented international naval effort from more than 30 countries working together to protect transiting vessels.
- Partnered with the shipping industry to improve and promote Best Management Practices that merchant ships and crews can take to avoid, deter, delay, and counter pirate attacks.
- Strengthened the capacity of Somalia and other countries in the region to combat piracy, in particular by contributing to the UN Trust Fund Supporting Initiatives of States Countering Piracy off the Coast of Somalia; and
- Launched a new initiative aimed at disrupting the pirate enterprise ashore, including its associated financial networks, through approaches similar to those used to address other types of organized transnational crime networks.
Kenya and piracy
Fetching them on the beaches
Tourist abductions from Kenyan resorts mark the expansion of Somali piracy (TheEconomist)
ON OCTOBER 1st a disabled French woman was dragged from her home on Kenya’s northern coast by pirates and taken by speedboat to Somalia. The kidnapping was even more shocking to residents and visitors than the killing of a British publisher and the kidnapping of his deaf wife, also by pirates, three weeks earlier. That attack took place at an isolated spot closer to the Somali border. But the French woman was snatched near the town of Lamu, a haven for foreign tourists.
The attacks are a blow to Kenya’s economy, which earns over $800m a year from tourism. Many of its half a million visitors come from Britain, so a headline in the Daily Mail, a British newspaper, was damaging: “Kenya is a treacherous place—and it’s getting worse”. The country had hoped for a record year. Not any more.
Growing numbers of tourists from China and elsewhere in Asia, together with the lure of a weak currency, could revive tourism next year. But the kidnappings highlight a longer-term problem: having a failed state as a neighbour. Kenya had turned its back on Somalia and hoped for the best. That is no longer enough. Its border is porous. The Kiunga post, just across from Ras Kamboni, a Somali town near the border, is undermanned. The mangrove swamps on the other side are home to training camps for the Shabab, a Somali militant group close to al-Qaeda that controls swathes of southern and central Somalia. Kenyan soldiers patrolling at the other end of the border have recently been snatched by them.
The French captive was apparently taken ashore at Ras Kamboni and driven to the southern Somali port of Kismayo, a Shabab stronghold. That raises suspicions that she is being used as a shield against American drone attacks on the Shabab, which have increased. Mediators have had trouble locating the British captive; she may have been sold to pirate gangs in central Somalia. If ransoms are paid, as they have been before, more kidnappings are likely. Payments for the release of ships nabbed off Somalia’s coast have risen from $100,000 to $2m-plus.
Many Kenyans accept that robust action is required. Yet cross-border military intervention is unlikely and would probably be counterproductive. In the meantime, the growing operational range of the pirates and their ties to jihadists mean that tourists may be at risk of capture ever farther down the coast.
Leaders protest over Lamu security clampdown By Ronnel Onchagwa (NationMedia)
Police commissioner Mathew Iteere arrived in Lamu for a meeting with tourism stakeholders this week after suspected Somali militiamen kidnapped a British tourist and a French resident.
Leaders in Lamu have complained about a security operation in the area mounted in response to the recent abduction of tourists.
They also denied
No comments:
Post a Comment