by Johann Hari
http://www.sfbayview.com/2009/you-are-being-lied-to-about-pirates/
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
U.S. 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 menaces 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 18th 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 9 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 U.N. 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 cleanup, 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 $300 million 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 Coast Guard 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 Program 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 defense 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 coast guard 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 gunboats to root out Somalia’s criminals.
The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarized 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?