Robalini's Note: Thanks to Scott Rose of ScottWorld.com for passing this great article to me. Although it is over a year old, the article is still as important and timely as ever.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html
Johann Hari.Columnist, London Independent
January 4, 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 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?
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper. To read more of his articles, click here. or here.
POSTSCRIPT: Some commenters seem bemused by the fact that both toxic dumping and the theft of fish are happening in the same place - wouldn't this make the fish contaminated? In fact, Somalia's coastline is vast, stretching to 3300km. Imagine how easy it would be - without any coastguard or army - to steal fish from Florida and dump nuclear waste on California, and you get the idea. These events are happening in different places - but with the same horrible effect: death for the locals, and stirred-up piracy. There's no contradiction.
Showing posts with label Somalia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Somalia. Show all posts
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Sunday, December 30, 2007
10 humanitarian crises forgotten (but not gone)
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article3266598.ece
10 humanitarian crises forgotten (but not gone)
If doctors edited newspapers... The frontline physicians at Médecins Sans Frontières have chosen the 10 humanitarian crises that should have been given more coverage in 2007. By Claire Soares and Daniel Howden
Published: 20 December 2007
Colombia
While the cocaine trade regularly features in the headlines, little attention is devoted to the scale of the internal refugee crisis. After four decades of civil conflict that has evolved from a war of political ideologies to a struggle for territory and control over the narcotics trade, large numbers of Colombians live in areas controlled by militia or guerrillas. With basic human rights under threat and unpredictable violence endemic in many rural areas, millions have fled to the shantytowns – or barrios – that ring every major town. Nearly four million people live in these insecure settlements cut off from basic state services such as mains electricity, water and health care. In the endless slums that now choke the capital, Bogota, areas are divided up and fought over by the same paramilitaries and left-wing rebels that blight and dominate the countryside.
Sri Lanka
After a quarter of a century of fighting, this year will be remembered among the bloodiest in Sri Lankan history. The civil war between the government forces and the separatist Tamil Tigers flared back into life last year and has kept worsening. International efforts to resolve the conflict have made no headway as key figures on both sides appear to have decided that a military solution is possible. Targeted bombings, mine attacks, suicide bombings, abductions, recruitment of child soldiers have all followed. The civilian toll in a country already flattened by the 2004 tsunami has been horrendous. Hundreds of thousands of people in need of humanitarian aid have been forced to flee to makeshift camps and the situation has been compounded by a climate of hostility and suspicion towards aid agencies. MSF is among the few agencies still operating in frontline areas, such as Point Pedro and Vavuniya, where doctors are desperately needed.
Somalia
Violence in Somalia hit some of the worst levels in more than 15 years in 2007, prompting UN officials to declare it the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa, surpassing even Darfur in its horror and hopelessness. Ethiopia invaded Somalia on Christmas Day last year and easily overpowered the Union of Islamic Courts, but ever since insurgents have been staging increasingly ferocious guerrilla style attacks, particularly in the capital, Mogadishu. Aid workers say one million people have fled their homes, including 60 per cent of Mogadishu's population. This week mortar shells slammed into a crowded market in the capital, killing a dozen people including a mother and her three children, and a foreign journalist was kidnapped. This precarious security situation means reaching those in need is increasingly difficult. Just yesterday, the UN called for the creation of "safe zones" so that aid could get through to the most vulnerable, particularly children.
Burma
The extraordinary democracy protests by the Buddhist monks in one of the most repressive countries on earth put Burma back atop the news agenda this year. But the nature of ordinary life under the military junta has remained a dim part of the picture. High levels of malaria and HIV are made unimaginably worse by the negligence of a regime that spent only 1.4 per cent of its budget on health care. Despite the overwhelming need, there are few humanitarian groups able to work within the country and those that do so have to operate under severe restrictions. Comparatively few donors are willing to fund operations in the country for fear of indirectly supporting the regime. Further complicating the situation is the absence of any clear statistics on the health situation. The UN says that as many as 360,000 Burmese, out of 50 million, are living with HIV.
