The Seychelles: trouble in paradise

The Seychelles may be a tourist heaven, but it is struggling to modernise its economy and security services, both of which are under pressure from Somali pirates. Irish contractors have been brought in to help – but they haven’t been welcomed by all

THE WINTER trade winds have finished, and the palm trees are bending lazily in the cool Indian Ocean breeze. Fishermen wade in from the coral reefs at dusk, octopuses hanging from their shoulders. All is quiet but for the warble of birds and the gentle strumming of water against the shore.

The Seychelles is paradise as it was meant to be. A land of giant tortoises and virgin forest, buried pirate treasure and secret smuggling dens, it’s the stuff that makes men leave home on the strength of a notion.

The French and British came in the 1770s to grow sugar cane and cotton, and their descendants can be seen today mixing easily in the capital, Victoria, with the descendants of the African slaves and southern Indians who came to work on their estates.

Many countries say they strive for racial harmony, but the Seychelles, which became independent from Britain in 1976, can probably make a better claim than most that it is somewhere close to achieving that goal.

“Be careful,” says my landlady, a Seychellois, before I leave for the islands. “Men go to the Seychelles and never come back.”

THE PIRATE THREAT

Unfortunately, the archipelago is proving attractive to pirates too. They have begun to land off the Seychelles, and their growing presence threatens to tear this isolated paradise apart as the local authorities struggle to keep them at bay.

Lt Col Michael Rosette examines the giant wall map in the operations room of the Seychelles coastguard. With 1.3 million square kilometres of water from above the northern tip of Madagascar to the Somali coast, it would be a challenge even for one of the world’s biggest navies to police. For Rosette it is even more of a test. He has just two fishery-patrol boats at his disposal, and one of them, the Italian-built Andromache, is 28 years old. It could almost match any of the patrol vessels in the Irish Navel Service for speed, but then so could the skiffs Somali pirates use.

“It’s going to be a bad season,” he says, noting that calmer seas at this time of year will only help pirates working in local waters. Their activity has increased dramatically, he says. “And I can’t see it dying down any time soon. It’s very lucrative. Very good business.”

Before last year no attacks on Seychelles-owned vessels by Somali pirates had been recorded. But as international navies worked to rid the shipping canals of pirates around the Gulf of Aden, pirates moved south and east of their traditional hunting grounds. Already they have appeared 15km off the main island of Mahé.

Last year two Seychellois vessels were hijacked. In March a diving charter vessel with seven people was taken. This was followed in April by a tourist sailing charter with three people on board. All passengers were taken hostage, but they have since been released. The Britons Paul and Rachel Chandler, who were seized after they had sailed away from the Seychelles towards Somalia in October 2009, were released last month amid reports of a $1m ransom being paid.

Some arrests have been made. In the summer of 2009 23 suspects were captured in three incidents. They have all been released, though 11 pirates caught on December 5th are being prosecuted.

It is beginning to have an impact on this small country of fewer than 100,000 people. Ninety-eight per cent of hard-currency earnings on the 115-island archipelago come from tourism and fishing. Last year fishery revenues were down 85 per cent based on yield while tourism revenues fell 20 per cent.

The global recession has probably had an impact. But locals also say that cruise liners, which can bring 2,000 visitors at a time, have stopped docking in Victoria port.

“It is a huge burden,” says Joel Morgan, the minister for home affairs. “Especially when we are undergoing an IMF programme. It has affected our GDP by 4 per cent, and port revenue, which comes from harborage and giving fuel to ships, is down by 30 per cent.

“We have modernised our laws on piracy and are working to get more experienced investigators to deal with the problem. But we need budget support for fuel and equipment in the coastguard, because we are the only country in the region putting out a 24-hour service.” In one week of patrolling the Andromache costs €100,000 in fuel alone. The annual budget for the police is €1.5 million.

EU NavFor, the European Union’s naval force for Somalia, has provided fishing-patrol aircraft and begun to use the Seychelles as the new hub for anti-piracy operations in the region. Meanwhile the United Arab Emirates has stepped in to offer five more vessels to the coastguard, which will present its own challenges in training new crews to operate them.

Taking this assistance has meant trading on some of the island’s sovereignty, according to some locals. The government says, however, it has no choice but to reach out to the world for assistance, especially when it is short of cash.

