Guardian excerpt

The Guardian ran an excerpt of Deadly Waters in its G2 supplement yesterday:

It had taken five days to arrange this meeting. Somali pirates are hard to track down, constantly moving around and changing phone numbers. Days earlier, frustrated and eager to begin interviewing, I had naively suggested approaching some suspected pirates on the streets of Garowe, a rapidly expanding city at the heart of the pirates' tribal homeland. Habitually munching on narcotic leaves of khat, they are easy enough to spot, their gleaming Toyota four-wheel-drives slicing paths around beaten-up wheelbarrows and pushcarts. My Somali hosts laughed, explaining that to do so would invite kidnapping, robbery, or, at the very least, unwanted surveillance. In Somalia, everything is done through connections – clan, family or friend – and these networks are expansive and interminable. Warsame, my guide and interpreter, had been on and off the phone for the better part of a week, attempting to coax his personal network into producing Abdullahi "Boyah" Abshir. Eventually it responded, and Boyah presented himself.

Full article available here: "Somali pirate: 'We're not murderers, we just attack ships'"

Booklist review

The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World.
Bahadur, Jay (Author)
Jul 2011. 320 p. Pantheon, hardcover, $26.95.

Bored with his job in marketing research, Bahadur decided to travel to Somalia in 2008–09 to investigate maritime brigandage. His boldness results in an insightful report based on interviewing pirates in their lairs, educing their rationales for hijacking ships, figuring out the finances of piracy, and embedding the whole phenomenon in the clan-based society from which it emanates. He alighted in the Puntland region, whose bleak landscapes and crumbling buildings he economically describes as he recounts jouncing trips on pot-holed roads through trackless desert. Conducted during hours-long sessions of chewing the stimulant drug khat, Bahadur’s conversations captured pirates’ life stories and their apologia for buccaneering. They cynically claimed to be protecting Somali territorial waters. For their hostages’ views, Bahadur went to a pirate cove, in which a captured ship lay at anchor. Not permitted to speak with the captive crew, he gathered its members’ accounts after they were ransomed and released. Bahadur’s revelatory journalism and astute analysis of causes and solutions prove far more informative than any TV footage about the contemporary piracy problem.

— Gilbert Taylor

Fear-mongering never gets old

After two and a half years spent researching Somali piracy, I thought I had become inured to the sensationalist guff that the topic inevitably seems to inspire. Then a very special piece of hysterical twaddle, such US Senator Mark Kirk's (R-IL) recent report on piracy, comes along to rouse my dulled sense of outrage. In his fifteen-page brief, Kirk paints a grossly distorted portrait of the threat posed by Somali piracy, which he seems to view as the latest in a series of historical crises aimed at upsetting American hegemony. Indeed, his report is peppered with apparent references to US history; Kirk's colour-coded "Somali Political Control Map" labels political factions as "Unionist" and "secessionist," he warns of the danger to "American and allied shipping" that conjures up images of German U-boats, and he counsels a return to the "tradition of the Jefferson Administration" and its Barbary war. Even in his description of the handful of rescue operations carried out by US and "Allied" navies, which he refers to (without any hint of facetiousness) as "notable battles against pirates," Kirk demonstrates a markedly exaggerated perception of the scale of the problem.

There are over four thousand words in this report (and a whole slew of numbers) but Kirk's entire agenda is laid bare in his first paragraph, highlighted in bold: "Unless our policy becomes more aggressive to attack pirates," Kirk writes, "we will see a huge increase in terrorism from Al Qaeda affiliates that feed off pirate ransoms." The rest of the report adds nothing in support of this thesis, but rather supplies ledgers of unsourced stats and unrelated assertions whose only seeming purpose is to convince his readers that they are looking at a legitimate piece of research. After sifting through the chaff, it eventually becomes clear that the weight of Kirk's entire argument rests on a single unsubstantiated claim by the Kenyan government that 30% of ransom money (more than $50 million, apparently) is "funneled to the East African Al Qaeda/Al Shabaab Islamic terrorist groups." This is the same government, mind you, that announced that the pirates had pulled in $150 million in 2008, a figure roughly fivefold larger than the reality.

Senator Kirk maps out his strategy, Bossaso.

As I argue in my book, links between pirates and terrorists undoubtedly exist, but they tend to be isolated and non-systematic—opportunistic individuals with Islamist ties who happen to dabble in piracy investments on the side. A prime example is thuggish southern warlord Yusuf Mohammed Siad "Inda'adde," a pirate financier who alternatively calls himself a TFG minister, a Shabaab potentate, and an Independent, depending on the expediency of the moment. Somali political relationships, unfortunately, are not so clearly defined as Senator Kirk's neatly chequered map would have us believe.

Shabaab militias began pushing north into Mudug in the spring of last year, driving many pirates in Harardheere north to Hobyo (since then, disgruntled Hobyo locals have forced the pirates even further north). In the aftermath, there has been some convincing evidence that the pirates still operating in the Harardheere region have reached informal "profit-sharing" arrangements with Shabaab leaders. Yet to say that Kirk is sensationalizing Islamist-pirate links would be an understatement. I do not know, nor care to speculate on, what sort of political manoeuvrings Kirk is involved in, for which lobbyists' marching band he is beating his anti-terror drum, or whether he has simply trained himself to see the rest of the world as a breeding ground-in-waiting for anti-American extremism. His motivations are not that important. Fear-mongering hucksters like Senator Kirk will always exist, seizing upon any scrap of evidence and attempting to peddle it as whole-cloth. We can only hope that once Kirk's moment in the media spotlight has passed, wiser heads within the Obama administration will fling his half-baked opus into the dustbin, where it belongs.

Publishers Weekly review

An advance review of my forthcoming book is just out from Publishers Weekly:

The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World

Jay Bahadur. Pantheon, $26.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-307-37906-1

The inner workings of the world of Somali pirates are astutely explored by Bahadur, a journalist who embedded himself among them to detail how "a level of international naval cooperation unprecedented in human history has been unable to stop a motley assortment of half-starved brigands armed with aging assault rifles and the odd grenade launcher." It's an engaging account, full of solid analysis about the collapse of Somalia and the tight-knit clan and subclan networks that keep a failed state from dissolving into complete anarchy while fostering conditions ideally suited to ocean-going criminality. Few other economic options exist for young men along this harsh coastline, largely because of abusive fishing practices by foreign trawler fleets. The institutionalization of these hijackings has created an economic order among the pirates not unlike other forms of organized crime. Coupled with the widespread addiction to the narcotic herb khat, conditions for wiping out piracy may be impossible to achieve. Still Bahadur's interviews with the pirates reveal that they rarely relish criminality; it's genuine desperation that motivates them. What's especially impressive (aside from Bahadur's sheer nerve in insinuating himself among these dangerous men in a lawless corner of the world) is the amassing of multiple perspectives--of pirates and policymakers--that support a rich, suspenseful account. (July)