Malnutrition
There may not have been a headline-catching food crisis in 2007 on a similar scale as the one that beset Niger last year, but malnutrition is still a disturbing way of life for many in west and east Africa and south Asia, and is associated with the deaths of five million children under the age of five. MSF is campaigning for international donors to scale up their funding for ready-to-use foods, milk and peanut-based pastes that do not need to be kept in a refrigerator, so can be sent out into the rural mud-hut villages where mothers can feed them to their babies at home, rather than being forced to trek miles to the nearest clinic. In Maradi, Niger aid workers are using these pastes to boost the diets of 62,000 children during the seasonal lean period and stop them becoming malnourished in the first place.
Chechnya
Ninety-nine per cent of the electorate here turned out to vote for Vladimir Putin in the recent Russian presidential election. Such a result defies belief in the breakaway Muslim republic crushed by Mr Putin's forces in the second Chechen war. The Putin-installed strongman who rules the republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, made sure that his boss would not be disappointed. Under his authoritarian rule, Mr Kadyrov has cowed the separatists and terrified their families through torture and abduction. The capital, Grozny, flattened by Russian bombs, has been rebuilt, and the airport reopened. But two wars have left psychological and physical scars on the civilian population with large numbers of people suffering from high levels of anxiety, insomnia and depression. As the military conflict with Russia fades into the background with only sporadic clashes now reported, and western leaders no longer openly challenge Russia on its human rights abuses in the republic, humanitarian needs remain critical.
Zimbabwe
With each new headline warning of economic meltdown in Zimbabwe the litany of impossible statistics has grown this year: inflation at 12,000 per cent, three million fleeing the country, 85 per cent unemployment. Under this extraordinary strain, what had been among the best healthcare systems in Africa has collapsed. As many as 3,000 people are dying every week from HIV/Aids and the chronic absence of life-extending antiretroviral drugs is accelerating this death march.
As many as four million people are in danger of starvation according the World Food Programme and the fuel crisis means that rural clinics are treating patients who have sometimes walked for days in search of medical treatment. The fate of the 83-year-old President, Robert Mugabe, continues to dominate coverage of the country that was once seen as the poster boy of post-colonialism, but it is the impoverished people of this beautiful southern African country paying the price of a man-made crisis.
Central African Republic
While neighbouring Chad and the western Sudan region of Darfur have made their way into global media coverage, the tiny landlocked Central African Republic finds itself starved of attention. This "phantom state" in the middle of Africa has no government institutions functioning outside the capital, in the north bandits and warring factions constitute the law of the land. Rights groups say hundreds of civilians have been executed and at least 100,000 people caught in the crossfire of rival armed groups have fled their villages and are hiding in forests and bush. Complicating a perilous internal situation are the CAR's unpredictable neighbours. The potential for the whole region to tip over into chaos is immense. A small contingent of EU peacekeepers is due to be deployed in the New Year.
Democratic Republic of Congo
With the country's first democratic elections in decades successfully completed in 2006, the Congolese might have been forgiven for expecting an easier time in 2007. But those out in the east, in the North Kivu region, have seen little sign of the stability that re-elected President Joseph Kabila promised. Instead, fighting between armed groups has raged for much of the year and the government is in open combat with rebel leader Laurent Nkunda. Hundreds of thousands of homeless people are hiding in the forest because their villages are no longer safe. They are scavenging food to stay alive and trying to dodge the cholera that is rampant throughout much of the region. And for the women living in this area, there is another nightmare to face: sexual violence is alarmingly high. A peace conference has been scheduled for next week to try to calm the troubled region, but few are optimistic of a rapid solution.
