DEbUNkINg THE PIRAcy MyTH

THE RUSI JOURNAL

Debunking the Piracy Myth How Illegal Fishing Really Interacts with Piracy in East Africa Stig Jarle Hansen

Somali pirates have claimed, and some Western analysis repeated the idea, that illegal fishing has been an underlying cause and justification for piracy. But pirate behaviour is not consistent with this idea, and the claim that piracy started as a form of coast guard, protecting Somali fisheries, is dubious. Rather, piracy is motivated by the quest for profit. Nevertheless, illegal fishing narratives do contribute to the pirates’ local legitimacy, and need to be undermined in order to fight piracy.

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peaking on 20 November 2011, President Farole of Puntland reiterated what has become one of the most repeated explanations of Somali piracy: ‘The piracy started when fishermen defended themselves against illegal fishers’.1 In echoing a narrative often repeated by pirates themselves, he was reinforcing the tendency identified by Jay Bahadur whereby pirates shun the Somali word equivalent of ‘pirate’, burcad badeed (ocean robber), preferring badbaadinta badah (saviours of the sea) instead, and thus automatically claiming that their aim is to protect the Somali waters.2 This is also the claim of one of the major pirate leaders of Somalia: ‘We are going to keep going until our seas are cleansed of illegal fishing’.3 Several researchers have also stressed, in their view, a clear causal relationship between piracy and illegal fishing.4 However, analyses propounding this argument are often based on interviews with the pirates themselves, who have an undeniable vested interest in appearing innocent. These interviews often contain vast ambiguities: for instance, pirates have been known to reveal that they have participated in chasing commercial ships in order to ‘help friends’, or because ‘all foreigners were

equally guilty’.5 Nor are the interviewed pirates very clear on when the transition itself took place, sometimes giving interviews that are self-contradictory.6 Any approach that takes the pirates’ statements for granted leaves much to be desired: what is needed instead is more in-depth analysis introducing statistics of pirate activities and their targets, as well as interviews with both local fishermen and international fishing companies. It is important to examine whether the pirates’ actual deeds match their rhetoric, both to map out how the illegal fishing narrative influences the modus operandi of the pirates, and to understand the root causes of East African piracy. However, even if pirate outfits in East Africa are not operating as a coast guard protecting Somali waters against illegal fishing, nor being driven by illegal fishing, narratives of grievances might still exert a significant influence over the phenomenon in broader terms. As Hayward Alker writes, ‘Fairytales might come true if you believe in them’.7 This article argues that it is essentially wrong to claim that Somali pirates are driven by idealistic motives – protecting the Somali coastline – or even to claim that piracy started out as a coast guard activity; the pirates’ deeds simply

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do not match their words, and pirates never did behave as a ‘coast guard’. It will highlight the problems created by the definition of ‘illegal fishing’, and illustrate how different groups inside Somalia have accused each other of this very activity. The article does, however, argue that illegal fishing, in the sense of foreign ships fishing inside the 200 nautical mile zone from the Somali coast, does exist, and has existed since long before Somalia’s collapse, and that, whilst the ‘illegal fishing’ narrative does help the pirates to garner local legitimacy, it does not actually influence their actions.

Myth One: Somali Pirates Act as a Coast Guard The narrative of illegal fishing in Somalia definitely has some grounding in reality. According to a Norwegian fisherman with experience in the region, foreign trawlers have fished within a 200 nautical mile zone off Somalia since the breakdown of the navy in Berbera in 1986.8 It should be noted that illegal fishing is actually traditional in this areas, and resembles the nomadic practice of onshore Somalis crossing national borders. Offshore, fishermen from the Bajuni tribe based in Kenya often use their dhows to fish around the areas of Kismaayo, a practice DOI: 10.1080/03071847.2011.642682

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A US Coast Guard maritime safety and security team board and search a fishing vessel in the Persian Gulf, September 2009. Photo courtesy of US Navy/MC2 Brian K Fromal.

