I understand that another in the team of contributors to this project has undertaken to tackle the subject of piracy on the Somali coast.  As such, I am loath to poach on grounds that have been spoken for by another.  I merely wish here to put forth a few ideas for the world community that they may employ to eradicate the scourge of Somali maritime looting.  To do this, a few passing remarks on the origin and evolution of the phenomenon of piracy on the Somali coast.  Two recently published pieces shed some light on how maritime robbery came about as a kind of vigilante response to foreign abuse of the Somali shores.(12)   Abdulkadir Egal's "Suspected Correlation between Cancer Incidence and Industrial and Nuclear Wastes" and Zainab Hassan's "Dumping on Somalia: a Plea for Evironmental Justice" are of a piece.  Egal, a Somali medical doctor, and Hassan, an independent researcher who is interested in environmental causes, tell a horror story, notably the wholesale poisoning of Somalia's once pristine shores by foreign interlopers--Italian mafia?--through nearly two decades of indiscriminate dumping of nuclear waste and other hazardous industrial materials.  Egal examines the catastrophe from a medical viewpoint, while Hassan does so from that of the environment.  As well, Hassan takes a telescopic look at the recent global commotion over the issue of piracy in Somali waters. 

On the Somali side, the pieces implicate a local warlord along with assorted shady characters in these nefarious business transactions, resulting in the degradation of the Somali coast. Somalia was once reputed as having one of the world's richest tuna fish catches on its shores.  From the combination of over-fishing by alien poachers and the pollution of the coastline in this unprotected land, the fish population has all but crashed, wreaking havoc on the livelihood of fishers and on the life of the local fishing industry.   Worse still, two decades of sustained dumping has thoroughly contaminated large swaths of the Somali coast.  The result has been an outbreak of alarming, myriad forms of cancer and equally deadly diseases, hitherto unknown in Somalia, devastating people and livestock alike.  Horrendous tales in these reports of fertility afflictions among Somali women proliferate, of large-scale abnormal births--miscarriages, stillborns and infants born with ghastly disfigured features.

Faced with this environmental apocalypse, Somali fishermen and petty merchants--under the urging of the elders of the clans, whose livestock has been decimated--organized themselves into a kind of law-enforcing, Robin Hood-style coast guard.  Using speed boats and armed with RPGs, bazookas and AK-47s, they took to seizing fishing vessels of foreign interlopers and shook them down for "taxes."  Then the Somalis realized that if they applied the shakedown scheme to all maritime traffic in the area, their financial catches could multiply.  This was the humble beginning of today's booming pirate enterprise.

As Somali piracy became one of the major economic activities in the country, annually netting an estimated $150m to 200m, thereby prompting mounting international alarm, a blizzard of publications--commissioned reports, monographs, all manner of essays and commentaries--have congested the publishing highways, both in print and electronically(13)   To take but one sample, Rubrick Biegon in Foreign Policy in Focus writes:

The recent spike in pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia has generated a great deal of international media attention, including news reports sprinkled with ubiquitous references to Long John Silver, Jack Sparrow, and Captain Hook...As the hijackings have increased in number they have also become more sophisticated, enabling the pirates to seize larger targets.  On September 25, [2008] Somali pirates captured the MV Faina, a Ukrainian ship transporting Soviet-era weaponry to Kenya.  This was followed one month later by the hijacking of the MV Sirius Star, the largest ship ever captured by pirates.

A Saudi-owned supertanker carrying approximately 2 billion barrels (about $100 million worth) of crude oil, the Sirius Star was finally released on January 9 for a $3 million ransom. However, the pirates continued to hold the Faina and its crew near the small port city of Eyl, located in Somalia's semi-autonomous Puntland region.  All told, the Puntland-based pirates are believed to be holding at least a dozen seized vessels.  Over 300 merchant mariners are being held hostage--though, it should be noted, their treatment has been less-than-barbaric by most accounts. (14)

Thus the humble affair that began as an umbrage over depleted fish has mushroomed into an illicit booming business with diversified components: financiers, global positioning experts, middlemen, foot soldiers and money laundering networks.  As a result a new buccaneering class of Somali pirate elite has emerged, parading their ill-gotten gains in the form of newly-constructed luxury villas, land cruisers, conspicuous consumers with multiple nuptials in such erstwhile humble villages as Boossaasso, Eyl, Hobyo (Obbia), Haradheere, Gara'ad, etc.  Moreover according to some reports, the pirate elite has lately grown so brazenly flamboyant that a pirate CEO has recently made an offer of humanitarian aid to the Haitian victims of the recent quakes in that unfortunate country!(15)                  

