Pirates of Somalia Read Online Free PDF

knee-high bramble patch separating the farm from the shoulder of the highway. With gigantic strides, he ran up the slope to the cars and waited impatiently as we slowly climbed up after him.
    It was time for his khat.

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    Pirate Lore
    E DWARD T EACH (OR B LACKBEARD, 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. Another legend holds that the Barbary corsair Barbarossa (“Red Beard”), Blackbeard’s North African predecessor, tortured the inhabitants of a small Greek island in order to discover the location of a town concealed by a precipitous gorge. As the bloodthirsty pirates descended upon the town, mothers threw their children over the edge of the cliff in order to save them from being sold into slavery.
    Passed down through the centuries, such tales are probably as apocryphal as the stories of buried treasure, peg legs, and Jolly Roger flags, yet they have become part of our collective image of the swashbuckling buccaneer. Somalia’s modern sea bandits may lack some of this colour, but, aided by the news media’s inexorable search for a good yarn, they are already on their way to amassing their own canon of folklore.
    MYTH #1: SOMALI WATERS ARE TEEMING WITH PIRATES.
    In recent years, 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. Given the international media focus on every daring hijacking off the Somali coast, sailing through “Pirate Alley”—the shipping lane from the Indian Ocean through the Gulf of Aden—may appear as dangerous as a seventeenth-century trip across the Spanish Main in a gold-laden galleon. But before you abandon your plans for a career in the merchant marine, ask yourself, What are the actual chances of being hijacked by Somali pirates? When you switch off the six o’clock news and examine the numbers, they turn out not to be very high. In 2008, about twenty-four thousand commercial transits through the Gulf of Aden led to only forty-two successful hijackings, according to the International Maritime Bureau, a global body devoted to combating maritime crime. 1 In short, the average sailor faced less than a 1 in 550 chance (0.17 per cent) of being taken hostage on a given voyage—not all that much worse than the effectively 0 per cent chance on any other sea route in the world.
    Of course, for some this figure will be significantly higher; to the poor sailor on a supertanker with a maximum speed of eight knots and a low freeboard, the Gulf of Aden might start to look uncomfortably similar to the Spanish Main.
    MYTH #2: THE PIRATES ARE IN THE POCKETS OF SOMALI ISLAMISTS.
    By all measures, 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, and for the last two decades the international community has been trying a variety of strategies to piece it back together. Initially, the United Nations embraced the “building block” approach, which focused on supporting and engaging with the relatively stable mini-states within Somalia, such as Puntland and Somaliland. The logic was that if these regions became bastions of peace and security, their stability would spread to the more turbulent areas surrounding them. Once a number of such “blocks” were in place, reassembling a federal government would be a relatively easy task.
    This all changed in 2000, when the Somali National Peace Conference held in Djibouti