that is older than both independent Kenya and independent Somalia. There are other actors as well, and sometimes pirates target suspicious ships. For instance, the fishing ship Tian Yu No. 8 was captured close to Kismaayo, well inside the 200 nautical mile zone on 13 November 2008, and according to the Danish private company Risk Intelligence it was captured with 53 tons of tuna, 25 tons of lobster and 35 tons of shark fin, as well as illegal ivory on board.9 The Chinese owners claimed that the ship had been captured in Kenyan waters, but Risk Intelligence bases its positions on triangulation between military sources (often based on satellite positioning) and civilian sources, shrouding the claim of the owners in doubt. There are thus clear indications that something fishy is going on in Somali waters, although one would need to have access to a satellite tracking system to clearly see where the fishing vessels are being hijacked. Nevertheless, only a small amount of fishing ships have actually reported attacks, or attempted attacks, within the alleged 200 nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone outside

Somalia, with no such incidents reported in 2007, two in 2008, three in 2009 (of which all were Yemeni), four in 2010 (of which three were Yemeni), and none in 2011. The predominance of Yemeni fishing ships may be partially explained by the fact that most of the vessels were targeted close to the Socotra archipelago, where Yemeni waters run quite close to the Somali coast.10 Therefore, the pirates seemingly either did not find or did not take action against many fishing boats within the 200 nautical mile zone. Figure 1 shows that, with the notable exception of 2010, the most common victims of Somali piracy have been various forms of tankers, the slow-moving bulk carriers being the second type of preferred victim. Such prey clearly has no connection with the fishing sector. Fishing ships may be widely present in the rich seas off East Africa, but pirates seem to leave them largely undisturbed, preferring more profitable targets instead. Ironically, the success rate of attacks on larger ships was generally lower than that of attacks against fishing ships. Attacks against fishing ships were and are more likely to succeed than attacks

against other types of ships, save the vulnerable dhows, which are mostly handled by poor shipowners in the region, and generally have few countermeasures on board. The slight increase in attacks against dhows in 2010 might be explained by their usefulness for pirates as ‘motherships’, as well as better incident reporting routines for local traffic. Figure 3 shows the drastic decrease in success to attempt ratio across ship types in 2010 and 2011. This may be due to the increased use of private security on board tankers and bulk carriers, as well as the often underestimated improvement of counter-measures implemented by the shipping industry itself – both are statistically efficient tools in combating piracy.11 The mere fact that, in spite of the high success rate of attacks against fishing ships, pirates choose not to target them, provides a clear illustration of their disinterest in avenging illegal fishing. Piracy is profit driven: it targets the boats that seem to bring the most profit, yet it is not advanced enough to take any estimates of success rates into account. Pirates avoid attacking the targets

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Debunking the Piracy Myth

compared to attacks against fishing ships. The pirates’ hunting grounds and their chosen targets clearly indicate that Somali pirates have no interest in hunting illegal fishing boats.

Figure 1: Attempted hijackings 2007 to present, by ship type. 80 70

Tanker

60 50 Other Bulk carrier

40 30 20

Cargo ship

10

Fishing boat Dhow

0 2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

Source: Hansen, Piracy in the Greater Gulf of Aden; 2011 figure is based on recorded incidents before 11 October 2011.

Figure 2: Successfully hijacked ships 2008–11, by ship type. 20 18 16 14 12 10 8 Bulk carrier Tanker Fishing boat Cargo ship

6 4 Dhow 2

Other

0 2008

2009

2010

2011

Source: MaRisk.dk, checked against IMBs reports; 2011 figure is based on recorded incidents before 11 October 2011.

with the highest probability of success, essentially undermining the validity of any claim that what they are doing is based on their alleged contempt for the foreign fishing sector. In the words of one pirate, ‘We don’t attack fishing ships as what you can get from them is limited

in terms of ransom. We attack big cargo ships.’12 An analysis of the targeting practices of Somali pirates is thus highly revealing. It is the ship types more likely to garner a higher ransom that are targeted, in spite of the lower probability of success

