There is Always Two Sides to Each Story
Wednesday, April 22, 2009 at 1:57PM I received an email from one of my UM colleague this morning about the story of Somalian pirates. Yes. I am not condoning what they are doing, but it is always nice to know their perspective. Would you have done the same given their predicament?
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?
© 2009 Huffington Post
Pirates, Somalia in Current Affairs 
