“THE PIRATES HAVE SEIZED THE SHIP”

Even as gunboats from across the globe move into their waters, the desperate, well-armed, and increasingly bold bandits of Somalia keep swarming the decks of the world’s largest ships. They take what they want, they don’t leave until the (higher and higher) ransoms are paid, and they won’t stop until a modern-day war against piracy breaks out
Thanks to Somalia, the world is in the midst of the greatest piracy epidemic since the Barbary Wars in the early nineteenth century. From Boosaaso and rocky little coves up and down the 1,900-mile coast, Somalia’s pirates are threatening to choke off the Gulf of Aden, through which 20,000 ships pass each year. The economic consequences of all this piracy are potentially catastrophic. The world’s biggest shipping companies are detouring their vessels thousands of miles around the Cape of Good Hope, at the bottom of Africa, rather than risking a voyage through Somalia’s pirate-infested seas. Insurance costs are shooting up. Security bills are skyrocketing. The cash-starved Egyptian government could collapse if more ships avoid the Gulf of Aden and the Suez Canal, which provides Egypt with billions of dollars each year.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,’’ said Pottengal Mukundan, director of the International Maritime Bureau in London. When we spoke in December, he told me that more than a dozen hijacked ships, with 300-plus hostages, were anchored just off the coast of Somalia. “You can see the images of these ships on Google Earth,’’ he said. “Nowhere else in the world would this be tolerated.’’ Somalia was gripped by “a national criminal ethos,” Mukundan went on, and only now that pirates were threatening global trade did the world seem to care about it.
Since December, warships from China, India, Italy, Russia, France, the United States, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Greece, Turkey, Britain, and Germany have all joined the hunt for Somalia’s pirates. But the pirates keep eluding them, keep hijacking merchant ships, and keep making millions in ransom payments. In the past year, they netted $120 million, an astronomical amount of money in a country where a fifth of the population is on the brink of starvation.
It’s easy to think of the pirates as modern-day Robin Hoods, and in some respects they are. In Somalia, a whole mythology has grown around them. I’ve been told—though I haven’t seen them—that entire malnourished villages along Somalia’s coast are now being well-fed by the loot they bring in. Women bake bread for them; young men from the coastal villages board the ships once they’re docked and act as extra muscle to guard the hostages; others serve as scouts, accountants, mechanics, and skiff builders. There’s no doubt that in Somalia, crime pays—it’s about the only industry that does—but this goes beyond just the money. With their black scarves covering their faces and submachine guns slung over their arms, Somalia’s pirates are the real Jack Sparrows of the twenty-first century, minus the eyeliner. One young woman who lives near Boosaaso bragged about going to a pirate wedding that lasted two days. A band was flown in from neighboring Djibouti. There was nonstop dancing and an endless supply of goat meat. “They drive the best cars, they throw the best parties,” she gushed. “We all want to marry them.” She claimed that her own pirate boyfriend had just given her a small gift—$350,000 in cash. For young Somali men, pirate life is becoming too much to resist. Fishermen all along the coast have traded in their ragged fishing nets for rocket-propelled grenades.
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