Myth Two: Illegal Fishing Spawned Piracy Another variant of the illegal fishing argument, ‘illegal fishing started it’, seems to hold more promise. It suggests that piracy started out as a defensive measure taken due to illegal foreign fishing, which over time has turned into professional piracy. Ken Menkhaus states that piracy evolved as a defensive strategy against exploitation by foreign vessels. He notes that: ‘In 1991, foreign fishing trawlers aggressively moved into Somalia’s rich and unpatrolled waters, at the expense of coastal fishing villages. Angry Somali fishermen secured weapons and began firing on foreign trawlers.’13 According to Mohamed Waldo, piracy off the Gulf of Aden is the product of the illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing of foreign trawlers. But again, several facts also contradict this claim. Firstly, as described earlier, Somali pirates have always targeted non-fishing vessels.14 Statistical records show that the easiest and most valuable targets, slow-moving cargo ships with no ties to illegal fishing, have been the most popular targets of Somali pirates throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. In other words, Somali pirates seem to have always hunted for profit. The early data is more problematic than the Marisk/IMB data used to map the targeting practices of the pirates from 2008 onwards in the first part of this article. MARAD data initially reported all instances of violence at sea, which had to be recorded. Additionally, earlier episodes of piracy were probably under-reported. It is also likely that attacks against foreign fishing boats in general are under-reported because of the embarrassment of being discovered operating in Somali waters. Nevertheless, documented attacks against other types of boats clearly indicate profitable attacks against non-fishing boats always constituted a sizable proportion of the total pirate attacks off Somalia. The quest for profit was always a key driving force.

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Stig Jarle Hansen

It is indeed surprising that so few attacks against fishing vessels are reported in this period, partly because of the legal status of the EEZ off Somalia. When an EEZ is declared, the state in question enjoys sovereign rights for the purposes of exploring and exploiting, conserving and managing the natural resources, and any state or company that violates these rights is acting unlawfully.15 Fishing ships from a foreign state are forbidden to fish inside an EEZ without some form of license or a treaty. However, such a zone has to be declared publicly to the UN, which Somalia never did: instead, it declared a 200 nautical mile territorial zone, in violation of the UN Convention on the Law of the SEA. The zone is thus illegitimate according to international law.16 As Somalia did not properly deposit its EEZ claim with the UN, it could be argued that Somalia does not actually have any economic zone.17 Consequently, fishing cannot be defined as ‘illegal’, as national sovereignty over the area has not been properly established. Both the British Foreign Office and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs take the view that no Somali EEZ exists and that thus all states can fish in these waters legally. This argument can be used in courts to defend international trawlers’ activities in what normally would have been defined as Somalia’s EEZ, although an argument could be made that several international actors, for example Yemen and shipowners in Spain, have de facto accepted Somali claims by signing agreements on fishing rights, or in the latter case, accepting a legal settlement in the British legal system over illegal fishing.18 Moreover, even if we accept the existence of a Somali EEZ, this state’s collapse created confusing circumstances around the exact definition of what was to be ‘legal fishing’: would it be license holders from the various rebel factions that had legitimate licenses, former managers of the governmental fishing companies, or the local clans? These ‘fish wars’ in 1994 even saw the first ransom paid for hijacked ships in Somalia (although not the first hijacking), when two ships belonging to the former manager of the governmental fishing

Figure 3: Development in pirate success ratio, by ship type. 120

100

80

60 Dhow Fishing boat

40

Cargo ship

20

Bulk carrier Tanker Other

0 2008

2009

2010

2011

Source: MaRisk.dk, checked against IMBs reports; 2011 figure is based on recorded incidents before 11 October 2011.

Figure 4: The victims of early piracy (1989-2000). 120

100

80

60 Dhow Fishing boat

40

Cargo ship

20

Bulk carrier Tanker Other

0 2008

2009

2010

2011

Source: Numbers taken from the US Maritime Administration database, combined with IMO figures; based on figures from Anti-Shipping Activity Messages collected and available at FAS. org. The dataset can be requested from either the author or the US Maritime Administration.

company, Hassan Munya, were hijacked in Boosaaso.19 Crucially, however, this was not the first act of piracy, as there had already been several attacks against foreign cargo ships long before this: either the same groups

targeted commercial ships as well, almost from day one of their existence, or there were other pirate groups. However the fact remains that commercial attacks unrelated to illegal fishing took place from the very start of Somali piracy.

