Censored News
It is very striking that Project Censored, an academic program at the University of Sonoma in San Francisco, which produces an annual listing of the most censored news, has in third place this year, a story that shows the flip side of Somali pirates.
This report reveals that many pirates are actually bankrupt, outraged local fishermen who have rebelled against the continued abuse of their fishing grounds by large foreign vessels while a passive Mogadishu government looks on.
Pollution and Resource Depletion
Somalia is a country of approximately 9 million people and extremely poor. Its population has been steadily ravaged by famine. With nearly 1,900 miles of coastline, Somalia has no coastguard almost two decades since the end of civil wars, some externally induced, that collapsed its government in 1991.
The country has been depleted of food resources and its waters polluted by nuclear waste in what might be called “the other piracy.”
Western fleets engaged in illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) activities in Somali waters, have harvested an estimated $327 million annually in fish and seafood, the main source of protein in one of the poorest nations in the world, thus ruining the legitimate livelihood of its inhabitants and fishermen.
In 1992, European Union member countries and another 168 nations signed the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, which led to sending hazardous waste to war zones.
Although claims of discharge of toxic waste and illegal fishing exist, and can be documented dating back to the early 1990s, the strongest evidence emerged in 2004 when a tsunami hit the country, blowing rusty barrels of toxic waste onto the shores of Puntland in northern Somalia, according to the United Nations Program for Environment (UNEP).
UNEP spokesman Nick Nuttall told Arabic news channel Al-Jazeera that when the containers were broken open by the pounding waves, they uncovered a “frightening activity” that had taken place for over a decade.
“Somalia has been used as a dumping ground for hazardous waste starting in the early 1990s,” said Nuttall. According to him, the waste includes radioactive uranium waste, lead and heavy metals like cadmium and mercury, industrial waste, and hospital and chemical wastes.
According to sources, by 2004, the coastal population had already begun to fall ill. At first, the inhabitants had strange rashes, nausea, and babies were born with malformations. But after the tsunami of late 2004, washing hundreds of these barrels and their contents up onto the beaches, people began to show symptoms of radiation poisoning, and more than 300 people died.
Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, UN envoy to Somalia, told Johann Hari writing for the Huffington Post, “Someone is dumping nuclear material here.” When asked if European governments had decided to do something to remedy this, he replied, “Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention.”
Lack of Lasting Solutions
The UN has done nothing to stop the continued devastation of Somali marine resources and the discharge of toxic waste. This is the context in which the pirates appeared – disenfranchised fishermen, plus gangsters, and opportunists.
In this scenario, it is not surprising that apparently some “pirates” have the support of some of the population. The independent Somali press Wardheer News conducted a small survey into what the population thinks about Somali piracy.
About 70 per cent of the 30 participants in the focus groups said they “strongly viewed the piracy as a form of crude ... national defense of the country’s territorial waters.”
As time goes by, the situation is likely to become more complicated. International authorities will sooner or later have to consider that the piracy problem in the Indian Ocean goes far beyond sending naval vessels or private security companies to fight with fire and sword.
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