Piracy in Somalia is the logical if tragic result of 18 years of lawlessness.
A brutal civil war toppled dictator Siad Barre in 1991, but no single leader or entity emerged to replace the deposed regime. Instead, local warlords duked it out, each with their armies of narcotics-addicted foot soldiers. An unprecedented U.N. peacekeeping operation meant to return stability to Somalia ended in bloodshed when, in 1993, 18 U.S. troops were killed during a raid to capture two minor officers of a prominent warlord.
What followed was more than a decade of fighting that steadily reduced the country’s infrastructure to ruins and its people to desperation. Over time, more and more Somalis came to depend on the U.N. for food. The rise of a hard-line Islamist regime calling itself the Islamic Courts Union drew Ethiopia into the fighting in 2006.
By late 2007, the Ethiopians were mired in a brutal, Iraq-style insurgency. In that year alone, some 7,000 Somalis died in the crossfire. Meanwhile, the humanitarian crisis only worsened. In the last 12 months, the number of Somalis requiring U.N. food assistance has jumped by 77 percent to the current 3.5 million.
The U.N. has struggled to keep up with demand. The banditry that strangled Somalia’s roads has migrated onto water. In the mid-1990s, pirates began seizing the U.N.’s unescorted food ships. At first, these pirates acted out of a perverse sense of justice. “They said that the food was not getting to where it was intended because of the warlords,” recalled Mr. Wahutu, the maritime official. “The pirates said, ‘We shall hold the vessels, so we get the food.’”
Over time, pirates became bolder, seizing so many food ships that many ship owners refused to take U.N. contracts. Somali pirates risked starving themselves and their countrymen.
Where the pirates seizing food ships might fancy themselves as “Robin Hoods of the sea,” other pirates got their start in the 1990s by defending Somali fisheries from illegal incursions by foreign fishing trawlers. They called themselves “coast guards.”
Somalia has rich fisheries. Indeed, before the civil war, fishing — especially for tuna and sharks — was one of the country’s major industries. But when the government collapsed, there was no one to enforce Somalia’s national waters.
With no maritime offices, courts, police, coast guard or navy to protect these waters, major fishing countries had a field day. Fishing vessels from as far away as China and Japan sailed across the Indian Ocean to plunder Somalia’s tuna stocks. Somali fishermen responded by taking up arms, boarding fishing vessels and demanding “fees.”
Read the rest at The Washington Times.
(Photo: me)
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