The ‘Other’ Pirates
By Mara Caputo for ISN
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 external pageworth 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 external pageaction 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 external pageasked 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, external pagedeclaring 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.