Oct 12 2009
Monbiot on the Pirates
I’ve blogged about the Somali Pirates before. But I was not expecting them to pop out of a George Monbiot essay.
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, 22nd September 2009
Italian prosecutors are investigating the scuttling of a further 41 ships. But most of them weren’t sunk, like Fonti’s vessel, off the coast of Italy; they were lost off the coast of Somalia. When the great tsunami of 2004 struck the Somali coast, it dumped and smashed open thousands of barrels on the beaches and in villages up to 10km inland(5). According to the United Nations, they contained clinical waste from western hospitals, heavy metals, other chemical junk and nuclear waste. People started suffering from unusual skin infections, bleeding at the mouth, acute respiratory infections and abdominal haemorrhages(5a). The barrels had been dumped in the sea, a UN spokesman said, for one obvious reason: it cost European companies around $2.50 a tonne to dispose of the waste this way, while dealing with them properly would have cost “something like $1000 a tonne.”(6) On the seabed off Somalia lies Europe’s picture of Dorian Grey: the skeleton in the closet of the languid new world we have made.
The only people who have sought physically to stop this dumping are Somali pirates. Most of them take to the seas only for blood and booty; but some have formed coastal patrols to stop over-fishing and illegal dumping by foreign fleets(7,8,9). Some of the vessels being protected from pirates by Combined Task Force 151 – the rich world’s policing operation in the Gulf of Aden – have come to fish illegally or dump toxic waste. The warships make no attempt to stop them.
Go read the rest of the article. It’s a doozy. But I wanted to call out the thing about the pirates specficially. Not that I have any great hope that it will stop people from asking us if we’re afraid of pirates; I just wish more people understood that they have far, far more reason, to be afraid of us.
Related posts:
Yikes. I had no idea…