A Million Shillings- Escape from Somalia
BOSASSO, SOMALIA- JANUARY 2007
Watching over a group of refugees at one of his network’s safe houses hidden deep in Bossaso town’s back streets, thirty-four year old “big fish” smuggler Omar lights a cigarette.Working at sea since he was a teenager, Omar spent years helping local fishermen to hunt down sharks for their fins but illegal commercial fishing put an end to the business. He involved himself instead in the arms trade, ferrying weapons to and from Yemen. War in Somalia provided him with new financial rewards however when Bossaso became the country’s hub in human trafficking, as more and more people began to flee the brutal fighting while warlords tore the country apart.The financial rewards for him are the main draw. He now makes a minimum of $5000 per month ferrying migrants and refugees across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen; far in excess of the average income of just $100 a month in Somalia.Omar may be a big fish in Bossaso but he is just part of a bigger countrywide chain. His unnamed network has offices in Mogadishu, Belet Weyne and Galkayo in southern Somalia, and Burao on the Ethiopian border. “These tahrib pay $20 to one of our offices before making their own way here- a receipt then guides them to me when they get here and I charge $50 to get them to Yemen but then the boat owners and agents take commission, and of course we have to pay off the authorities”.Omar is just one of eight key smugglers working in Bossaso linked to an international network of agents and traffickers. He shrugs off the violence and death perpetrated at the hands of his men. When he looks at the forty migrants in his charge waiting to board boats to Yemen that night he calls them “blood money”.