The War on....Pirates!

Are the people hijacking ships off the coast of Somalia really evil, terrorist, rouge, pirates?

I don't think so.

The pirate stories running in the news recently have attracted a huge amount of interest. Everyone has asked me if I had heard that a boat captain was rescued and about another boat being seized.

Why are the "pirates" and their threat to commerce the dominant interest when there are health and food problems and a massive refugee camp still growing from the collapsed socialist dictatorial government in 1991 and its subsequent failed 14 attempts at governance?

European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs.. The estimated annual worth of those waters is around $300 million in seafood. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

Also after the collapse, European governments and companies began dumping toxic nuclear and industrial waste off the coast.

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. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When asked what European governments were doing about it: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

This is the context in which these "pirates" have come into the international media.

So who are they?

They were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas."

No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters. Though the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defense of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

Threat to commerce or defense from imperial conquerors?

And who are the gangsters?

There is a group of pirates in the same waters that operate out of Ethiopian and USA created enclaves in Somalia calling themselves Somaliland and Puntland. These Ethiopian and USA backed warlord controlled territories have for many years hosted Ethiopian military bases, which have been greatly expanded recently by the addition of thousands of Ethiopian troops who were driven out of southern and central Somalia by the Somali resistance to the Ethiopian invasion.

After securing their ransom for the hijacked ships the Somali pirates head directly to their local safe havens, in this case, the Ethiopian military bases, where they make a size able contribution to the retirement accounts of the Ethiopian regime headed by Meles Zenawi.

Apparently we are a threat to our own commerce by providing military safe havens for gangsters in Ethiopia.

A pirate was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Read more ...