From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Thu Apr 16 2009 - 08:23:04 EDT
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ben_macintyre/article6101229.ece
>From The Times
April 16, 2009
The battle against piracy begins in Mogadishu The Somali marauders who are
terrorising shipping have deep roots in the local ‘shifta' tradition of
outlaw robber gangs Ben Macintyre
We call them “pirates”, because that is how they most easily translate into
Western culture, but the Somali marauders currently terrorising Indian Ocean
shipping might better be termed ocean-going shiftas, heirs to a long and
uniquely African tradition of banditry.
The term shifta may be unfamiliar, yet it is a key to understanding what is
happening off the coast of Somalia, and how it might possibly be resolved.
Shifta, derived from the Somali word shúfto, can be translated as bandit or
rebel, outlaw or revolutionary, depending on which end of the gun you are
on.
In the roiling chaos that is Somalia, the killers and criminals are
variously pirates, warlords, kidnappers, fanatics or Islamic insurgents.
Most are young, angry men with no prospects, no education and a great deal
of heavy weaponry. But all are historically descended from the shiftas who
have plundered the Horn of Africa for decades.
The shiftas originated in the 19th century as a sort of local militia in the
unruly mountains of north east Africa, but soon developed into freelance
outlaws, rustlers and highway robbers, roaming across borders to rob and
kill. The British colonial authorities sought to control shifta activity,
but the armed bands played an important role in resisting Italian occupation
in Ethiopia and Somaliland during the Second World War.
They had a reputation for extreme barbarity. One British officer based in
the Northern Frontier District of Kenya in 1942 described the marauding,
heavily armed bands of Somali shiftas as “ruthless outlaws who killed for
the sake of killing, holding human life cheap if it stood in the way of rape
and pillage”. The shiftas, it was said, handed captives over to their
womenfolk to be elaborately mutilated before an agonisingly slow death.
The term shifta is still used to describe robber gangs in the remoter rural
regions of Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Kenya. The conservationist George
Adamson of Born Free fame was killed by Somali shiftas in Kenya in 1989.
But shiftinnet (the role of the shifta) is more complex than mere thievery
and thuggery. The term can also denote status, respect and rebellion against
unpopular authority. Two 19th-century Ethiopian emperors were originally
shiftas. In his book Bandits, Eric Hobsbawm argued that in some instances,
outlaws rise above their crimes to become champions of the underdog, rebels
articulating the grievances of the dispossessed, robbing the rich to give to
the poor.
Shiftinnet has some of this outlaw mystique. Precisely the same is true of
the latter-day Somali pirates infesting the seas off East Africa. They, too,
follow a code of conduct that precludes harming crewmen, as well as a
formula for divvying up the loot within the robber band. In their own
communities, they are seen as heroes and breadwinners, a sort of maritime
mafia upholding social order while resisting Western power.
Such people are glorified and romanticised when government is weak: Dick
Turpin, Billy the Kid, Blackbeard and Robin Hood were functions of violent
social dislocation. Just as shiftas have long flourished in the lawless
areas in and around Somalia, so the abject failure of the modern state of
Somalia has led to the explosion of piracy.
Somalia is now the most dangerous place in the world. This half-starved
country has suffered 14 failed governments in two decades. Piracy is the
only big industry: the sea-going shiftas made $150million last year. Since
February the pirates have attacked 78 ships, hijacked 19 and taken more than
300 hostages from a dozen countries.
The banditry comes with the usual veneer of buccaneer bravado: “We believe
in dying for our land,” one pirate declared this week, after the American
rescue of a kidnapped freighter captain.
Somali piracy is usually seen as a political and economic problem or even as
a military threat to be solved using brute force, but it is also at root a
cultural issue, a return to a form of behaviour that is grimly embedded in
Somali tradition. Killing a few pirates will have no more effect that the
British attempts to stamp out the shiftas of an earlier era.
Rooting out piracy in Somalia means stripping the Robin Hood myth from
Somalia's bandit chiefs, pirates and warlords, rebuilding social
institutions, re-educating a generation brought up on violence, and
providing alternative forms of employment. There will be no peace at sea off
Somalia until there is some form of law on land.
For many years the deteriorating situation in Somalia has been largely
ignored by the rest of the world: the country is now listed by the UN as the
world's worst humanitarian disaster, a hotbed of Islamic extremism, and a
throwback to a medieval way of thinking in which brigandage is not merely
tolerated, but venerated.
Organised banditry is worming its way into what remains of the Somali state:
in some ports, the pirates pay the salaries of the local police.
The life of a Somali pirate, like that of a Somali shifta, is nasty, brutish
and frequently short. Pirate vessels are barely seaworthy; many pirates
cannot even swim. As always, while a few get rich, the rank-and-file in the
criminal enterprise are young, desperate and careless of life, their own
included.
Yet it is a mark of how far Somali society has been degraded by years of
conflict and international complacency, that such creatures are regarded
with both fear and admiration by their compatriots. Barack Obama has pledged
to “halt the rise of piracy”.
That cannot be done with guns alone, and will never be achieved until and
unless Somalia can finally rid itself of the culture of the gun. Arrivals at
Mogadishu airport today must fill out a landing form detailing name,
address, and calibre of weapon. Welcome to the brutal, shifting world of the
shifta.
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