As a Somali let me say this: good on you with the fancy guns, please stop depleting our sovereign waters of fish and stop dumping industrial waste in our beaches.
I'm going to take the unpopular position of somewhat defending this attitude.
As I understand it, as the Somali state failed, foreign fishing vessels took advantage of the missing government and misdirected leftover Somali coastguard to slip in and illegally fish out the local waters. This decimated the local economy. A bunch of out of work, starving fishermen sat around and looked at their boats, empty nets and left over coast guard gear and asked themselves "now what?" Justified anger led them to simply attack the offending fishing boats wantonly, but they soon realized that there was cash in them-thar ships.
From there, it quickly spiraled out of control. That much money available, combined with the local anger and desperation, quickly made all ships targets. Calls for "the end of piracy" sound to the locals like "please sit there and starve quietly by the coast we fished out like good world citizens."
This is why even magic comic book rifles that can bend bullets won't end piracy. Sitting and starving is not an option.
Personally, I've been impressed so far by the restraint the international community has shown in dealing with the pirates. The temptation to just load cargo ships with old WWII guns and blaze away must be no small thing.
I just really really hope we don't get a "war on piracy" out of this whole deal. I'm pretty much "war on X'ed" out.
Thank you for your compassion, brother/sister noonespecial. Or as we say in Somali, "mahad sanid". Thank you.
We have an infant government in the making. It's not much, but it's ours. We had a U.S. puppet of a prez fighting al-Qaeda supported Jihadis for the last two years. But as soon as W left office something nice happened: the puppet government stepped down after the end of its term, and the "terrorists" put down their weapons and actually participated in elections. Now we have something unique: an Islamist president who wants to reach out to the opposition; almost everyone is happy for it, it's really cute. Both were hardliners til Obama came to office; the warlords lost the guarantee of a U.S. funding, and the Islamists lost the existential adversary in George W Bush. So now they're talking. They are making something that will benefit the Somali people everywhere and make the world proud.
I, myself, have no interest in following their experiment. I'm an American now. I have a home, a country, friends, and a little thing going on for me that I want to keep. My sympathetic understanding of the pirates' issues, thanks to my linguistic affinity with them, is not enough to keep me interested. I might be Somali, but Somalia's problems are not exactly mine. I can go there today, but I'm ruined for it, I'm the "American guy" now. I hope those still there can turn it around into something pleasant.
There's no doubt that this or any other gun is not going to solve piracy, especially when the root of it is injustice. But the world isn't going to sit back and tolerate piracy either. WWII guns on cargo ships may be closer than you think.
And yes, that won't be a good thing. The interesting thing is, no matter how noble and Robin Hood like the start was, now there is hundreds of millions of dollars worth of loot at stake so I am sure just diplomacy and development aid is not going to stop piracy in the short term.
Regardless of any legitimate grievances you may have against illegal fishing or dumping in your waters, hijacking ships full of international goods owned by people and companies having nothing to do with this (hell one of the hijacked ships was carrying aid to Somalia) is neither right nor prudent.
No doubt, but what you don't hear is that these "pirates" pretty much trained on catching offending ships. This has been going on since 1992, and you didn't hear much about it because the ships they attacked had no reason what so ever to announce the matter and attract publicity. I wonder why? hmmmmm.
One more thing, the pirates are nearly all from the Majeerteen tribe. They are Abdulahi Yusuf's tribe, and he was the former transitional Somali president and American Ally Extraordinaire. Yusuf is the guy who made the war on terror happen in Somalia, and Bush Jr flooded him and his tribe with moolah. He invited Ethiopians into Somalia and did his best to catch and kill Islamists ..
Except one thing; Yusuf is a war criminal and made no effort what so ever to separate his for-profit conquests from the American mandated attacks on Jihadis. He dragged the name of the U.S. through the mud and cashed up while he was in power. He was eventually defeated in a fair election by the same Islamists he was fighting on behalf of the U.S.
