So, Refugees International beat me to this topic, but I’ll put my opinion out there anyway, because I believe it’s incredibly important to understand.
Recently, I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about the pirate situation off the coast of Somalia. Currently, 15 ships and 300 crew members are being held hostage by Somali pirates. On April 8, a group of Somali teenage “pirates” kidnapped and held for ransom the captain of an American container vessel. In a “successful mission,” the pirates were shot dead by U.S. Navy Seals. More recently, a Russian cruiser stopped three pirate ships off the coast of Somalia and detained 10 pirates. Yesterday, a teenage Somali pirate captured by U.S. forces and brought to New York for trial was ordered to face the court as an adult on piracy charges; he could be jailed for life.
True, people need to be held accountable for their actions. But the focus on punishing the pirates is wrong: political leaders, the international community, and the news media need to focus on addressing the underlying causes of piracy instead. These pirates were driven to engage in criminal behavior because of the poverty, lack of opportunity, and chaos in Somalia. What about the more important story: Somalia’s history, and it’s dire situation?
The media frenzy is wrongly focused on the issue of piracy because it’s sensational, news-worthy. What about everything else going on in Somalia? I don’t know if you’ve realized, but Somalia is a country. With a history, a long legacy. There’s a lot more to Somalia than just pirates. Somalia is a failed state, a humanitarian crisis - and piracy is just a symptom of this. In 1991, a civil war destroyed Somalia’s government, and since then the country has suffered famine and utter chaos. Somalia has split into several mini-states and does not even have a central government. The country is also being exploited by Ethiopia; since Ethiopia, backed by the US, overthrew Somalia’s government, the country has been consumed in anarchy. Somalia’s situation is even worse than that in Darfur. One third of its people are currently refugees. More than 3 million are dependent on external assistance. Piracy is a result of this horrible situation; people are driven to desperate measures in order to survive. In spite of this ongoing crisis, the entire media is focused on the few pirates who have been caught - not the millions dying of violence and poverty. Where are our priorities?
The severe international response to punishing the pirates is also unfair since it’s largely a reaction to the decades of exploitation Somalia has undergone at the hands of more powerful nations. For decades, the country’s long coastline has been pillaged by foreign vessels. Fishing fleets from around the world have long plundered Somalia’s rich waters; trawlers from places like South Korea, Japan, and Spain have fished illegally on the Somali coast. This has forced the country’s own poor fishermen out. Impoverished Somali fishermen lacked the advanced boats and technologies of their competitors, and were sometimes even shot at by foreign fishermen. Somalia - with all its chaos - has no way of monitoring its coastlines; it has no navy or coast guard. “According to another U.N. report, an estimated $300 million worth of seafood is stolen from the country’s coastline each year.” As a response, poor Somalis living by the ocean were forced to start defending their own fishing expeditions; the first pirate gangs emerged simply as a method of self-defense. They simply had no option if they were to survive.
The international community needs to understand that the problem of piracy isn’t something that can be solved by punishment or even worse, violence and war. If we want to end piracy, we have to attack the root cause of the problem - which is the overwhelming poverty and anarchy of the country. If we help the Somali people to establish a stable government, as well as help improve the overall quality of life in the country, perhaps they wouldn’t have to resort to desperate measures like piracy. And we need to shift media focus away from the pirates and onto the humanitarian crisis occurring in the state: there’s more to Somalia than pirates, and it’s time people realized this.
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