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Debunking the Piracy Myth

The Instrumental Values of the Narrative Pirate behaviour does not follow pirate rhetoric, but rhetoric serves important purposes for the pirates. The ‘illegal fishing argument’ might fulfil psychological needs of self-justification among the pirates, providing an explanation when they are questioned about their activities by the local population. Indeed, this was indirectly expressed by one of the pirates interviewed in 2009: ‘We see ourselves as being bad thief but then again we tell ourselves that those ships are dumping toxic wastes on our seas and are looting our fish resources’.20 There are also some indications that the use of the ‘coast guard’ title could have been an instrumental strategy in order to hail ships and get them to slow down. The story of the MV Bonsella provides a good example. On 9 September 1994, the cargo ship MV Bonsella, transporting emergency aid to Somalia was approached by a dhow that started to fire on it using highly inefficient mortar rounds. The Bonsella issued a mayday call, which resulted in the pursuing boat making radio contact, claiming to be the Somali Coast Guard patrolling to catch illegal fishers, and that the Bonsella should stop ‘in the name of the law’. Assurances were made that the firing would halt when the Bonsella stopped; the Bonsella was then boarded by eleven men. A total of two pirate groups were involved. Despite carrying emergency aid to Somalia, and despite not being involved in illegal fishing, the ship was hijacked. The pirates justified this by claiming that they needed a faster ship to stop illegal fishing. The boat was then used to follow and attempt to capture two other ships using the same strategy – hailing them under the guise of the coast guard to get them to slow down. These ships were also cargo ships, and there was no reason to assume they were connected with illegal fishing. The attempted attacks failed. The Bonsella was released after being plundered of the emergency aid destined for Somalia and the valuables of the crew.21 Perhaps the biggest instrumental gain stemming from the illegal fishing narrative is the creation of some kind

of legitimacy for the pirates. The illegal fishing narrative is a way to harness support from the Somali political elite, who do tend to quote illegal fishing when expressing support for piracy. Al-Shabaab leader Mukhtar Robow, for instance, has referred to pirates as ‘the jihadists at sea’, praising them for protecting Somali waters.22 It should be noted however that religious Somali leaders and community leaders often express disgust with the pirates, arguing that the practice contradicts Somali culture.23 Somali piracy also has negative consequences on the Somalis themselves – such as inflation related to war premiums on food, the outright theft by pirates of food aid, as well as the spread of prostitution and HIV infection in pirate-dominated areas.24 In a losing battle over Somali hearts and minds, the illegal fishing argument thus becomes a tool to sustain some local legitimacy, and piracy will gain some defenders amongst the local population based on this.25 The irony is of course that there are large signs, often ignored by Western observers, that the Somali fishing industry itself, the sector that Somali pirates are claiming to protect, is being destroyed by piracy. Somali fishing boat owners frequently claim that they have been pushed out of business by pirates, as nobody wants to be a fisherman anymore, finding piracy far more rewarding.26 Somali culture as well as religion condemns piracy, and in one sense, the narrative becomes a very welcome excuse that can be used to get both political and popular support, although the limited size of the pirate sector in Somalia indicates that there must still be strong norms against piracy in operation, and that there are limitations even to the effect of the narrative. Undermining the narrative will remove an important item from the pirate toolbox.

The Way Forward The narrative is enhanced by the fact that the events it explores are real: as the case of the Chinese trawler illustrates, several fishing companies do take advantage of Somalia’s lack of capacity to defend its waters and its failure to deposit its claim for the economic zone. The Transitional

Federal Government (TFG), Somalia’s internationally recognised government, is working to deposit a claim to the United Nations, but is hampered by the fact that an economic zone has to be demarcated with Kenyan and Yemeni waters, and that there are resulting disagreements over the exact position of the maritime border with both states. Any attempt to declare a maritime zone will be used politically by the enemies of the TFG (already a weak institution) to claim that it is ‘selling out’ Somali interests. The demarcation of the continental shelf of Somalia, supported by the Norwegian government, might even have sparked bomb threats against the Norwegian embassy in Nairobi. Despite the political ramifications, the process of declaring an economic zone is very important, and border problems might be solved by ‘agreeing to disagree’ and declaring a ‘grey zone’ between the claims of Somalia, Kenya and Yemen that could be jointly monitored until the issue is settled in the future, a solution that has been used elsewhere. The international naval coalition should commit to protecting the area and the economic zone after it has been declared, and it should explicitly state that it will avoid helping foreign trawlers attacked within a 200 nautical mile zone of Somalia, a step that would signal a commitment to prevent illegal fishing in this zone. It is crucial that the shipping industry itself pressures the companies that fish in the 200 nautical mile zone to stop doing so; this would create local goodwill inside Somalia. This also goes for the United Nations as well as Western governments: they should strongly criticise and publicly discourage the practice of fishing inside the Somali EEZ, and should also look into potential national tools of legislation to prevent this practice. The illegal fishing narrative needs to be undermined; one way of doing so is just by showing commitment to fighting illegal fishing. This, however, needs to be combined with the provision of information to the Somali community that the acts of the pirates are evidence that they are not a coastguard. While the narrative is therefore useful for the international community to believe in, as it encourages the fight against trawlers exploiting Somali waters, it is at the same

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time a dangerous myth for the Somalis to believe in, as it provides the pirates with local legitimacy. The problem, of course, arises when the belief of the first category spills over into the second. It is

perhaps then a paradox that to destroy a narrative, one needs to engage with it – but this is not necessarily to grant it legitimacy. ■

Stig Jarle Hansen is an expert on piracy and is the head of the IR programme at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He has a PhD from the University of Aberystwyth, Wales.

