The big news this morning was the fact that the crew of a U.S. flagged ship fought off a group of pirates off the coast of Somalia. It still seems jarring that there should be such a thing as pirates in this day and age. As with so many things, this is not what it seems, or not what is being reported.
What we aren’t told is why this problem has suddenly developed. Who are these people, and why did they take up the pirate trade? Mediachannel.org reports that on the backstory:
Of course, there are straight-up gangsters and criminals engaged in these hijackings. Perhaps the pirates who hijacked the Alabama on Wednesday fall into that category. We do not yet know. But that is hardly the whole “pirate” story. Consider what one pirate told The New York Times after he and his men seized a Ukrainian freighter “loaded with tanks, artillery, grenade launchers and ammunition” last year. “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” said Sugule Ali:. “We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.” Now, that “coast guard” analogy is a stretch, but his point is an important and widely omitted part of this story. Indeed the Times article was titled, “Somali Pirates Tell Their Side: They Want Only Money.” Yet, The New York Times acknowledged, “the piracy industry started about 10 to 15 years ago… as a response to illegal fishing.”
Take this fact: Over $300 million worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are “being stolen every year by illegal trawlers” off Somalia’s coast, forcing the fishing industry there into a state of virtual non-existence.
But it isn’t just the theft of seafood. Nuclear dumping has polluted the environment. “In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed,” wrote Johann Hari in The Independent. “Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since — and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.”
From Hari’s report:
As soon as the [Somali] government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.
The pirates started as a grassroots response, so to speak, to the offshore depredations. Since then, they’ve discovered that they, unlike those Pirates from Penzance, can make piracy pay.
Apparently, the pirates are not at all unpopular in Somalia, and you can see why. George Orwell observed that all [people] are equal, but some are more equal than others. The victims of Somalia piracy, which include arms dealers and oil companies, are apparently more equal than the Somalian victims of another form of international piracy. That’s the way of the world. It might very well be cheaper and easier to deal with this situation by patrolling those waters to keep the interlopers out, but that will likely never be a seriously considered option.
An interesting, but irrelevant sidenote, in the linked article Media Channel reports that the Somalian pirates apparently snookered the Americans into handing over their captain as a hostage.
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