The Pirates of Somalia Quotes

“Piracy is not so much organized crime as it is a business, characterized by extremely efficient capital flows, low start-up costs, and few entry barriers.”
― Jay Bahadur, The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World

“As a Puntland cabinet minister once told me: “In Somalia, there are two industries that work: hawala [money transfer] and khat.”
― Jay Bahadur, The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World

“For the masses of unemployed and resentful local youth, piracy was a quick way to achieve the respect and standard of living that the circumstances of their birth had denied them.”
― Jay Bahadur, The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World

“khat resembles its South American equivalent, the coca leaf, causing mild euphoria, heightened energy, garrulousness, and appetite loss. Another effect is the belief in one’s own invincibility,”
― Jay Bahadur, The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World

“Somalia should have been one of the most economically successful African nations: it has the continent’s longest coastline, is strategically situated on the Suez Canal shipping lane, and has a long-standing history of trade and entrepreneurship. Sadly, events have taken the country along a different trajectory,”
― Jay Bahadur, The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World

“In 2008, about twenty-four thousand commercial transits through the Gulf of Aden led to only forty-two successful hijackings,”
― Jay Bahadur, The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World

“information technology has made twenty-four-hour-a-day news coverage a reality, with the unintended result of making the world seem much riskier than it is.”
― Jay Bahadur, The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World

“EDWARD TEACH (OR BLACKBEARD, AS HE IS MORE COMMONLY known) was reported to have tied sulphur fuses into his beard, which he would set alight before going into battle in order to give himself the appearance of the devil. It is said he liked to drink a burning mixture of gunpowder and rum, and that, after he was killed and decapitated by the Royal Navy, his skull was fashioned into a silver chalice.”
― Jay Bahadur, The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World

“Using steel-pronged drag fishing nets, these foreign trawlers did not bother with nimble explorations of the reefs: they uprooted them, netting the future livelihood of the nearby coastal people along with the day’s catch. Through their rapacious destruction of the reefs, foreign drag-fishers wiped out the lobster breeding grounds. Today, according to Boyah, there are no more lobsters to be found in the waters off Eyl.”
― Jay Bahadur, The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World

“He claimed to employ different tactics for different ships, but the basic strategy was crude in its simplicity. In attack groups spread amongst several small and speedy skiffs, Boyah and his men approached their target on all sides, swarming like a water-borne wolf pack. They brandished their weapons in an attempt to frighten the ship's crew into stopping, and even fired into the air. If these scare tactics did not work, and if the target ship was capable of outperforming their outboard motors, the chase ended there. But if they managed to pull even with their target, they tossed hooked rope ladders onto the decks and boarded the ship. Instances of the crew fighting back were rare, and rarely effective, and the whole process, from spotting to capturing, took at most thirty minutes. Boyah guessed that only 20 per cent to 30 per cent of attempted hijackings met with success, for which he blamed speedy prey, technical problems, and foreign naval or domestic intervention.
The captured ship was then steered to a friendly port – in Boyah's case, Eyl – where guards and interpreters were brought from the shore to look after the hostages during the ransom negotiation. Once the ransom was secured – often routed through banks in London and Dubai and parachuted like a special-delivery care package directly onto the deck of the ship – it was split amongst all the concerned parties. Half the money went to the attackers, the men who actually captured the ship. A third went to the operation’s investors: those who fronted the money for the ships, fuel, tracking equipment, and weapons. The remaining sixth went to everyone else: the guards ferried from shore to watch over the hostage crew, the suppliers of food and water, the translators (occasionally high school students on their summer break), and even the poor and disabled in the local community, who received some as charity. Such largesse, Boyah told me, had made his merry band into Robin Hood figures amongst the residents of Eyl.”
― Jay Bahadur, The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World