Tuberculosis
Kairat, from Uzbekistan, on the right, was among the 500,000 people to be diagnosed with multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis this year. But he was one of the lucky ones, moving to one of the few hospitals in the region to get specialist care. But even those who do get treatment have to rely on a highly toxic and expensive cocktail of drugs that often trigger violent side-effects and has to be taken for two years. Amazingly, there have been no major advances in treatment of the disease since the 1960s, and the most commonly used test to diagnose TB was developed at the end of the 19th century and detects only half the cases. An estimated $900m is needed every year for research and development but only $206m has been made available.
10 humanitarian crises forgotten (but not gone)
If doctors edited newspapers... The frontline physicians at Médecins Sans Frontières have chosen the 10 humanitarian crises that should have been given more coverage in 2007. By Claire Soares and Daniel Howden
Published: 20 December 2007
Colombia
While the cocaine trade regularly features in the headlines, little attention is devoted to the scale of the internal refugee crisis. After four decades of civil conflict that has evolved from a war of political ideologies to a struggle for territory and control over the narcotics trade, large numbers of Colombians live in areas controlled by militia or guerrillas. With basic human rights under threat and unpredictable violence endemic in many rural areas, millions have fled to the shantytowns – or barrios – that ring every major town. Nearly four million people live in these insecure settlements cut off from basic state services such as mains electricity, water and health care. In the endless slums that now choke the capital, Bogota, areas are divided up and fought over by the same paramilitaries and left-wing rebels that blight and dominate the countryside.
Sri Lanka
After a quarter of a century of fighting, this year will be remembered among the bloodiest in Sri Lankan history. The civil war between the government forces and the separatist Tamil Tigers flared back into life last year and has kept worsening. International efforts to resolve the conflict have made no headway as key figures on both sides appear to have decided that a military solution is possible. Targeted bombings, mine attacks, suicide bombings, abductions, recruitment of child soldiers have all followed. The civilian toll in a country already flattened by the 2004 tsunami has been horrendous. Hundreds of thousands of people in need of humanitarian aid have been forced to flee to makeshift camps and the situation has been compounded by a climate of hostility and suspicion towards aid agencies. MSF is among the few agencies still operating in frontline areas, such as Point Pedro and Vavuniya, where doctors are desperately needed.
Somalia
Violence in Somalia hit some of the worst levels in more than 15 years in 2007, prompting UN officials to declare it the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa, surpassing even Darfur in its horror and hopelessness. Ethiopia invaded Somalia on Christmas Day last year and easily overpowered the Union of Islamic Courts, but ever since insurgents have been staging increasingly ferocious guerrilla style attacks, particularly in the capital, Mogadishu. Aid workers say one million people have fled their homes, including 60 per cent of Mogadishu's population. This week mortar shells slammed into a crowded market in the capital, killing a dozen people including a mother and her three children, and a foreign journalist was kidnapped. This precarious security situation means reaching those in need is increasingly difficult. Just yesterday, the UN called for the creation of "safe zones" so that aid could get through to the most vulnerable, particularly children.
Burma
The extraordinary democracy protests by the Buddhist monks in one of the most repressive countries on earth put Burma back atop the news agenda this year. But the nature of ordinary life under the military junta has remained a dim part of the picture. High levels of malaria and HIV are made unimaginably worse by the negligence of a regime that spent only 1.4 per cent of its budget on health care. Despite the overwhelming need, there are few humanitarian groups able to work within the country and those that do so have to operate under severe restrictions. Comparatively few donors are willing to fund operations in the country for fear of indirectly supporting the regime. Further complicating the situation is the absence of any clear statistics on the health situation. The UN says that as many as 360,000 Burmese, out of 50 million, are living with HIV.
