Kidnapped: Life as a Somali Pirate Hostage by Colin Freeman: review

Simon Scott Plummer on a witty and admirable account of being a hostage, Kidnapped: Life as a Somali Pirate Hostage by Colin Freeman.

By Simon Scott Plummer

Iraq and Somalia are not the sort of places you would visit unless they were in your line of business. Colin Freeman went to the first as a freelance reporter to flee the tedium of door-stepping minor celebrities for the London Evening Standard. He found himself in the right place at the right time and ended up as chief foreign correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph.

As such, he was asked to go to Somalia in the autumn of 2008 to report on the most extraordinary criminal phenomenon of recent years, the growth of Somali piracy in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. The cost to shipping and insurance companies and the governments that have contributed to the international naval task force attempting to control this racket runs into billions of pounds.

Freeman’s brief, following the hijacking of the oil tanker Sirius Star (later ransomed for $3m), was to interview a pirate about why he did what he did. With a Spanish photographer, José Cendon, he landed at Bossaso in Puntland, a region which has declared autonomy from the rest of the country, and, with the obligatory help of fixers, set about his task.

The fixers turned out to be in cahoots with a kidnapping gang, a fact Freeman and Cendon only discovered after spending 40 days as its hostages in various caves in Somalia’s dauntingly arid interior.

The author is obviously of stern stuff. In Iraq he was shot in the backside by a member of the Shia Mahdi Army. In Somalia he endured the terrible uncertainty of not knowing whether he would be released or killed. Neither seems to have caused any personal trauma. Rather, in both The Curse of the Al Dulaimi Hotel, his last book, and Kidnapped, his new one, he treats these grim experiences with a self-deprecating humour which at times makes one laugh out loud.

The appeal in what he writes lies in its lack of pretentiousness and its honesty about the baser side of his character. He admits that thrill-seeking plays as much a part in his reporting as bearing witness. The $3m demanded by the gang for his release seems “rather a lot for a grubby hack like me”.

He feels a surge of guilt about the pain which his “reckless selfishness” might be causing his parents and his girlfriend, Jane. He lacks the guts to attempt an escape for fear of the beating that might follow. And he finds himself ill-equipped to cope with boredom: “There was something uniquely life-sapping about a routine where you woke up and then spent the rest of the day doing nothing.”

Fortunately, he had in Cendon an English-speaking companion with whom to share his ordeal. “As a hostage,” he writes, “there is only so much time that can be spent musing profoundly on the nature of life and death: it is helpful to be able to while some of the hours away talking light-hearted twaddle.”

As well as telling his own story, Freeman is illuminating on how Somalia’s desperate poverty and political anarchy drive people into piracy, and on the near impossible task of controlling it.

He takes the example of a kidnapper who may be condemned by a European court, receive a brief prison sentence and then, on release, claim political asylum, thus escaping the misery back home. He also writes about Britain’s Somali community, estimated at more than 100,000, its propensity for crime and the danger of its being radicalised by Islamic extremists.

One finishes this book admiring the author’s wit in adversity and enlightened on one of the least known parts of the world. But one question remains: what was the deal, political and/or financial, which secured the hostages’ release? On that Freeman is resolutely coy.

Kidnapped: Life as a Somali Pirate Hostage

by Colin Freeman

Source: The Telegraph (TELEGRAPH.CO.UK)