Ransoming in Contemporary Northeast Africa: Piracy off the Coast of Somalia

Introduction

Ransoming is an age-old phenomenon dating at least as far back as the mid-first century BC when pirates kidnapped Julius Caesar near the Greek island of Pharmacusa and demanded “twenty talents” for his release. According to the Greek historian Plutarch, Caesar “laughed at them for not knowing who their captive was, and of his own accord agreed to give them fifty [talents].”² This chain of events has an eerie resemblance to the alacrity of hijacked foreign illegal fishers in Somali waters in the early 2000s, who offered their captors irresistible sums of money to secure their speedy release.

When local Somali vigilantes captured illegal foreign fishing vessels, the former demanded “fines” and the latter readily paid—sometimes offering more money than they would be asked to—in order to avoid drawn-out legal altercations and embarrassment.³ With more than 20,000 vessels crisscrossing this pirate prone area, such alacrity to pay rising fines helped usher in predatory ransom piracy. This criminal enterprise became as much a contributory factor to the vicious cycle of insecurity and political-economic deterioration as it is a symptom and consequence of it.

Although ransoming in Africa is also an old practice of paying for the freedom of captives, contemporary piracy and ransoming off the Horn of African coast are both recent and unique. The two emerged and thrived in the wake of complete breakdown of any semblance of law and order. Unlike other historic cases of piracy and ransoming, defensive Somali piracy emerged in the late 1990s against the plundering of Somalia’s marine environment by resource pirates since the collapse of the central government in 1991.⁴ By mid-2000s, it metastasized into a predatory enterprise when criminal elements – also taking advantage of the collapse of the state – hijacked the impromptu grassroots response of the coastal communities.⁵ The lawlessness was so unbridled that pirates, unsupported by the state like the historic North African piracy, commandeered their captive vessels to – and held them and their crew hostage in – coastal waters of inhabited territories and went inland to celebrate their “catch” while ransom was being negotiated.

The regional and global effects of Somali ransom piracy are understood in their broad contours but the economics and inner dynamics of ransoming on the ground in Somalia continue to elude scrutiny as do its local consequences. Efforts to investigate the multitude of questions that arise often lead to treacherous, and even risky, dead ends and vicious cycles. This paper examines the dynamics and economic aspects of ransoming foreign hostage sailors out of pirate captivity in twenty-first century Somalia. In establishing the general framework of the entire practice, from the start of negotiations to the aftermath of receiving ransoms, this paper addresses the following questions: How did ransom negotiations take place? How were ransoms paid to and split among all the stakeholders? And finally what are the effects of the practice itself on the local communities and the infusion of large unearned sums into the local economies? In answering these questions, the paper contends that while presenting extremely few, very lucrative and equally dangerous criminal prospects for the daring, jobless and/or greedy few, ransom piracy deteriorated the security of local communities and wrecked their weak and vulnerable economies.

Minding the Inauspicious Victim-Beneficiary Binary

Without tackling the morality, legitimacy, and/or legality of the means and circumstances in which sailors are taken and held hostage and freed, this paper documents from the field in Puntland how the majority of ransom money was ab/used, and examines the effects of the injection of large sums of ill-gotten cash into weak economies and vulnerable communities. Besides the practical hardship and security threats that make fieldwork difficult, doing so is muddied by scholarly works, policy analyses and media coverage that have fanned widely-held but inaccurate views that regard the majority, if not all, Somalis as beneficiaries of pirate-generated ransom money.

A January 2012 Chatham House report authored by Anja Shortland is but one example. Arguing that a land based solution needs to replace...