Are Somali Pirates Just Trying to Protect the Environment?
The Huffington Post ran an interesting feature today, just one day after Capt. Richard Phillips was rescued from that hostage situation in Somalian waters. The feature is an essay written by a Somalian-Canadian singer/activist and explains why Somalians don’t condemn, and sometimes even encourage, their pirates. The argument has been tossed around the Internet a bit, but I haven’t seen it much in mainstream media, and especially not now that we’ve just recovered one of our very own from a dangerous situation.
The argument runs: Many Somali pirates are just trying to keep Somalia’s waters clean.
Yes, that’s right. Forget all the loot that comes with pirating. The pirates are merely conservationists, working in a country that has no government to do the dirty work they must take on. The brunt of Somali complaints goes toward European unions, which, K’naan says, frequently dump waste illegally into Somalian waters. European companies were supposedly (and they might still be) paying warlords in Somalia to dump waste in the Indian ocean off the coast of Somalia. The reason is because it’s a lot cheaper to pay warlords than to dispose of the waste legally.
The matter came to light in 2004, when a tsunami washed up toxic-waste containers onto the Somali shore. At the time, people started showing a variety of serious symptoms, including skin peeling off.
I looked to see what other news organizations have covered the environmental nature of the pirate attacks, and came across this article from Al Jazeera, the Arabic news network. Says the article, “Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy for Somalia confirmed to Al Jazeera the world body has ‘reliable information’ that European and Asian companies are dumping toxic waste, including nuclear waste, off the Somali coastline.”
Nobody in the story would name any specific companies or expand on this “reliable information.”
I chose to highlight this article because it is written from overseas, and because the comments after it say a lot. Take some of these, for example, that support the piracy:
“This practice has been carried out by Europeans for decades, often with a nod from the elites who inhabit African governments like maggots eating at the fragile envinronment, African “businessmen” contract deals with Europeans to import and dump toxic waste.This only happens to poor nations. The same Europeans who send their navies to protect the flow of oil - send their toxic waste to protect Europe. Garbage is welcome in Africa but Africans aren’t welcome in Europe”
-Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, United States
“i think that the pirates are doing a good job by defending,patrolling and guarding the coastline of somalia. and i am urging somali pirates to carry on piracy untill somalia becomes stable or the dumping of toxic waste be eradicated.”
-mohamed, Kenya
Some other comments reminded everybody that this is not just a Somalian issue:
“This is going on all over the world. The Somolian pirates are hardly making things any better. Surely there just be some way to hit the world courts with this injustice. You see innocent people all over the world will pay for the ignorance of a few. The people dumping this waste seem to be ignorant that they and their future generations may reap the benefits of their ignorance. Don’t you just love it?”
-WebSpeak Ezine, United States
And then there were a few (but only a few) that completely condemned the piracy:
“With this “dirty money” the Somali pirates have acquired, are they hiring people to analyze this toxic waste, toxic waste disposal teams, hiring doctors to tend to these victims of this toxic waste and contacting agencies to help stop the said international community of these alleged practices? Or are they using the toxic waste dumping as an excuse and sqandering the money on themselves?”
-Ernest Saenz, United States
I’m pointing out some of these comments to just show that the issue seems to be greatly contested. As it should be, since, as both articles pointed out, we can’t be sure which ships ARE dumping. Is it right to take over other ships as punishment for dumping that they might not have done? Are these pirates REALLY just green vigilantes?
Of course, all the pirates out there certainly aren’t just out there for a good cause. If there are really good ones out there, there are probably 10 times as many bad ones. Pirate activity has risen some 21 percent in the last couple years, causing international entities like NATO and the EU to send over ships to help qualm the seas.
Says K’naan in the essay, “But while Europeans are well in their right to protect their trade interest in the region, our pirates were the only deterrent we had from an externally imposed environmental disaster. No one can say for sure that some of the ships they are now holding for ransom were not involved in illegal activity in our waters.”
“No one can say for sure” seems to be the key phrase. One thing that IS for sure is that we’re just glad to have Capt. Phillips back.
See Related Post: Somalia Pirates Seize Saudi Oil Tanker
Photo Credit: Here’s Kate at Flickr under a Creative Commons License
I think you have this a little wrong. Several media reports including one on the NYT have reported that over-fishing and waste dumping drove the Somali fisherman to piracy out of desperation. It’s not that they are trying to “clean up” their waters. They’ve just turned to another source of income. The source of the dumping is suspected to be Italian mafia dumping European wastes including hospital nuclear wastes. The over-fishing is suspected to be done by foreign fisherman taking advantage of Somalia’s lack of government and no capability to patrol its territorial waters. In any case, Somali fisherman found another, far more lucrative profession, hijacking cargo and pleasure craft. Somalia is now run by warlords and criminals, so the leap from poor fisherman to relatively rich pirate is easy to understand. I think the environmental excuse may be partially valid, but is by no means the real motivator. The motivator is money.
I was just writing an Earth Day blog on the same topic! I agree that ‘cleaning the water’ may not be the MAIN reason for all of the piracy, but there’s no denying that the oppression, plundering and degradation of the environment has caused disease, desperation and forced these people into it. I believe it to be more of a message to the world. We need to wake up and get stricter about dumping like this. The ransom money they are getting is justifiable. They are loosing millions from illegal fishing. They are not greedy men (well, most probably anyway). They are simply acting out against greedy corporations who would rather shirk European environmental laws than pay the price of the toxic business they do.
I am pretty sure you are wrong about this. look at it from both sides of the story and think about the fact that they are threatening lives and killing people. their goal is to gain money from doing this and they could care less about the environment. Maybe if they had a recycling emblem of something but they don’t. dumping is not the issue here..