The Brigadier Smith Method of Dealing with Somali Looters

Brigadier R. H. Smith was a dashing British army officer who was posted to disorderly Somalia to take command of the British armed forces in Somalia in the aftermath of WW II when the entire Somali peninsula, from Gardafui in what is today known as Puntland to the borders of Kenya, came under British tenure (1941-48).  Smith was charged to restore law and order to lawless Somalia and stop the internecine killings in clannish feuds and vendettas and, above all, to halt the relentless camel rustling among the clans. In this wild environment of murder and mayhem, the beleaguered British officer, according to native testimony,(16)  came close to a nervous breakdown.  Then one day, in a manner of speaking, he was struck by a sudden epiphany.  Fortunately, he did not leap out of his ramshackle Mogadishu office to fall on an innocent pedestrian but realized, to his great enlightenment, that the Western concept of individual guilt and individual innocence was alien to the Somali weltanschauung.  Instead, he began to appreciate that in Somali customary law and legal sanctions, the principle of collective punishment was paramount.  For example, if a man from a certain lineage is murdered by a member of another lineage, the murderer's guilt was instantaneously transmitted to his entire lineage.  Members of the whole lineage collectively became fair game as targets of a flying spear of vendetta.  So was their livestock liable to seizure.  The aggrieved party was free to mete revenge to any member of his clan. 

At once Smith began to apply collective punishment to the kin of recidivist trouble-makers, especially camel rustlers.  He arrested kindred elders of offending individuals, and captured their camels.  The seizure of the camels and then corralling them, sometimes to the point of starvation (camels on which the nomads' livelihood depended) though brutal, had Smith's desired effect.  In other words, the method of collective punishment worked. Clan after clan laid down their spears and arrows.  And he had the peninsula pacified, according to indigenous oral sources,(17)  in twelve short months, making his name legendary in the land.  He became the only European, to my knowledge, whose name was so seared into Somali consciousness that it was immortalized in Somali classical poetry, poetry being, in B. W. Andrzewski and I. M. Lewis's informed judgement, the Somalis' "principal cultural achievement."(18)

Thus, the great Dervish poet-warrior Ismaa'iil Mire riffed on in a tone of contrastive ironies:

1. Isma oga Ismiir iyo ninkii, ayro foofsadaye  
2. Isma oga arbaha weerka iyo, ariga goosmaaye
3.  Isma oga waraabaha amliyo, awr la laayacaye
4. Isma oga atoor qadow bartiyo, uubta loo qodaye
5. Isma oga nin urugaysan iyo, eelka kii dhigaye
6. Isma oga dhillada uunsatiyo, awga taaibaye
7. Isma oga aqoon-xume dhargiyo, malag arsaa'iile
8. Isma oga agoon iyo ninkii, aabihis dilaye
9. Isma oga askari qooqan iyo, nimaan afbuux siine
10. Isma oga abeer qalabliyo, inanka doonaaye
11. Isma oga ugaar iyo libaax, adamiyaystaaye
12. Waxba gabaygu yuu ila ordine, waxaan ku soo ooday
13. La illow nin aakhira tegoo, iilka hoos maraye(19)

1.  Two know not each other: the camel seizing Smith and he who carelessly
grazes his herd near him;                                                                             
2.  Two know not each other: the prowling striped hyena and a flock of straying
 goats;
3.  Two know not each other: the lean hungry stripeless hyena and the he-camel
 not protected by its owner;
4.  Two know not each other: the dikdik used to nibbling fallen seeds under the
acacia tree and the trap thereof set for it;
5.  Two know not each other: the grievously embittered man and he who is the
 cause of his grief;
6.  Two know not each other: the over-perfumed prostitute and the pious ascetic
who has renounced the world;
7.  Two know not each other: the over-satiated fool and the avenging angel of
 death;
8.  Two know not each other: the revenge-seeking orphan and the murderer of his
 father;
9.  Two know not each other: the armed, over-arrogant rogue cop and the
 aggrieved civilian who maintains his silence;
10. Two know not each other: the camel with a chattering bell and the young man
 who is looking for it by following the sound of the bell;
11. Two know not each other: the stalking hungry lion and the unsuspecting game
 lazily grazing nearby;
12. Now let not these lines of poetry bolt away with me: here is my conclusion:
13. He who is dispatched by death to the other world is easily forgotten.