“Piracy has had a greater impact on the Seychelles than perhaps any other state apart from Somalia,” says Alan Cole, programme director of the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime in Nairobi, Kenya.

His agency began to work with the Seychelles last January. It helps to fund the training of police and prosecutors to deal with captured pirates and to overhaul the courts and the country’s main prison, Montagne Posée.

The EU, Germany, the Netherlands and the US have committed about $4 million (€3 million) in total to the Seychelles, bringing international attention back on to the islands two decades after the end of the cold war saw the Russians and Americans abandon their substantial radar stations on the islands.

THE IRISH ARRIVAL

Ireland has not handed over any money, but a surprising number of Irish people work for the Seychellois government.

The involvement began in 2006 after it brought in Irish companies that specialise in surveillance and communications to debug its offices. Now there are Irish people in prominent positions in customs and the police force. They have set up a Seychelles equivalent of the Criminal Assets Bureau, called the Financial Investigation Unit.

In 1978 the law was amended following a coup, to disqualify any foreigner from wearing the uniform of the Seychellois police. It was revised two years ago to allow Irishmen to take over senior positions in the police force.

Garda chief superintendent (retd) Michael Fitzgerald became deputy commissioner of the police force. Garda chief superintendent (retd) Liam Quinn became director of operations and training. Liam Coen, a former chief superintendent, was appointed to the crime wing of the country’s police force. Liam Hogan, another chief superintendent, became director of the Financial Investigation Unit.

“They were all appointed by the government and responsible under the police act,” says Declan Barber, a former Irish Army captain and one of the men brought in to take part in debugging operations for the government.

Barber says he first came to the Seychelles with Niall Scully, a former senior non-commissioned officer in the Irish Army. Scully and Barber had their own businesses, handling investigations work and communications respectively in Ireland, and both came out in a private capacity. The job took three days. Impressed with their work, the Seychellois government began to recruit a number of former Irish public servants, gardaí and defence-force personnel to work in the country full time.

Irish security contractors, including Scully, later trained a hostage-release and anti-piracy team. Last year they helped to secure the release of two groups of Seychellois hostages from Somalia. A large-scale review of the force also took place under the direction of the Irish contractors, and several Seychellois police officers lost their jobs.

Modernising the police force wasn’t easy. Officers had never walked the streets nor taken part in community policing. The Seychellois police had a bad reputation. In 2006 at least 13 people at a demonstration were assaulted for holding an “illegal gathering”. There had been incidents in which prison detainees were bitten by dogs. In one, a prison detainee had been beaten with metal chains and suffered injuries to his ribs and lungs that required hospitalisation.

“The police were very abusive for many years,” says Bernard Georges, a defence lawyer on the islands. “Virtually every prisoner who escaped from prison was shot. [To find] .33-calibre bullet wounds on a man who had just a knife in his hand was common. In that context the Irish would have a very difficult job on their hands of changing the perception that the forces of law and order were seriously bent and had a clear disrespect for human rights.”

THE BACKLASH

An inevitable resentment built up among some officers against the Irish personnel, many of whom earned about €65,000 a year, when the salary of a Seychellois police officer was closer to €12,000. People in the diplomatic community and some ordinary Seychellois expressed their disapproval of the Irish workers to this reporter.

“If there is criticism of Irish officers it is from ordinary Seychellois,” says Jean-François Ferrari, a member of the SNP opposition party in the islands’ legislative assembly. “I have seen them on operations, and they are quite heavy-handed. It’s just a whole network of old friends and old boys.”

Ferrari, who publishes Regar, the newspaper of the main opposition party in the Seychelles, recalls the day the paper’s office was raided. “We published a sketch of the plan for a naval base. The police came here to search our offices.” Ferrari was told the newspaper was “endangering state security”.

John Sheehan, head of the Seychelles Criminal Investigation Department and a former Garda superintendent, was involved in this search. “In Ireland or any civilised society, can you imagine a police officer would search a newspaper office?” says Ferrari.

Declan Barber defends the reputation of the Irish workers in the Seychelles. “We’re a new phenomenon,” he says, “They see us as an independent and objective obstacle. We are very easy targets for labelling. It is very easy to call a former soldier in another country a mercenary. It is 100 times easier to make that label stick than to make it go away.”

Many in the country’s government say the police force, which had maintained its colonial structure from the days of British rule, needed to be brought into the new century.

