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?
© 2009
Huffington Post