10 Ibid.

19 Author interview with Farah Hirsi Kulan ‘Boya’, Garowe, 4 August 2008.

NOTES 1 Addirahman Mohamud Farole, speech at Hanson Wade Combating Piracy Week, London, 20 October 2011. 2 Jay Bahadur, The Pirates of Somalia: Inside their Hidden World (New York: Harper Collins, 2011), p. 17. 3 Ibid., p. 84. 4 See, for example, Mohamed Abshir Waldom, ‘The Two Piracies in Somalia: Why the World Ignores the Other?’, Dajir News, 8 January 2009; Peter Lehr and Hendrick Lehmann, ‘Somalia: Pirates’ New Paradise’ in Peter Lehr (ed.), Violence at Sea: Piracy in the Age of Global Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 2007); Bahadur, op. cit.; for an undecided view, see Martin N Murphy, Somalia: the New Barbary? Piracy and Islam in the Horn of Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 5 Bahadur, op. cit., pp. 81, 84. 6 Compare Bahadur’s interview with Farah Hirsi Kulan ‘Boya’ in Bahadur, op. cit., pp. 81, 84, with Hansen’s interview with the same pirate leader, in Stig Jarle Hansen, Piracy in the Greater Gulf of Aden, NIBR report 2009:29 (Oslo: NIBR, 2009), p. 11. 7 Hayward Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 8 Author interview, Oslo, 1 April 2009.

11 Hansen, op. cit., p. 29. 12 Author interview with pirate ‘Adan’, Nairobi, 3 August 2009. 13 Ken Menkhaus, ‘Dangerous Waters’, Survival (Vol. 51, No. 1, February-March 2009), p. 22. 14 Waldo, op. cit.; Lehr and Lehmann, op. cit., p. 12. 15 Sophia Kopela, ‘The “Territorialisation” of the Exclusive Economic Zone: Implications for Maritime Jurisdiction’, paper presented to 20th Anniversary Conference of the International Boundary Research Unit on ‘The State of Sovereignty’, Durham, 1–3 April 2009. 16 Ibid. 17 Author interview with Carl Salicat, Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Oslo, 3 April 2011. See also Chris Holtby, speech on ‘Delivering an Integrated and Comprehensive Approach to Piracy’, Hanson Wade Combating Piracy Week, London, 19 October 2011. 18 See Stig Jarle Hansen, ‘Helpers or Proxies? The Politics of Private Military Force in Somalia’, Review of African Political Economy (Vol. 5, No. 116, Winter 2008); Yemeni Observer, ‘Yemen and Somaliland Sign Fishery Agreement’, 23 March 2006; Garowe Online, ‘Federal Official Challenges Validity of YemenPuntland Deal’, 3 July 2007.

20 Author interview with pirate ‘Absiyee’, Hobyo, 1 June 2009. 21 Hansen, op. cit. in note 6, p. 11. The story is taken from the Anti-Shipping Activity Messages Database, which is created and maintained by the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) and the Maritime Safety Information Centre (MISC) for the US Maritime Administration (MARAD). The dataset can be requested from either the author or MARAD. 22 Washington Times, ‘Somalia’s Muslim Jihad at Sea’, 22 April 2009. 23 See for example Al Jazeera, ‘Somali Pirates Face Public Backlash’, 18 June 2009; also United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Counter-Piracy Program, Issue 7, September/October 2011. 24 See Said Ismail, ‘Pirates to Blame for the Spread of HIV/AIDS’, Somalia Report, 6 May 2011. 25 See Al Jazeera, ‘Life Inside the Den of Somali Pirates’, 6 June 2009. 26 Al Jazeera, op. cit. in note 23; Hansen, op. cit. in note 6, p. 29.

9 MaRisk.dk, accessed 20 October 2011.

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