“There is a real need for increased operational capacity,” says the British high commissioner to the Seychelles, Matthew Forbes. “The Irish help fill that goal.”

Watching police officers stroll the streets of downtown Victoria in fluorescent jackets, as people go about their daily business, it is obvious that something has changed.

“Right now I can say that the police force is much better perceived,” says Georges. “That is somewhat attributable to the Irish.”

A tale of two shootings in Victoria

June 2009

On June 12th, 2009, former Garda detective sergeant David Sheedy of the National Drug Enforcement Agency (NDEA) led an effort to recapture two escapees from the Seychelles’ only prison, Montagne Posée. They were Patrick Sopha, a convicted murderer, and Maxime Tirant, a petty thief who had been on remand in prison for 11 months but had yet to be convicted. (Coincidentally, Maxime Tirant shares his name with an official at Montagne Posée.)

Following their escape both were believed to have been involved in a bungled robbery that resulted in the death of France Henriette, a close friend of the president, James Michel.

On returning from a foreign visit, the president offered his personal condolences to Henriette’s family on the national TV channel, SBC. He then gave Tirant and Sopha 24 hours to hand themselves in. They didn’t.

During the operation to catch the escapees, Tirant was shot dead. There are differing accounts of the shooting, but lawyers for Tirant’s family have not been able to get his autopsy report released.

On September 1st, 2009, Tirant’s lawyer Alexia Amesbury wrote a letter to the commissioner of police asking for “all documents in the custody of the police” to be forwarded to her, as she had been instructed by the family of the deceased to seek compensation for his death.

The response was short and curt. The request should be “struck off for being frivolous and vexatious in view of the burden of proof being cast on the plaintiffs to prove their case”.

Without the documents, which should include photos of the dead man’s body and a full internal and external body examination, the lawyer cannot proceed with her case.

That she has yet to receive an autopsy report or photographs of the dead body is “very abnormal”, says one lawyer on the island. “Normally you get a copy of the post-mortem report and pictures. In this case, nothing.”

Amesbury has launched a civil suit in the islands’ supreme court against the government of the Seychelles; the NDEA, represented by David Sheedy; the police force; the Seychelles People’s Defence Forces; and the prison authority.

The state responded: “The plaint does not disclose any reasonable cause of action against the 3rd and 5th defendant.” The case against the first, second and fourth defendants, which includes the NDEA and Sheedy, stands.

Sheedy confirmed he was at the incident but refuses to answer any other questions. The minister for home affairs, Joel Morgan, strongly rejects that any man in the Seychelles could have been shot in suspicious circumstances. “We are a very placid people. The idea that one of us could shoot another just doesn’t bear thinking about.”

May 2010

Earlier this year four men were shot, but not killed, in a police operation led by two Irishmen. It followed another escape from Montagne Posée, on May 1st. Among the escapees was Patrick Sopha, who had previously escaped with Maxime Tirant. The following day an operation was launched to recapture the men. It was led by Niall Scully of the police force and David Sheedy of the National Drugs Enforcement Agency.

The two Irishmen say they do not have authorisation to speak about it, because they are employees of the Seychelles government.

Sheedy and Scully were exonerated for their actions in a board-of-inquiry investigation led by Liam Quinn, a former senior Garda and a member of the Seychelles police force.

Seychelles legislation authorises the use of firearms to subdue violent and resistant prisoners and to prevent their escape. The intention should be to disable the prisoner temporarily.

But accounts of this night differ. One witness told this reporter that no proper warning was given to the victims before the shooting. Another insists that several warnings were issued and that the victims were armed with “machetes, hatchets and a long knife”.

Jacques Dyotte, a French-Canadian prison officer with 33 years’ experience in the sector, was a United Nations mentor at the prison; he spoke to the escapees after their recapture.

He says that later he confronted an Irish official about their escape. “I said, ‘How could you do this? They were unarmed,’ ” says Dyotte. The official, Joe Cully, a former Irish Army officer who was an adviser at the prison, said the men had been armed.

Sheedy later left the NDEA, but minister for home affairs Joel Morgan denies that this had anything to do with either shooting. Liam Quinn, who led the investigation that exonerated Sheedy and Scully, and Scully himself were moved to positions in the NDEA, where they still work.

No Irish citizens now wear the uniform of the Seychellois police, although they still hold senior positions in the National Drug Enforcement Agency and the Financial Intelligence Unit.