[Just had to inform the dough-eyed voting American with a little bad news about foreign policy that might just ruin his TiVoed episode of tonight's PBS Frontline ;-]
America's (and mostly W's) short sighted foreign policies are legend, although Obama seems to be turning that tanker around slowly, as he says. Looks like you guys are stuck between a rock and a hard place if the word Islamists carries the same connotations there. But at least you had a fair election.
Also, while the allegation that a majority of Americans are ignorant about the shortcomings of American foreign policy may be true, I think you will find that 1) It is less true on HN 2) When people on HN don't know something, they listen with an open mind, even to criticism of their country 3) (In my experience) Americans are the most open to discussing criticism of their country
So your repeated use of cliches to bash Americans is counterproductive here. FWIW I am not a US citizen.
You don't need to tell me about Americans ajju, after all, I'm one :-)
I understand what you're saying yar, but deeko, things are not as cut and dry as they seem. The story I'm replying to had a phoney "pirates be ware, we have sophisticated guns" vibe to it. The so called pirates couldn't give a shit what you type of guns you have. To them death is secondary, because they have little to live for.
We have to understand their motives to combat their piracy (not to kill them): The pirates have two sources of income, cattle and fish. They used to export cattle, but their produce is no longer sold in any international market, because Somalia lacks the federal institutions to certify meat quality and oversee health issues. But they can't fish anymore, because foreign fishing boats have pretty much whipped out their coasts.
None of these pirates are committing crime in someone else's backyard. Nearly every ship they took was in Somali waters. I have no sympathy for the pirates, but I understand their cause as much as I understand an Inuit who bombs an oil refiners because, say, the Alaskan oil extraction industry is killing whales and sea lions, which the Inuit needs to hunt for food and fur.
Well, the "as a Somali" part in your first comment tripped me up and I forgot that one can be both Somali and American!
I do see your point. Military force is never a solution against extremism bred out of injustice and desperation. Maybe the current US administration will act based on this understanding.
And nice use of Hindi/Urdu over there. Where did you pick it up? :)
>And nice use of Hindi/Urdu over there. Where did you pick it up? :)
I grew up with Amitabh and Dharmendra movies, from Sholay to Silsila to all the classics. The soundtrack of my childhood has been Mohamed Rafi, Asha and Lata. Then came the Khans, Sharuh, Amir and Salman. We loved them in Somalia more than anything else. Then in my teens I moved to Pakistan to study for my O-levels and A-levels and now I sing with the best of them "Sindhi hum, balochi hum, punjabi hum puttani hum .." :-)
Dekha ek khwaab to yeh silsile hue - that's one of the first songs I remember listening to as a kid! Glad to know our Ambassadors to Somalia were Mr. Bacchan and Dharam Paaji :)
No offense taken man and you've definitely been all over the subcontinent to the point of being an honorary desi ;)
I entirely support your point that folks shouldn't dump waste in Somali waters.
However, I'm not prepared - without evidence - to accept the assertion that the acts of piracy are explicitly aimed at ships that dump waste.
In fact, all the evidence I've read says the opposite - the pirates attack ships with high value cargos (food, machinery, etc.)
Also, if the pirates are political freedom fighters, why are they asking for bags of unmarked cash, instead of asking for a resolution condemning dumping?
The few things I've read indicate that the Sicilian Mafia is behind a lot of the dumping - they get paid to dump waste b/c they can do it "cheaply". Can you point to some sources which indicate that U.S. concerns are involved in this activity? Furthermore, exclusive economic zone only extends 200 nautical miles out from the coast. Given Somalia's coastal length of 1,880 miles, that's about 432,400 square miles of sea. And yet articles like this: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gB7YMEDuCw... say that the danger zone is 1.1 million square miles large. How do you account for the discrepancy?
One man's pirate is another man's coast guard.
Soomaliya ha noolaato!