[Reader-list] Johann Hari : You Are Being Lied to About Pirates

[Jeebesh]

  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html

Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring  
a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy -  
backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to  
China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still  
picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon  
be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land,  
into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me- 
hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people  
our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times"  
have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden  
age of piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the  
senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British  
government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed  
it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by  
supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book  
Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through  
the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then  
- plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you  
ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped,  
half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all- 
powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you  
slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of  
months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They  
mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different  
way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected  
their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared  
their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian  
plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the  
eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and  
lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly - and  
subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and  
oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is  
why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man  
called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just  
before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I  
did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to  
live." In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa -  
collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation  
ever since - and many of 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.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the 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. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy  
to Somalia, tells me: "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 I asked Ould-Abdallah what European  
governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There  
has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other 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.  
More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is  
being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into  
Somalia's unprotected seas. 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."

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have  
emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at  
first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or  
at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer  
Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal  
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." William Scott would understand  
those words.

No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are  
clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food  
Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of  
the local population for a reason. 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 defence 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?

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches,  
paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat  
in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those  
crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the  
transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to  
shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to  
stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to  
root out Somalia's criminals.

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another  
pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He 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." Once again, our great imperial  
fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?


Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper. To read more of  
his articles, click here. or here.

POSTSCRIPT: Some commenters seem bemused by the fact that both toxic  
dumping and the theft of fish are happening in the same place -  
wouldn't this make the fish contaminated? In fact, Somalia's coastline  
is vast, stretching to 3300km. Imagine how easy it would be - without  
any coastguard or army - to steal fish from Florida and dump nuclear  
waste on California, and you get the idea. These events are happening  
in different places - but with the same horrible effect: death for the  
locals, and stirred-up piracy. There's no contradiction.

     * Pirates
     * Somalia

Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring  
a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy -  
backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US t...
Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring  
a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy -  
backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US t...