From: jesus475073@webtv.net   
      
   Nuke waste has been dumped on the Somalian Coast for decades   
   Group: news:alt.discuss.politics.liberal Date: Mon, Apr 13, 2009,   
   11:17am (EDT-3) From: spamgalore@webtv.net (Thisname Istaken)   
      
   You Are Being Lied to About Pirates   
   By Johann Hari   
   April 12, 2009 "Huffington Post" --- Who imagined that in 2009, the   
   world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read   
   this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two   
   dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to   
   take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime   
   villains.   
   They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates   
   onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind   
   the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal.   
   The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of   
   our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on   
   their side.   
      
   Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age   
   of piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the   
   senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British   
   government in a great propaganda-heave.   
      
    Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued   
   from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we   
   can't? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker   
   pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy   
   sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and   
   hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell.   
      
    You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you   
   slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with   
   the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown   
   overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often   
   cheated of your wages. Pirates were the first people to rebel against   
   this world.   
   They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a   
   different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates   
   elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They   
   shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most   
   egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere   
   in the eighteenth century."   
      
    They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals.   
   The pirates showed "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did   
   not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant   
   service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite   
   being unproductive thieves.   
      
   The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called   
   William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he   
   was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to   
   keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live."   
      
    In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed.   
   Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since -   
   and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a   
   great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our   
   nuclear waste in their seas.   
      
   Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious   
   European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast   
   barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first   
   they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies.   
      
    Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking   
   barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation   
   sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to   
   Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is   
   also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it."   
      
   Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who   
   seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply.   
   When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about   
   it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no   
   compensation, and no prevention."   
      
   At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas   
   of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own   
   fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs.   
   More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is   
   being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into   
   Somalia's unprotected seas.   
      
    The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are   
   starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south   
   of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be   
   much fish left in our coastal waters." This is the context in which the   
   men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were   
   ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to   
   dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them.   
      
   They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not   
   hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate   
   leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and   
   dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We   
   consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our   
   seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William   
   Scott would understand those words.   
      
   No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are   
   clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food   
   Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of   
   the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site   
   WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary   
   Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the   
   piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial   
   waters."   
      
    During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and   
   America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial   
   waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most   
   Americans supported them. Is this so different? Did we expect starving   
   Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear   
   waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London   
   and Paris and Rome?   
      
     We didn't act on those crimes   
   - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the   
   transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to   
   shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to   
   stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to   
   root out Somalia's criminals.   
      
   The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)