Somalian Pirates:
24 April 2009
By Terry WrightIn 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed, and the Western world decided to take this great opportunity to illegally fish and dump toxic waste into their seas.
As soon as Somalia became a failed state, mysterious ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping barrels into the ocean under the cover of night. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up onto the shoreline. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.
Ahmedou Ould Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, has claimed that Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and other heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury. Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who are passing it on to the Italian Mafia to dispose of cheaply.
At the same time, other ships have been striping Somalia's seas of their greatest resource, seafood. More than $300 million worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. This is the context in which the Somalia pirates have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a tax on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia, and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site Wardheer News found 70 per cent strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defense.
And what are European governments doing about it? There has been no clean up, no compensation, and no prevention, just gunboat diplomacy.
The UN's monitoring of the situation has pointed to evidence that the pirate gangs have established relations with officials of the Puntland government. And that Somalia's two major pirate networks bribe port officials to allow the pirates to use Eyl and other ports as their bases of operation, and to bring some of their captured ships in for safekeeping while the pirates negotiate ransoms with the ships owners. There is also evidence that expatriate Somalis living in Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and throughout the Persian Gulf may be feeding information to the pirates about ships that have docked in those regions and may be heading toward the Gulf of Aden.
Puntland , is a arid region of north east Somalia, and declared itself an autonomous state in August 1998. The move was, in part, an attempt to avoid the clan warfare engulfing southern Somalia. Nevertheless, the region has endured armed conflict. Unlike its neighbor, breakaway Somaliland, Puntland says it does not seek recognition as an independent entity, wishing instead to be part of a federal Somalia.
The region's leadership refused to take part in peace talks in Djibouti in 2008 that led to the formation of a new transitional federal government headed by a moderate Islamist PM, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, but later reluctantly recognized the new administration. Sporadic fighting has broken out between Puntland and Somaliland over the ownership of the latter's Sool and Sanaag regions, which are claimed by Puntland on the basis of ethnicity. Violence also accompanied a political power struggle in 2001 between rival claimants to the Puntland leadership.
Today's pirates are mainly fighters for Somalia's many warlord factions, who have fought each other for control of the country since the collapse of the Siad Barre government in 1991. Their motives? A mixture of entrepreneurial and survival, initially, one of the main motives for taking to the seas, working first with local fishermen, and later buying boats and weapons with the proceeds of every ship they captured was pure survival.
Now it has become a highly profitable, sophisticated criminal enterprise hauling in millions of dollars in ransom payments. "Armed extortion is one of the few opportunities to make a living in lawless Somalia." The money seems to be distributed by warlords to their families and friends, and then further outward toward their fellow clan members. If ever simple fishermen did run things, they have long since been supplanted by much bigger fish from within their own clan ranks.
In pirate boom towns such as Harardhere, Eyl and Bosaso on Somalia's northern coast, along the breakaway Somali statelet of Puntland, sprawling houses nestle next to shacks made of sticks and discarded plastic bags. Like Western urban drug barons, pirates cruise in luxury cars through unimaginable squalor. For most people here life expectancy is just 46 years, and a quarter of children die before they reach five. In contrast, the key players in piracy luxuriate in a lifestyle fuelled by money transfers through accounts in Nairobi, Mombasa, Dubai and further afield.
While the exploits of Somalia's pirates continue to grab the headlines, this obscures the equally murky, complex geopolitical issues that have given rise to their menacing presence and the potential solutions for dealing with this scourge.
Military solutions do not address the root causes of the piracy. Somalia has spent almost 20 years in a state of civil war, and shifting alliances, international interventions and a steady supply of unemployed young men and cheap guns have acted against any tendencies towards stabilization. In a country where the average income is estimated at around $650 the lure of up to $10,000 for a successful pirate raid is obvious.
The chronic instability of the country and the attendant daily threats to life mean that the risks associated with piracy can be seen as little worse than those faced every day. Clan bosses have little difficulty recruiting to fill any gaps in their crews. In this context a solution based on security systems and guns will not address the root causes of Somali piracy. And as long as a state with grinding poverty, hunger, no law enforcement and no effective government sits beside a rich trading route, piracy will continue.
As the rich and powerful nations of the world send in their gunboats and US navy seals to stare down the pirates, we should be asking ourselves, do we allow our governments to continue the practice of stealing the worlds bounty from the poor, just so that we can keep our criminal standard of living. Or do we share the wealth.
Do we really expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us steal their seafood?
