From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Thu May 07 2009 - 22:26:43 EDT
The ‘Other’ Pirates
Navy ships on patrol off the coast of Somalia.
Navy ships on patrol off the coast of Somalia.
While Somali pirate attacks captivate attention, the international
community turns a blind eye to the ‘other’ piracy that has hijacked
local livelihoods: the foreign plunder of natural resources, Mara Caputo
comments for ISN Security Watch.
By Mara Caputo for ISN Security Watch
The recent spate of dramatic pirate attacks along the Somali coast has
drawn navies large and small to patrol the busy shipping routes in the Gulf
of Aden and the Indian Ocean. Following 111 attacks off the coast last
year, warships from more than 30 governments have been dispatched to guard
their commercial interests in the area.
Certainly, the persistent, internal mayhem gripping Somalia, crushing
penury and simple greed have helped drive piracy.
But the cold, hard fact remains that piracy has emerged as a backlash
against the exploitation of Somali natural resources by foreign powers –
a situation that receives much less attention in the media in part because
it levies a stinging indictment against much of the international
community.
Indeed, foreign governments have played a damnable role in creating and
perpetuating the piracy phenomenon.
Further still, foreign interests have contributed to the creation of this
modern-day Somali piracy by committing a piracy all their own. “Fishing
piracy”- illegal commercial fishing by foreign-owned vessels - has
plundered Somalia’s fragile marine ecosystem, stolen an estimated US$300
million worth of its seafood yearly and decimated local fishermen’s
livelihood.
Following the Somali government’s collapse in 1991, foreign fishing
vessels invaded Somali waters by the hundreds, taking advantage of the
country’s inability to safeguard its waters from illegal fishing. These
foreign crews took aggressive and inhumane action against local fisherman,
ramming their boats, cutting or stealing their nets, pouring boiling water
on them, even "disappearing" and killing them, according to a report from
irinnews.org.
Their livelihood, and even their lives, threatened, some Somali fishermen
took up arms against this foreign pillage, declaring themselves a de facto
coast guard in the absence of a functioning government. These seafaring
vigilantes teamed up with unsavory ex-warlord-affiliated militiamen, and
thus was born contemporary Somali piracy.
While these Somali shipping pirates have rightly been the subject of
repeated condemnation by powerful governments, UN resolutions and the news
media, the exploitative, illegal and vicious foreign fishing piracy has
received little international attention.
The arrival of the global armada to fight Somali pirates has made matters
even worse for local fishermen: Illegal fishing vessels now enjoy extra
cover from the navies of their home countries. “We are being driven out
of business by foreign vessels protected by their navies. Who is protecting
us? Our existence depends on fish,” a desperate Somali fisherman asked
the UN news outlet.
The neocolonial impulse to exploit the resources of Africa at the expense
of local populations is nothing new. This most recent anti-piracy
mobilization effort simply underscores the moral bankruptcy of much of the
international community’s long-standing treatment of Africa’s people,
as well as its inability to effectively combat crises borne of complex
socioeconomic and political ills using military might.
Several members of the European Parliament (MEPs) protested the EU’s
recent anti-piracy mission to Somalia as “military nonsense.”
Portuguese MEP Ana Maria Gomes delivered a fiery diatribe on the “moral
problem” underlying the naval mission, declaring it was designed solely
for the protection of European economic interests in the region concluding
that “nobody gives a damn about the people in Somalia who die like
flies,” according to the EU Observer
As long as this uncomfortable truth persists, so too will Somali piracy.
Mara Caputo is an ISN editor.
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