Student Researcher: Christine Wilson
Faculty Evaluator: EOP Advisor Andre Bailey
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. 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. At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: seafood. 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. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka, 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. 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.”
“You are being lied to about pirates” Johann Hari Huffington Post, 1/4/2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html
or http://www.sfbayview.com/2009/you-are-being-lied-to-about-pirates/