The effort of trying to translate a Somali classical poem into English surely constitutes a daunting task; for the poetic sense and sensibility of the two languages, as well as their physical structural scheme of versifying, are so alien the one from the other.  Still, I hope I've managed to bring out in this imperfect English rendition something of the scent of the Somali original.  The one thing that becomes obvious from a content analysis of the Somali version relates to the fact that a line is missing from each of the tenth and twelfth stanzas; for Ismaa’iil Mire, the great general--who played a central role in the cataclysmic social upheavals that shook the Somali peninsula (1900-20) as a result of the liberation war waged by the Somali nationalist Dervish movement (20) and the colonial efforts to put it down--characteristically composes in triplet stanzas, like his master, Sayyid M. A. Hasan, the poet-mystic warrior who led the anti-colonial struggle.  However, the fact of the missing two lines does not matter insofar as this piece is concerned.  The essential point revolves around the first line of the poem that enshrines the British officer's name in the corpus of Somali pastoral verse.

The pacification of large swaths of dour Somalia must have been Smith's crowning achievement.  Bizarrely enough, years later he, to borrow an anthropological jargon, went native, setting up shop in Somalia whence he married a beauty of the Geri clan-family--the Geri whose place in Somalia was immortalized by the romantic-eccentric globe-trotting Briton, Richard (later Sir) Burton.  Still years later, in keeping with the long memory of Somali clannish feud and vendetta, he was gunned down by a descendant of an elder whose herds had been seized by the ill-fated Smith.  In July 1977, I met Smith's beer-swilling assassin, one Mahammad 'Eegaag, in a Rome bar.   In between burps and puffs, he boastfully claimed to have been the trigger man.  Said he, "Smith went ashen blue when he sighted the revolver in my hand."  He said, half defiantly and half pleadingly, "Are you going to kill me?"  I said, "Yes, with pleasure, and shot him twice."  Thus ended Brigadier Smith's eventful career in Somalia. 

For a brief period in the 1940s, Smith's method of collective punishment succeeded in taming the rapacious habits of nomadic murder and mayhem, especially the notorious camel raiding and rustling among the clans.  That method, in my view, can be used today in effectively putting an end to Somali piracy.  Instead of chasing around uncatchable, elusive pirate speed boats over the vast waters of the Indian Ocean, the world's navies should place a spy in all the well-known home bases of these thieves, find out the clans they belong to, arrest their elders and round up their camels for corralling. Then the elders should be admonished that if ship and crew are not returned safely immediately, they would be taken to a remote island, say, Diego Garcia where they would rot away to the end of their miserable lives, and the camels would be sold to the Emirate Arabs ever so hungry for Somali camel meat, so as to compensate the ship’s owner and crew. And if they refuse to comply, carry out the threat to maximum harshness as an object lesson.  I remain convinced that this would work.  But does the West have a stomach for the disagreeable business of collective punishment?

America, Somali Lineage Segmentation Will Do It For You

The new U.S involvement in chaotic Somalia is both unnecessary and potentially disastrous. It is unnecessary because Somalia is no territory for Islamic terrorists.  In fact I’d defy Murphy’s Law to argue that Somalia will never be a breeding ground for Islamic terrorism.  Here is why:  the Somali polity is shaped, to an extraordinary degree, by a central principle that overrides all others, namely the phenomenon that social anthropologists refer to as “segmentary lineage system.”  Stripped of the scientific razzle-dazzle with which it is often presented, segmentation, to paraphrase an Arab Bedouin saying, may be expressed thus: “my uterine brother and I against my half brother, my brother and I against my father, my father’s household against my uncle’s household, our two households (my father’s and uncle’s) against the rest of the immediate kin, the immediate kin against non-immediate members of my clan, my clan against others and, finally, my nation and I against the world.

Segmentation, that is, is a chaotic non-system that divides Somali society into unstable warring segments and that pits practically all levels of the Somali body politic, including the religious level, against one another, thereby enshrining institutional instability as a norm.  Thus, segmentation stands as the root cause of the reason the Somalis have repeatedly failed to form a centralized national government for over eighteen years now, despite much strenuous trying, principally because the underlying social fabric of the Somalis militates against centralization but, ineluctably, predisposes them into being extremely individualistic, anarchic and egalitarian with a marked tendency to endless schisms. 

