Answering Captain Phillips

Piracy is a Response to Maritime Rape

Testifying before the Senate Commerce subcommittee yesterday, Captain Richard Phillips urged America’s leaders to find the root causes behind the piracy in Somali waters that led to his five-day ordeal last month. If the esteemed Senators don’t’ already know the answers, and are actually interested in finding out (both of which I highly doubt), then they’d be wise to forego the mainstream media as their source of information. The majority of Western media outlets of course, opted to focus on proper military solutions and Phillips’ heroism, more so than a genuine effort to understand what had led to piracy.

Phillips is going to be sincerely disappointed if he wants real answers to his inquiry, because it would require a modicum of sincerity and introspection from the political establishment, traits most certainly lacking. Here is the answer you’ve asked for Mr. Phillips: the Somali piracy that has been wreaking havoc on the high seas and was responsible for your capture, is itself a response to piracy…ours!

For years Western governments and corporations have taken advantage of the absence of a Somali government by ravaging the coastlines of fishing resources and dumping harmful toxic waste. Since this coastline belongs to the people of Somalia according to international law, this theft and plundering is by definition piracy. The fact that Somalia has no coast guard or navy to defend its rights does not make this practice legitimate, lest we forego the rule of law and accept rule of the gun.

Few media outlets have cared to bring this issue to light, the notable exceptions being Democracy Now!, The Huffington Post, and Al-Jazeera. African newspapers have done better to service to the issue by acknowledging “the other piracy.” In this article from The New Vision, a Ugandan publication, the author intimates with Somali locals on the matter to get their perspective:

However, fresh information that is increasingly becoming available is that since Siad Barre was overthrown from power and lawlessness settled in, big fishing companies from Japan, China and Western Europe made the Gulf of Aden their playground.

They came with huge trawlers, dug deep and took as much of the livelihood of these poor Somali fishermen and destroyed what they couldn't take with them. And because there was no government in power with a national coast guard, the situation went on for more than a decade when fishermen decided to take the law into their own hands…

Ordinary Somalis do not share the government view that these young men in their 20s are common criminals.

The article poses a sensible question that is nevertheless startlingly naïve:

Isn't it worth investigating by the international community, the MI5, the FBI and other international crime agencies to find the root cause of this menace that has made travel rather unsafe on Africa's East Coast?

No, it isn’t worth it if the answers are going to suggest that Western society’s limitless demand for seafood and need to dump its toxic filth in unprotected waters are indeed Somali piracy’s root causes. It isn’t worth it if an investigation will diminish the capacity to scapegoat a Somali teenager for the scourge of piracy.

In examining ‘The Flipside of the Hijack Coin’, Nigeria’s Daily Trust sees the issue through a more cynical lens. To sum it up:

The collapse of the Somali state since the fall of the Siad Barre regime in 1991, has led to the massive illegal foreign fishing regime of poaching and destruction of Somali marine resources which has not been part of the international concern in the same why that the menace of piracy has been highlighted. Illegal, Unreported Unregulated (IUU) fishing fleets from Europe, Arabia and the Far East, have been active in Somalia waters over the past 18 years damaging economic and environmental life of the Somali people.

Major kudos to the author, Is'haq Modibbo Kawu, for so eloquently describing the phenomenon at work as the world “deals” with piracy:

The situation today is that a combination of biased UN resolutions, big power orders and tendentious news reporting by the major international news outlets have raised the stakes internationally about Somali piracy, but they have failed to mention the need to project Somali mineral resources from IUU violation in the same waters. It is in fact appearing as if the anti-piracy campaigns have as object the effort to cover up and protect illegal fishing activities in Somali waters.

What’s worse, even those fisherman merely trying to obstruct IUU’s, risk being destroyed by navies under the pretense of anti-piracy operations. To his credit, Kawu doesn’t equivocate in assessing this dire situation:

Somalia has therefore become a helpless victim of this massive international process of maritime rape!

That would be an honest answer for Mr. Phillips.