Colin Freeman and Peter Leftie
2 July 2011
Nairobi — The men, six of them, were terrified, desperate and haggard.
All they wanted was for their captors to either set them free or take them to court to face charges instead of being held in filthy conditions at the Aden Abdulle International Airport police station in Mogadishu, Somalia.
“Please get us out of here at whatever cost, one of them said. It has been two weeks now. We have families!” Inside the station, a dilapidated building, the tension and anxiety was palpable.
“We don’t know what is happening, we do not mind being taken to court, it is much better than idling here for days on end,” said the elderly of the six men, who had been arrested at the airport on May 24 and were now under the close watch of Somali police officers.
They spoke in hushed tones, their fear of death quite visible in their eyes as they stood anxiously under a tree in an open yard behind the station.
The fact that they had been treated well by the Somalia authorities did not help matters. They just wanted to go home.
“We have not been molested, they have treated us very well. They have been allowing us to communicate but, as you can see, this is no holiday camp,” one of them told Lifestyle.
The six men, who had flown in two aircraft, had been arrested at the airport carrying $3.6 million (Sh324 million) to pay off Somali pirates. They were alleged to have picked it up from Hong Kong.
Among the six were three Britons and an American. The nationalities of the others were not known but they were suspected to be Kenyan.
Tight security
About 500 metres from where they were being held, the two light aircraft sat on the runway under tight security of the African Mission in Somalia (Amisom) forces and Somalia security officials.
As their anxiety mounted, their pleas to be freed or taken to court were heeded. They were taken to a Mogadishu court.
But it was shock when they were sentenced to between 10 and 15 years in prison for smuggling in $3.6 million into the lawless Horn of Africa nation. A $50,000 (Sh4.5 million) fine was imposed on each of the planes.
Their life of doom and gloom just took a turn for the worst. So it must have been joy and relief when last week the Somalia Transitional Government freed them following a presidential pardon.
“The six foreigners and their two planes were released … following a presidential pardon,” said Hashi Elmi Nur, a magistrate at a local court, on Sunday. The money was confiscated.
But where the Somali state officials are lenient, the pirates are ruthless as they seek huge amounts of money in exchange for the freedom of their captives.
The Sunday Telegraph’s chief foreign correspondent Colin Freeman and photographer Jose Cendon were victims of kidnapping by pirates. Mr Freeman gives an account of their harrowing experiences.
“There are two conceptions of the pirate. One lives in children’s imaginations, flavoured by illustrated storybooks and Johnny Depp.
The other wields a Kalashnikov rather than a cutlass. It was the modern-day version of the buccaneer that I was investigating when I was kidnapped in Somalia in 2008.
Abducted at gunpoint in the pirate port of Bossasso in the Puntland region of Somalia, my photographer Jose Cendon and I were imprisoned in a mountain cave, surviving off goat meat and rice, receiving occasional death threats, and dodging bullets one day when our captors had a gunfight with a rival gang.”
They were well-treated, but now many hostages are not. “As the days turned into weeks, our fears of succumbing to illness of either body or mind grew ever greater.
The worst part, though, was the crushing boredom of Stone Age life. Our only distraction, apart from talking to each other, was a shortwave radio, and much as I love the BBC World Service, listening to it all day gets a little repetitive.
Frightening though it was, however, our ordeal was indeed child’s play compared to the suffering of the thousands of sailors taken hostage as Somali piracy has boomed in the past three years. The average length of time that ships are hijacked for now is five months, while some are kept for up to a year.
As I write, hundreds of sailors are in captivity and, although they are generally kept on their boats rather than transferred to caves on the mainland, living cheek by jowl with gunmen who are often drunk, high on drugs or plain aggressive is not pleasant.
More worryingly, pirates are starting to abandon their one-time “code of honour” under which sailors were generally not hurt as long as they did what they were told.
In a bid to get shipping firms to cough up ransoms faster, gangs have started torturing their hostages, sometimes hanging them by their wrists from ships’ masts, sometimes throwing them overboard and dragging them by a rope through the sea.
One Indian sailor I recently interviewed told me how a fellow crewman was stripped naked and locked in the ship’s walk-in deep freeze for half an hour, at negative 17 degrees celsius.
Unsurprisingly, many such victims suffer lasting psychological trauma. All of which makes Jose and I feel very lucky with hindsight.
Our guards – the odd death threat notwithstanding – were generally reasonably cordial, feeding us more rice and spaghetti than we could eat, and chatting in pidgin English about Arsenal and Chelsea (even among the outlaw fraternity of the Somali mountains, the international language of football is widely spoken).
As a result, the only psychological wounds I emerged with were a lifelong loathing of goat meat risotto, a cigarette habit I’d previously kicked in 1992, and the trauma of appearing at a press conference with a beard that would have had even Ben Gunn reaching self-consciously for a razor.
Puntland has become notorious as the centre of Somalia’s lucrative pirate industry. The northeastern region makes up almost one-third of Somalia’s land mass and declared itself autonomous in 1998.
Expensive cars
In local fishing towns like Eyl piracy is one of the main industries, with profits paying for sprawling mansions and expensive cars.
The authorities are trying to clear Puntland’s coastline – and reputation – of the stain of piracy. It has been recruiting and training troops for an anti-piracy force.
About half of its prison population is now made up of pirates. My release, which came after weeks of round-the-clock negotiations by everyone from fellow journalists and diplomats through to Somali clan elders, felt nothing short of ecstatic, twinned with a sense of profound relief that neither of my parents had suffered a heart attack due to the stress.
While in the cave, though, there were some distinctly dark moments of the soul. Especially once Jose and I ran out of things to say to each other (which took about a fortnight) leaving us with only our own thoughts to occupy ourselves.
For it is then that you realise that your mind, already tired and stressed, is not the limitless sanctuary you might expect.
Rather than passing the time with intellectual, life-affirming insights, I increasingly found I could only manage things like listing old pubs I’d visited in my youth, and ranking the girls I knew in order of attractiveness.
So much for that university education and all those books I’d read over the years, I thought to myself, staring blankly at the cave wall.
Not only am I a scruffy, smelly hostage, I’m a dullard as well. And how much longer before I ran out of thoughts altogether, and the descent into some kind of madness began?
For a start, all the talk that the only way to fix the piracy problem is to fix the problems in Somalia itself strikes me as a little glib.
Somalia has been ignored by the outside world for 20 years now and, at the risk of sounding pessimistic, I sense no appetite for the kind of immense Iraq or Afghanistan-style commitment that would be required for outside intervention to stand a chance.
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