Brethren of the Coast

183 Pages·2017·4.156 MB·English

by  Iskashoto

IS ^S H O T O
TRANSI^ATlfl) BY
IsKASHATO
is a temporary autonomous collective. In
Somali, the name means "people who put
effort, knowledge, and means of production in
common, in order to create or transform
and to share in an egalitarian 'Way."
Brethren of the Coast
Memoir in defense of
the Somali pirates,
hunted down by all world powers
by Iskashato
revised and expanded edition
(2016)
english translation by vincent scurvy
(2017)
Contact: L'INSOMNIAQUE
43 rue de Stalingrad
93100 Montreuil
Tel & Fax [phone]
http:/ /www.insomniaqueediteur.org/
Brethroeftn h eC oast
byl skashato
revisaendde xpandeeddi tion
( )
2016
englitsrha nslabtyvi ionnc esnctu rvy
( )
2017
@@@
licenusnedde crr eatciovmem ons
ArdenPtr ess
POBox3920
BerkelCeAy ,
ardentp.cr oems s

Contents
i Foreward
1 Who Are the Predators?
Despoliation and Pollution in
the Ruins of the Somali State
33 Little Plunders and Big Operations
Military Repression
47 Punish Unresigned Poverty
The Legal Arsenal
69 Piracy trials on French soil
70 The Ponant Trial
94 The Carre d' As Appeal Trial
99 Interview with Yusuf Mohamed Ahmed
103 The Tanit Trial
132 Somali Pirates in French Prisons
144 After Prison, More Prison
145 The Teltow Drama
150 Appendices
151 I. Survey of counter-piracy operations in
the Indian Ocean
153 IL Non-exhaustive list of pirates and fish-
ermen killed during military operations
155 III. Piracy risk forecast
156 IV. Piracy from a German perspective
159 V. Protection teams at sea, welcome
aboard

FOREWARD
Have you ever heard of Puntland? It's a region of ex­
Somalia on the far end of the Horn of Africa, effectively
independent since the breaking up of the post-colonial
Somali State in 1991. Armed disorder there is much
more peaceful than in the southern part of the country,
where Islamists and tribal groups heedlessly kill one
another under the passive gaze of an "international
community" who can't seem to do anything about it.
Excluded from the "entente between [African]
nations," the inhabitants of Puntland are, as they expe­
rience their tribulations, rarely mentioned in the west­
ern media ... to such an extent that, when the coasts of
the region were devastated by the terrible tsunami of
December 2004, the above-mentioned "international
community" -with all its tear-shedding over dead
tourists in South Asia-completely ignored the dis­
tress of the coastal population. It required the appear­
ance, the following year, of highly active pirates from
the region for the press to get interested in this land
without a real state (aside from a few penitentiaries
subsidized by the West) and without a trace of tour­
ism (if you don't count a few mercenaries)-and this
was simply to blast it with curses.
As the "piratologist" Peter Lamborn Wilson (better
known under the pseudonym Hakim Bey) wrote, "the
second boat ever built was probably a pirate ship. When Su­
merians and Egyptians sailed 'the Land of Punt' 5,000
to
years ago seeking apes and ivory, gold and copper, no doubt
some proto-Blackbeard on a reed raft was already dogging
their wake." The seas bathing the coasts of the Arabian
peninsula and the Horn of Africa have for time imme­
morial been favorable to piracy, contraband, and all
sorts of trafficking in which a Rimbaud or a Monfreid
barely dipped.
At the end of the 17th century, piracy in the
Indian Ocean saw a brief golden age, favored by the
initial ruggedness of the "globalization" of merchant
exchange. Buccaneers, like Frarn;ais Misson or the
Englishman Thomas Tew, by then had established
mysterious colonies on Madagascar, serving as bases
for the pillage of the Mongolian emperor's vessels as
well as those of European merchants. These colonies,
the material traces of which seem to have completely
disappeared, were described (by writers of the time,
such as Daniel Defoe, who went to prisons and places of
ill repute to collect sailors' stories which were steeped
in piracy) as applying on land the communitarian and
egalitarian principles which dominated aboard pirate
ships of this time.1 These are what Peter Lamborn
Wilson called "pirate utopias,"2 which proliferated in
the Caribbean before being annihilated manu militari
by colonial powers or changing into "respectable"
commercial ports, integrated into the slave-export
economy of the region. As for the Madagascan colonies,
it seems that they were absorbed by "primitive"
societies of the regions where they attempted to settle,
or at least their existence was quite short, perhaps
even purely mythological.
1 See Marcus Rediker. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the
Golden Age. Beacon 2005.
2 See his Pirate Utopias. Autonomedia 2013.
ii
Piracy has certainly engendered plenty of
myths. First of all there is the one about the demonic
cruelty of sea crooks, propagated by hack journalists
and magistrates serving the colonial states and mer­
chant companies. The literature quickly seized on this
maritime epic, so suited for romanesque exaggeration,
and over the course of adventure novels, the image of
the pirate changed, becoming the one that, all things
considered is rather positive -and is very much en­
joyed in children's imaginations-and prevails in fic­
tion: the dropout sea-wolf in the colorful costume, the
intrepid refuser, the individualist entrepreneur, if not
also a good comrade ...
There is, of course, a bit of truth to the cliches:
since more often than not sailors mutinied, the char­
acters of the golden age of buccaneers were in revolt
against a suffocating and strictly hierarchical society,
whose oppression reached its epitome aboard mer­
chant or military vessels; they knew, as for themselves,
how to live free, according to the whim of their fan­
tasy, and pleasures of the moment were the principle
raisons d'etre of these brigands faced with permanent
danger: still, a few grew rich indeed on plunder and
those who avoided the gallows managed to integrate
into the middle classes of the colonial world, like the
famous Lafitte. But we know now3 that their rebel­
lion had on the whole an explicitly subversive sense
and a "sharing" and autonomous cohesion, announc­
ing in their own way the utopian socialism of the 191h
century and all the contemporary revolts that drove
3 Thanks to, notably, the fruitful research of the historians
Christopher Hill, Peter Linebaugh, and Marcus Rediker on piracy and
sailing in the 17'h and 18'h centuries
iii