Furthermore, the recent political history of Somalia has shown that among Somalis ethnic loyalty easily trumps loyalty to Islam, making it all but impossible for a Somali religious figure to command the absolute allegiance of his followers—if indeed he manages to muster any followers at all—or to rise to the level of reputed piety and spiritual sanctity as to make his word a law unto others, as is the case with al-Qaeda and other Islamic jihadists elsewhere.  Consider, for example, the structure of the Islamist groups vying for power, including the Ethiopian-backed Ahlul-Sunna wal Jamaa’, the priest-politician H. Dahir Awayes’s Hizbul-Islam and the more radical-appearing al-Shabaab. Despite their veneer of Islamic extremism, they are a rickety amalgam of seething ethnic factions.  Al-Shabaab itself, despite its militant allure, largely consists of young previously starving jobless fighters who are in it merely for the pay.  Thus, what gets al-Shabaab going is the money pouring in from the genuine fanatics--the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia and assorted Gulf States Islamists.    Here, however, I must throw in a caveat:  there are Somali-Somalis and non-Somali Somalis—the latter being Somalis who came as children or were born and raised in America, Canada or Western Europe.  These are highly vulnerable to jihadist indoctrination.  Having been detribalized and brain-washed by the fiery preaching of Pakistani or Afghani mullahs, they are liable to being seduced by the romantic notion of a global jihad, as illustrated by the recent example of the four Minneapolis boys featured in a New York Times front-page article.(21)  And last summer two Somali-Australians were arrested for a planned attempt to blow up an Australian military barracks.  Might these non-Somali Somalis be organized into “sleeping cells” by al-Qaeda to be activated in Bin Laden’s convenient timing? Still, instead of blundering into Somalia, the U. S. should tighten the screws on Saudi Arabia and the Gulf-States to halt the flow of funds that are fueling conflicts all over the Horn of Africa, particularly in Somalia.  
   
Curiously, the segmentary law makes success lethal to any Somali group that rises to power and prominence because it works in both centripetal and centrifugal ways.  The segments, that is, unify as easily against an interfering foreign force as they splinter when left alone.  This is the lesson that recent Somali experience teaches.  When the U.S. and other forces of the international community intervened to save Somalia in Operation Restore Hope in the early 1990s, the U.S. appeared to Somalis to be the new Big Boy on the block.  Predictably, the segments banded together behind the late Gen. M. F. Aydiid against America.  The result was the disastrous U.S. military reversal on bloody Sunday, October 3, 1993.  And when Aydiid in his turn appeared to be the next Big Boy, warlords Muuse Suudi Yalahaw, Muhammad F. Qanyare and others banded together against him.  He was duly fatally wounded. Then when in January, 2000, Mr. Abdiqaasim Salad became president of the TNG (Transitional National Government) before the current TFG  in the ‘Arta process in Djibouti, Yalahaw, Qanyare and others brought him down.  Then came former president Abdullahi’s Yusuf’s sad TFG in 2004, which tottered along for two years.  Ultimately, his decrepit outfit going nowhere, he was forced by international pressure to step aside in favor of Sheikh Shariif, the current de jure, though not de facto, president. The latter is now hanging on by the skin of his teeth, controlling only a few streets of the capital.  Would-be foreign force deployed to Somalia in future, take note. 

Accordingly, if and when al-Shabaab takes over, the segmentary law is certain to sabotage them by inspiring a counter-coalition of clans to form against them, especially the Abgaal businessmen who are doing brisk commerce at Mogadishu’s main port.  Conversely, any intrusion, for the time being, of a foreign force into Somalia against al-Shabaab would only serve to legitimize them as a nationalist movement and thus galvanize patriotic fervor in support of them from the Somali masses.  On the other hand,absent a foreign intervention, al-Shabaab, despite its current success, is in the long run likely to be but the latest victim to the beast of the Somali apocalypse—lineage segmentation.

Meantime, a piece of unbidden advice to the U.S.:  you have nothing to fear from the plague of Islamic terrorism from Somali quarters; for you have a formidable ally in Somali lineage segmentation working for you more effectively than any amount of money that CIA screwball personalities can squander on Sheikh Shariif’s government whose days are all but numbered.   In fact al-Shabaab has already over-played its hands by imposing a barbaric Medieval-type brand of Islam: banning music, soccer games, TV, amputating limbs for petty theft,  stoning to death publicly in the market place a thirteen-year-old girl,--who was gang-raped—for adultery.(22) By engaging in these barbaric practices, al-Shabaab has overreached to its inevitable downfall; they are facing a popular uprising, right now, led by moderate Sufi Islamists, Sufism (mysticism) being the dominant traditional mode of Somali Islam.  Writes the New York Times in a front-page article, entitled “Somali Backlash May Be Militants’ Worst Enemy”:

