Another View on Pirates

You are Being Lied to About Pirates

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.

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.

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

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