LIGHT TRAFFIC

Somali Pirates © Veronique de Viguerie, via The Guardian

As the world’s attention is consumed by fears of a swine flu pandemic and recaps of Barack Obama’s first 100 days, a Somali teenager has become the first person to face piracy charges  in a US court for over a hundred years.

Abde Wale Abdul Kadhir Muse was part of the group of four pirates who tried to hijack a ship off the coast of Somalia, and took its captain, Richard Phillips, hostage. Four days later, on April 12, US Navy Seals killed the three other pirates in an effort to free the captain. Phillips was released unharmed. Khadir Muse surrendered after having been stabbed in the hand.

The pint-sized pirate (news report indicates he’s no taller than 5’2″) reappeared a week later in New York, as he was being escorted to court by at least a dozen federal agents. He was wearing a prison jumpsuit several sizes too vast, handcuffs and a belly chain.
According to the NY Times, he is being charged with piracy, conspiracy and brandishing and firing a gun during a conspiracy. The most serious count carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison.

In court, Khadir Muse looked scared and even wept as he was portrayed as the brazen ringleader who shot at the ship’s captain and bragged about prior acts of piracy. Although there has been some debate about his real age – his mother who has pleaded for Obama to pardon her son, says he is only 16 – it has been determined last week that Khadir Muse will be tried as an adult.

Throughout this – and previous - Somali pirate sagas, little attention has been paid to the context out of which piracy appeared in that country. Aside from a few notable exceptions, mainstream media has mainly avoided the issue, leaving its audience free to wonder whether hijacking ships and taking people hostage wasn’t somehow part of the Somali DNA. Such a lawless place! Weren’t these Jolly Roger-agitating thieves just born with a hankering for seizing tank-carrying vessels and terrorizing the seas? Isn’t that just what they do when they’re hungry and bored over there?

As Democracy Now! revealed two weeks ago in an interview with Mohamed Abshir Waldo, a Kenyan consultant and analyst of Somali origin based in Mombasa, Kenya, the situation is a tad more complex. Back in January, Waldo published “The Two Piracies in Somalia: Why the World Ignores the Other?”, an article in which he argues that Somali piracy actually began in response to illegal fishing and toxic dumping by Western ships off their coast.

As Waldo told DN! host Amy Goodman, the first piracy – the one that goes unreported – is the fishing piracy. Many nations including several southern European countries (France, Spain, Greece), the UK, Norway, Russia, Taiwan, the Philippines, Korea, China and many others have allegedly been involved in large-scale unlicensed plundering of  Somali fishing stocks.

According to a U.N. report, an estimated $300 million worth of seafood is stolen from the country’s coastline each year. When invited to leave Somali waters and to cease their illegal practices, foreign ships have responded violently, going as far as to shoot at, or dump boiling water on Somali fishermen.

Now, as Waldo explained, the situation is getting even worse as navies and warships are getting involved, and “every country is protecting their own illegal fishing piracies.”

Equally disturbing is the issue of toxic dumping. According to Waldo, the same foreign ships that are involved in illegal fishing are “at the same time (…) dumping industrial waste, toxic waste and, it also has been reported, nuclear waste” into the sea. Since the 1970s, he explained, companies in the West have been stuck with toxic waste they want to get rid of but don’t know what to do with because of strict environmental regulations in their home countries. “So where else to take [it] but in countries in conflict or weak countries who could not prevent them or who could be bought?” he said. ”So these wastes have been carried to Somalia.”

Aside from the idea that it would seem thoroughly short-sighted and counter-productive to drop nuclear waste into the very sea you wish to massively fish from, this practice of toxic dumping has understandingly upset the Somalis, whose coasts and territorial water have become increasingly polluted.

As Waldo reports, these twin evils of illegal fishing and toxic dumping have gone on largely unreported since 1991. “[T]he fishing communities and fishermen reported and complained and appealed to the international community through the United Nations, through the European Union, with no, actually, response in any form at all. They were totally ignored.”

So it is in this context that what Waldo calls the “second piracy” – the one you can hear all about on Fox News – came to be. “[T]he community organized themselves and empowered (…) what they call the National Volunteer Coast Guard, he said, adding: “what you would call, and what others call today as pirates.”

This isn’t to condone the Somali pirates’ actions or to defend them although I do secretly laud their swagger and hutzpah. It isn’t to say that it makes perfect sense for the fishermen to be reacting this way to abuses committed off their coast. I’m just saying that being aware of some of piracy’s root causes may contribute to a better understanding of a situation often presented as both irrational and greed-based.

I mean, if you were dumping your radioactive sludge into Massawippi Lake ,where I come from, and simultaneously lifting all the fish while my family was dying of skinniness, chances are that 18 years later, I’d start getting a little agitated myself.