by FishHead Phil » Thu Sep 08, 2022 8:29 pm
Excerpts from account written by journalist kidnapped and held with Khmer seafarers off Somalia.
September 8th, 2022
Michael Scott Moore
Michael Scott Moore is a journalist who was kidnapped in early 2012 on a reporting trip to Somalia and held hostage by pirates for 32 monthsThe ship was an Asian melting pot with an improvised pidgin for a common language — Cambodians, Filipinos, Indonesians, Vietnamese, Taiwanese and Chinese.
The ship had an old TV with a DVD player, and some Cambodians were sick of watching Chinese karaoke videos. Four or five men began to scuffle. We heard thumping fists and feet. Someone said, “Shhhhhhhh,” but the Somali pirates noticed and waded through the mass of men to haul two Cambodians — Koem Hen Kim and Ngem Sosan — into the sunshine.
They had to lie on their stomachs. The second Chinese man didn’t. A pirate aimed his rifle; another pulled down on the recalcitrant fighter’s shirt. When he submitted, the Somalis bound his hands and feet. All four hostages were soon in the same stress position, belly-down, struggling to raise their faces off the sun-beaten deck while a Filipino crewman, a fellow hostage, translated orders. A Chinese chief mate, Qiong Kuan, walked around them all with a bamboo fishing gaff, like an executioner.
I noticed the tension and tried to hand around the spoils, but anger and frustration were endemic on the Naham 3, and one morning a Cambodian, Ngem Sosan, lost his temper. Somehow I thought I might be spared this breakdown in hostage brotherhood, but in a sarcastic, reedy-voiced and somehow comical diatribe the wiry Cambodian complained about the Filipinos and the Chinese and the Somalis and the food and the American and the lack of mango juice for Sosan. I handed him my last bottle, but he shook his head, electrically aware that I wanted him to shut up. Instead he made fun of my pale skin and my pointy nose. It wasn’t a totally new experience — I had traveled enough to be laughed at for my pallor, my accent and a number of my presidents — but “pointy nose” was a new one, and I had never been handled with so much fierce and taunting mistrust by someone who ought to have been my friend.
He continued in a mixture of Khmer and ship’s pidgin until I shouted, “Cambodia, sai-tei! Cambodia, loco-loco!”
That Cambodian’s crazy!
Sosan complained almost every day in blaring Khmer, which made the rest of us laugh, whether we understood him or not. He refused to work on the pirates’ orders. He was a loudmouth and a clown. Koem Hen, the other Cambodian fistfighter, was the ship’s strongman — handsome as a movie star, muscled and compact, with a constant cigarette pinched between his lips. He looked so impervious to trouble that a Westerner would have called him “stoic,” but of course Cambodians have different sources of ancient philosophy, which have nothing to do with Greece or Rome. The pirates found him hard to provoke. The fistfight over karaoke was a rare outburst: He’d been trying to sleep when someone put on the Chinese DVD. “My father gave me advice,” he told me later. “‘Learn how to be calm, to withdraw, how to step back from violence. . . . No matter who is right or wrong, step back, and check on yourself.’”
A third Cambodian, named Em Phumanny, was a cheerful, broad-smiling Buddhist with religious tattoos across his chest and back, including a stylized image of Angkor Wat, the famous temple in northern Cambodia. Before he became a seafarer he had spent three years as a monk. We saw his tattoos every evening, when it was time for showers and we stripped naked to rinse off under saltwater hoses. Afterward, while the sun set over Hobyo, Phumanny sat cross-legged in a forward corner of the deck, turned his face toward the thin steel wall of the ship and performed a Sanskrit chant for protection, to commit his soul to heaven in case he died.
I couldn’t speak Khmer, or Chinese, or Vietnamese, and it was a constant source of frustration during my summer on the ship that I had to guess about the men’s beliefs and backgrounds, their experiences of the world. How much did they know about the Somali hostage business? What did they rely on to cope?
The Somalis solved this intoxication problem by chewing a narcotic leaf called khat. It kept them awake during their nervous guard vigils, then sent them crashing into a depressive sleep. The stuff arrived on the Naham 3 in a massive bundle each afternoon by skiff, and some pirates found it hilarious to watch foreigners get high. One of them passed a daily handful to the Cambodians and a few other men, including the Taiwanese second engineer, and they formed a quiet, reclusive khat-chewing circle in one corner of the deck.
