-- a pretty good blog post
Somali pirates: another side of the story April 10th, 2009· posted by by Alan Bock, Register editorial writer
There’s no justification for the attempted takeover of the Maersk Alabama or for
holding the captain hostage. And while I expect the current hostage situation, which has the pirates
asking for a $2 million ransom, is most likely to end with the pirates getting safe passage, I wouldn’t mind seeing them
blown to kingdom-come and punitive raids — I imagine some Seals could pull it off — on the shore-based sanctuaries.
However, as execrable as the current situation is, there are aspects to the whole Somali sea-raiding phenomenon that haven’t received as much attention as might be warranted. According to
Johann Hari, a left-leaning but not entirely fact-averse British journalist in
a piece earlier this year, the Somalis didn’t start raiding ships until after a bunch of foreign fishing ships came in and
fished out their coastal waters, depriving local fishermen of their livelihood and local Somalis of a source of food. Then, it is alleged, foreign vessels started dumping waste, including nuclear waste, off the Somali coast, and the vaunted international community did nothing about it. There are reports of radiation sickness among Somalis, and a number of barrels of foul stuff washed up during the 2005 tsunami.
Thus some Somalis see the piracy as a way of
getting compensation for these indignities. There are problems with this, of course. By seizing commercial vessels they are demanding “compensation” from companies that are different from those that caused the problems in the first place. And what may have been conceived as a way to “get our own back” from nasty furriners has escalated into serious criminality, drawing in ever more ruthless and
greedy scum, as successful criminality almost always does.
I’m not sure if all these allegations are accurate, and even if so they don’t justify piracy. And I’m not sure how to resolve the situation. But
check out the
links and see what you think. The story may be more complex than we have been told to date.
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