Terror on the High Seas

Much has been made about the recent developments on the seas and the waterways in Eastern Africa. The United States media has recently taken a keen interest in the affairs of that region of the world. Sadly and unfortunately many of these same outlets only seem to tell one side of the story. Rarely, if ever, does that side tend to be from the African point of view. As the Navy Seals are celebrated and the Maersk Alabama's captain is returned to the United States, key questions such as why and how that were not asked or answered in the mainstream media must be answered here.

The why and how that I seek to answer are less related to the efforts of the Somali pirates in their attempt to take the Maersk Alabama, but rather why they feel the need to patrol the seas and oceans of that area anyway. Initially one's first line of reasoning would be why would pirates patrol an area. Many will rightly say that's the navy's job. However for a country such as Somalia that has been in turmoil as long as it has it has no standing navy. Once we acknowledge that, then we can see a myriad of problems that will develop for Somalia because of a lack of a navy.

One main problem that has served as a key spark in this pirating epidemic is the dumping of nuclear waste. Because Somalia is a nation in chaos and lacks the ability to organize a standing navy to combat foreign navies, many countries (including some western countries) dump their nuclear waste in Somali waters. What this does is pollute the Somali air quality and shorten the life expectancy of Somali citizens. If this isn't bad enough, when other nations don't want to over fish their waters, they send their fishermen to Somali waters. This takes work away from the Somali fisherman and food away from the Somali people. In turn many western "aid" groups step in to provide essentials like food for the Somali people when it is these same aid groups governments that are a factor in causing the starvation of the Somali people in the first place.

The Somali people's response to this is to fight back. As has been belabored the Somalis do not have a navy to formally fight with, so they fight with improvised tactics. The United States first faced improvised tactics with the Vietnamese and guerrilla warfare. Since then other organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas and Al-Qaeda have fought back using improvised techniques because they lacked proper armed forces. All of these groups have also been labeled as terrorist mind you. Sadly what happens in these cases is that otherwise innocent people are are the victims of the loose organizations (Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Pirates) on account of the policy decisions these innocent people's government have made. The United States mind you is the same government that armed and trained the Afghan people to fight against the Russians during the cold war in the 1980's. Then they were freedom fighters fighting off oppression. When they fight the United States they are called terrorist. What has changed? Nothing but the oppressor.

This is not in any way to condone or excuse violent behavior against innocent people. Perhaps (and one can only hope) the crew members of the Maersk Alabama were not on the high seas to dump nuclear waste and were there in fact as reported to deliver aid. If that is the case it is terrible that innocent people had their lives threatened. It was a shame that there were innocent victims in the numerous attacks across the world. In no way is this meant to praise the work of the Somali pirates or the Middle Eastern fighters. All we want to do, and it is our responsibility as citizens to do this, is look a little deeper than the obvious and find out the truth. The west and particularly the United States have never had clean hands when dealing with "third-world" or undeveloped countries. It is unlikely they'd start now.