Pirates broke them up by nation: Cambodians went under one thorn bush, Filipinos under another, etc. Most of central Somalia is a sun-blasted plain with low, white, evenly spaced thorn bushes and dusty green acacias. (The wind seems to discipline the vegetation, keeping it down to a certain height.) Pirates worried about secrecy rather than comfort, and because of real or imagined aerial surveillance they shifted the camp’s location at night, like soldiers, on foot. “We walked in the dark,” Koem Hen told me. “The pirates asked us to cover the flashlights — not to show anything bright.”
Koem Hen and a few other hostages then had to tilt the body towards the west, using more lumps of soil for support. Why? North or northwest from central Somalia would have been an approximation of qibla, the direction of Mecca. But the pirates said nothing about wanting Nasurin’s body to face toward or away from Mecca: “I asked them why we had to face the body in that direction, and they said, so he could see the sunset.”
On their last day in the bush, pirates loaded the 26 surviving crew into a single, small bus. Koem Hen said two men had to sit on his lap. “When I got out of the bus, I fell over,” he said. “No circulation!”
The 16 sailors spent three nights in a Nairobi hotel before their embassies organized flights home to the villages and towns where they’d been recruited. Freedom was a surprising occasion for grief: the men had spent almost six years together, about five of them as hostages, enduring far more than your average underpaid seafarer, even in the great global scam known as industrial fishing. As a group they started to realize that they might not see each other again, at least not in the same configuration.
In the years that followed I think we all recovered in some uneven way, and memories of the experience became a source of strength as well as horror. The suffering welded and changed us. Now we were scattered around the world in an intensely remembered network, like a platoon or a graduating class, and even if there would be no grand reunion, cohesion wasn’t totally lost. It was the 21st century, after all. Most of us had Facebook accounts. So we posted a picture from a meal in Cambodia.
full story
https://newlinesmag.com/first-person/so ... r-hostage/
[b]Excerpts from account written by journalist kidnapped and held with Khmer seafarers off Somalia.[/b]
September 8th, 2022
Michael Scott Moore
[b]Michael Scott Moore is a journalist who was kidnapped in early 2012 on a reporting trip to Somalia and held hostage by pirates for 32 monthsThe ship was an Asian melting pot with an improvised pidgin for a common language — Cambodians, Filipinos, Indonesians, Vietnamese, Taiwanese and Chinese. [/b]
The ship had an old TV with a DVD player, and some Cambodians were sick of watching Chinese karaoke videos. Four or five men began to scuffle. We heard thumping fists and feet. Someone said, “Shhhhhhhh,” but the Somali pirates noticed and waded through the mass of men to haul two Cambodians — Koem Hen Kim and Ngem Sosan — into the sunshine.
They had to lie on their stomachs. The second Chinese man didn’t. A pirate aimed his rifle; another pulled down on the recalcitrant fighter’s shirt. When he submitted, the Somalis bound his hands and feet. All four hostages were soon in the same stress position, belly-down, struggling to raise their faces off the sun-beaten deck while a Filipino crewman, a fellow hostage, translated orders. A Chinese chief mate, Qiong Kuan, walked around them all with a bamboo fishing gaff, like an executioner.
I noticed the tension and tried to hand around the spoils, but anger and frustration were endemic on the Naham 3, and one morning a Cambodian, Ngem Sosan, lost his temper. Somehow I thought I might be spared this breakdown in hostage brotherhood, but in a sarcastic, reedy-voiced and somehow comical diatribe the wiry Cambodian complained about the Filipinos and the Chinese and the Somalis and the food and the American and the lack of mango juice for Sosan. I handed him my last bottle, but he shook his head, electrically aware that I wanted him to shut up. Instead he made fun of my pale skin and my pointy nose. It wasn’t a totally new experience — I had traveled enough to be laughed at for my pallor, my accent and a number of my presidents — but “pointy nose” was a new one, and I had never been handled with so much fierce and taunting mistrust by someone who ought to have been my friend.
