It is disheartening, once again, to see the butchery of truth by an oversimplification of complex phenomena in a place that has become a metaphor for the grave ills of postcolonial Africa – Somalia.
It is disheartening, once again, to see the butchery of truth by an oversimplification of complex phenomena in a place that has become a metaphor for the grave ills of postcolonial Africa – Somalia.
As we say out here, don’t believe the hype! Or, as Bob Marley and the Wailers succinctly put it, half the story has never been told.
Let’s get through the debris of Gaza, the wasteland of Eastern Congo and the blighted plains of Darfur to get to the facts about Somalia and the Great Pirate Threats to Western Civilization as we know it.
First, the Good News: Somalia is not the Democratic Republic of Korea. The Somalis, struggling to hold on to the last trappings of sovereignty, don’t have nukes or threats of nukes or long range missiles to police their waters. Yes, the country has fallen on hard times, very hard times since 1991, when a brutal dictatorship imploded and the Somalis chose fragmentation over national unity.
Second, the Cold Fact: Like Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, and other places that have witnessed civil wars and collapse of all institutions of governance, greedy armies of foreign corporate interests saw the chaos in Somalia as an opportunity to loot the natural resources of this warring nation. It was blood diamonds in the case of Sierra Leone, timber and gold in the case of Liberia, and enormous amount of mineral wealth in the case of the Congo. It’s the old law of the jungle: You fall on your back, the vultures soon land for a good meal. Somalia has no diamonds, gold, oil and other strategic minerals ready for easy exploitation on land. What it does have, however, is the open sea with fish…tons of fish – for European markets.
Third, the Hard Truth: We live in a world with tons of nuclear waste, too. The waste was not created in Somalia. Remember, Somalia is not Iran or Pakistan or India or China or France or Britain or the US. But some of the nuclear waste has found its way to the open seas of Somalia…polluting the coastlines and destroying the livelihood of thousands of Somali fishermen. Someone is making lots of money for dumping nuclear wastes in Somali waters, but we are certain that the Somalis are not among the Dumping Mafia.
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