For the past three years, the Shabaab, one of Africa’s most fearsome militant Islamist groups, have been terrorizing the Somali public, chopping off hands, stoning people to death and banning TV, music and even bras in their quest to turn Somalia into a seventh-century-style of Islamic state…Mogadishu’s population sensing a change in the salt-sticky air, is beginning to turn against them….Women who have been whipped and humiliated by morality police for not veiling their faces are now whispering valuable secrets about the Shabaab’s movements into the ears of government soldiers. Teenage students outraged that Shabaab-allied fighters hoisted a black flag in front of their school recently pelted the fighters with stones.  Defectors are leaving the Shabaab in droves, including one thirteen-old who said that he was routinely drugged before being handed a machine gun and shoved into the combat.(23)

This seems to signal the beginning of the end for al-Shabaab.  America need not apply.

REFERENCES

Andrzewski, B. W. and I. M. Lewis.  Somali Poetry: An Introduction.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961, 1964.

Bast, Andrew. “It’s Time To Leave Somalia.” Newsweek. 8 and 3 Aug 2009. P. 9.
Biegon, Rubnick. "Somali Piracy and the International Response."  Foreign Policy in Focus. Jan. 29, 2009, p. 1.

Burns, Ken. Dir.  Mark Twain: a Documentary Biography, vol. 1, 2001.

Elliot, Andrea. “A Call to Jihad, Answered in America.” NYT, Sunday July 12, 2009. P A1.

Egal, Abdulkadir. “Suspected Correlation between Cancer Incidence and Industrial and Nuclear Wastes in Somalia.” Horn of Africa vol. xxvii.  2009.  Pp. 202-218.

Gettleman, Jeffrey. “Somali Backlash May be Militants’ Worst Enemy,” NYT, 23 March 2010, p. A1.

Hassan, Zainab. “Dumping on Somalia: A Plea for Environmental Justice.” Horn of Africa, vol. xxvii. 2009,   Pp. 163-201.

Lewis, I. M.   A Pastoral Democracy: A study of pastoralism and politics among the northern Somali of the Horn of Africa.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961.

“Somali Pirates Say They’ll Play Robin Hood in Haiti.” Aol News,2010, p. 1.

“Somali ‘Pirates’ Want to Send Loot Confiscated from Rich Countries to Haiti.”  Agencia Matriz del Sur.  January 21, 2010.

(12) Zainab Hassan, “Dumping on Somalia: A Plea for Environmental Justice.” Horn of Africa, vol. XVII. 2009, Pp. 163-201, and Dr. Abdulkadir Egal, “Suspected Correlation between Cancer Incidence and Industrial and Nuclear Wastes in Somalia.” Horn of Africa, Vol. XXVII.  2009.  Pp. 202-218.

(13) See the bibliography of Andrew Wapner's Master's Thesis supervised by this writer, History Department, Rutgers University, March 2010.

(14) Rubnick Biegon, "Somali Piracy and the International Response."  Foreign Policy in Focus. Jan. 29, 2009, p. 1.

(15) “Somali Pirates Say They’ll Play Robin Hood in Haiti.” Aol News,2010, p. 1; see also “Somali ‘Pirates’ Want to Send Loot Confiscated from Rich Countries to Haiti.”  Agencia Matriz del Sur.  January 21, 2010

(16) Mohammad H. Hussein “Sheeka-Hariir, “ Fieldnotes Interview, February 25, 1977.

(17) Ibid.

(18) B. W. Andrzewski and I. M. Lewis.  Somali Poetry: An Introduction.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961, 1964, p. 3.

(19) Said M. M. Shire—more popularly known as Said Suugaan, or Said Culture on account of his amazingly vast collection of Somaliana books, magazines and archival materials—kindly gave a copy of Ismaa’iil Mire’s poem “Osma Oga.”

(20) Dervish, the name taken by the movement, is a corruption of the Arabic Darwiish i.e. one who is dedicated to the service of God and community.

(21) Andrea Elliot, “A Call to Jihad, Answered in America.” NYTimes, Sunday July 12, 2009. P A1. 

(22) In the port town of Kisimayu, 2008.

(23) Jeffrey Gettleman, “Somali Backlash May be Militants’ Worst Enemy,” NYT, March 23, 2010, p. A1.

Related Article:

* America, Pray Leave Somalia to its Own Devices

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