He continued in a mixture of Khmer and ship’s pidgin until I shouted, “Cambodia, sai-tei! Cambodia, loco-loco!”
That Cambodian’s crazy!
Sosan complained almost every day in blaring Khmer, which made the rest of us laugh, whether we understood him or not. He refused to work on the pirates’ orders. He was a loudmouth and a clown. Koem Hen, the other Cambodian fistfighter, was the ship’s strongman — handsome as a movie star, muscled and compact, with a constant cigarette pinched between his lips. He looked so impervious to trouble that a Westerner would have called him “stoic,” but of course Cambodians have different sources of ancient philosophy, which have nothing to do with Greece or Rome. The pirates found him hard to provoke. The fistfight over karaoke was a rare outburst: He’d been trying to sleep when someone put on the Chinese DVD. “My father gave me advice,” he told me later. “‘Learn how to be calm, to withdraw, how to step back from violence. . . . No matter who is right or wrong, step back, and check on yourself.’”
A third Cambodian, named Em Phumanny, was a cheerful, broad-smiling Buddhist with religious tattoos across his chest and back, including a stylized image of Angkor Wat, the famous temple in northern Cambodia. Before he became a seafarer he had spent three years as a monk. We saw his tattoos every evening, when it was time for showers and we stripped naked to rinse off under saltwater hoses. Afterward, while the sun set over Hobyo, Phumanny sat cross-legged in a forward corner of the deck, turned his face toward the thin steel wall of the ship and performed a Sanskrit chant for protection, to commit his soul to heaven in case he died.
I couldn’t speak Khmer, or Chinese, or Vietnamese, and it was a constant source of frustration during my summer on the ship that I had to guess about the men’s beliefs and backgrounds, their experiences of the world. How much did they know about the Somali hostage business? What did they rely on to cope?
The Somalis solved this intoxication problem by chewing a narcotic leaf called khat. It kept them awake during their nervous guard vigils, then sent them crashing into a depressive sleep. The stuff arrived on the Naham 3 in a massive bundle each afternoon by skiff, and some pirates found it hilarious to watch foreigners get high. One of them passed a daily handful to the Cambodians and a few other men, including the Taiwanese second engineer, and they formed a quiet, reclusive khat-chewing circle in one corner of the deck.
Pirates broke them up by nation: Cambodians went under one thorn bush, Filipinos under another, etc. Most of central Somalia is a sun-blasted plain with low, white, evenly spaced thorn bushes and dusty green acacias. (The wind seems to discipline the vegetation, keeping it down to a certain height.) Pirates worried about secrecy rather than comfort, and because of real or imagined aerial surveillance they shifted the camp’s location at night, like soldiers, on foot. “We walked in the dark,” Koem Hen told me. “The pirates asked us to cover the flashlights — not to show anything bright.”
Koem Hen and a few other hostages then had to tilt the body towards the west, using more lumps of soil for support. Why? North or northwest from central Somalia would have been an approximation of qibla, the direction of Mecca. But the pirates said nothing about wanting Nasurin’s body to face toward or away from Mecca: “I asked them why we had to face the body in that direction, and they said, so he could see the sunset.”
On their last day in the bush, pirates loaded the 26 surviving crew into a single, small bus. Koem Hen said two men had to sit on his lap. “When I got out of the bus, I fell over,” he said. “No circulation!”
The 16 sailors spent three nights in a Nairobi hotel before their embassies organized flights home to the villages and towns where they’d been recruited. Freedom was a surprising occasion for grief: the men had spent almost six years together, about five of them as hostages, enduring far more than your average underpaid seafarer, even in the great global scam known as industrial fishing. As a group they started to realize that they might not see each other again, at least not in the same configuration.
In the years that followed I think we all recovered in some uneven way, and memories of the experience became a source of strength as well as horror. The suffering welded and changed us. Now we were scattered around the world in an intensely remembered network, like a platoon or a graduating class, and even if there would be no grand reunion, cohesion wasn’t totally lost. It was the 21st century, after all. Most of us had Facebook accounts. So we posted a picture from a meal in Cambodia.
full story https://newlinesmag.com/first-person/somali-pirates-insisted-on-muslim-burial-for-hostage/