Malnutrition
There may not have been a headline-catching food crisis in 2007 on a similar scale as the one that beset Niger last year, but malnutrition is still a disturbing way of life for many in west and east Africa and south Asia, and is associated with the deaths of five million children under the age of five. MSF is campaigning for international donors to scale up their funding for ready-to-use foods, milk and peanut-based pastes that do not need to be kept in a refrigerator, so can be sent out into the rural mud-hut villages where mothers can feed them to their babies at home, rather than being forced to trek miles to the nearest clinic. In Maradi, Niger aid workers are using these pastes to boost the diets of 62,000 children during the seasonal lean period and stop them becoming malnourished in the first place.
Chechnya
Ninety-nine per cent of the electorate here turned out to vote for Vladimir Putin in the recent Russian presidential election. Such a result defies belief in the breakaway Muslim republic crushed by Mr Putin's forces in the second Chechen war. The Putin-installed strongman who rules the republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, made sure that his boss would not be disappointed. Under his authoritarian rule, Mr Kadyrov has cowed the separatists and terrified their families through torture and abduction. The capital, Grozny, flattened by Russian bombs, has been rebuilt, and the airport reopened. But two wars have left psychological and physical scars on the civilian population with large numbers of people suffering from high levels of anxiety, insomnia and depression. As the military conflict with Russia fades into the background with only sporadic clashes now reported, and western leaders no longer openly challenge Russia on its human rights abuses in the republic, humanitarian needs remain critical.
Zimbabwe
With each new headline warning of economic meltdown in Zimbabwe the litany of impossible statistics has grown this year: inflation at 12,000 per cent, three million fleeing the country, 85 per cent unemployment. Under this extraordinary strain, what had been among the best healthcare systems in Africa has collapsed. As many as 3,000 people are dying every week from HIV/Aids and the chronic absence of life-extending antiretroviral drugs is accelerating this death march.
As many as four million people are in danger of starvation according the World Food Programme and the fuel crisis means that rural clinics are treating patients who have sometimes walked for days in search of medical treatment. The fate of the 83-year-old President, Robert Mugabe, continues to dominate coverage of the country that was once seen as the poster boy of post-colonialism, but it is the impoverished people of this beautiful southern African country paying the price of a man-made crisis.
Central African Republic
While neighbouring Chad and the western Sudan region of Darfur have made their way into global media coverage, the tiny landlocked Central African Republic finds itself starved of attention. This "phantom state" in the middle of Africa has no government institutions functioning outside the capital, in the north bandits and warring factions constitute the law of the land. Rights groups say hundreds of civilians have been executed and at least 100,000 people caught in the crossfire of rival armed groups have fled their villages and are hiding in forests and bush. Complicating a perilous internal situation are the CAR's unpredictable neighbours. The potential for the whole region to tip over into chaos is immense. A small contingent of EU peacekeepers is due to be deployed in the New Year.
Democratic Republic of Congo
With the country's first democratic elections in decades successfully completed in 2006, the Congolese might have been forgiven for expecting an easier time in 2007. But those out in the east, in the North Kivu region, have seen little sign of the stability that re-elected President Joseph Kabila promised. Instead, fighting between armed groups has raged for much of the year and the government is in open combat with rebel leader Laurent Nkunda. Hundreds of thousands of homeless people are hiding in the forest because their villages are no longer safe. They are scavenging food to stay alive and trying to dodge the cholera that is rampant throughout much of the region. And for the women living in this area, there is another nightmare to face: sexual violence is alarmingly high. A peace conference has been scheduled for next week to try to calm the troubled region, but few are optimistic of a rapid solution.
Tuberculosis
Kairat, from Uzbekistan, on the right, was among the 500,000 people to be diagnosed with multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis this year. But he was one of the lucky ones, moving to one of the few hospitals in the region to get specialist care. But even those who do get treatment have to rely on a highly toxic and expensive cocktail of drugs that often trigger violent side-effects and has to be taken for two years. Amazingly, there have been no major advances in treatment of the disease since the 1960s, and the most commonly used test to diagnose TB was developed at the end of the 19th century and detects only half the cases. An estimated $900m is needed every year for research and development but only $206m has been made available.
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