[Reader-list] When piracy is only self-defence

[Sanjay Kak]

Europeans have been dumping nuclear waste in Somalia's seas and
looting seafood.
This is the context in which the 'pirates' have emerged, argues JOHANN HARI

When piracy is only self-defence

Johann Hari

[Source: http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=4&theme=&usrsess=1&id=239043]

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 governments are labelling as "one of the
great menaces 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 Bluebeard that lingers today was created by the
British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people
believed it was false: pirates were often saved from the gallows by
supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book
Villains Of All Nations, historian Marcus Rediker pores through the
evidence.
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, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the
Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked often, 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, 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, without torture. 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 romantic
heroes, 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 collapsed. 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 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 Mr
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. Europeans have destroyed
their own fish stocks by over-exploitation, and have now moved on to
Somalia's. More than $300 million worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster
are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen
are now starving.
Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka, 100 km 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 "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 WardheerNews found 70 per cent "strongly supported
the piracy as a form of national defence".
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 in a telephone interview, one of the pirate
leaders, Sugule Ali, said: "We don't consider ourselves sea bandits.
We consider sea bandits (to be) those who illegally fish and dump in
our seas." William Scott would understand.
Did Europeans expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their
beaches, paddling in Europe's toxic waste, and watch Europeans snatch
their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome?
Europeans won't act on those crimes, the only sane solution to this
problem, but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the
transit-corridor for 20 per cent of the world's oil supply, they
swiftly send in the gunboats.
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, the great imperial fleets sail, but who is the robber?

The Independent, London