Somali Pirates Set Up Investors Co-op

ONCE UPON A TIME, THE WEST ROBBED AFRICA OF ITS RICHES. Actually, that's still going on as the people suffering from the proxy wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo could tell you. So, you'll forgive me if I don't condemn the Somali pirates, who are mostly fishermen trying to make the best of a difficult situation in the face of continuous meddling in Somlia's affairs.
It's in this context that I find this innovation of social banditry in a key pirate town so fascinating. Pirates have set up something like an investment co-op for locals to take advantage of, and participate in, the profits from piracy. They can invest into pirate crews with either money or equipment, garnering a share of the booty when that crew is successful.

"Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 'maritime companies' and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking," Mohammed said.
"The shares are open to all and everybody can take part, whether personally at sea or on land by providing cash, weapons or useful materials ... we've made piracy a community activity."
Haradheere, 400 km (250 miles) northeast of Mogadishu, used to be a small fishing village. Now it is a bustling town where luxury 4x4 cars owned by the pirates and those who bankroll them create honking traffic jams along its pot-holed, dusty streets.

This description of a local woman who has been able to use her divorce settlement as a way to improve her income earning potential is particularly inspiring.

Piracy investor Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee, was lined up with others waiting for her cut of a ransom pay-out after one of the gangs freed a Spanish tuna fishing vessel.
"I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation," she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony.
"I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the 'company'."

To hell with AMWAY and AVON, African piracy is the new way for single gals to supplement their income. And whoever invested in the crew that just seized a super-tanker with 2 million barrels of oil on board is about to take a very nice vacation this year.

Why I Support Somali Pirates

APPARENTLY SOME PEOPLE FELT THAT I WENT TOO FAR in defending Somali pirates as representing a legitimate response to imperialism. After all, the pirates take hostages and threaten - though, statistically, it is the pirates who are most likely to be killed. And, as the Wired interview I linked to notes, it is not in the interest of pirates to actually kill their hostages. There have been very few fatalities. Nonetheless, it raises some serious questions about political ethics for progressives. Luckily, being a know-it-all, I have a response.
The first response of course is that there's always a double-standard in the moral outrage about "criminals" and "terrorists". Nobody credible in the mainstream media would suggest that the US president is a terrorist or a criminal. Yet, the United States, under the leadership of pretty much every president, has been responsible for hundreds of times more deaths than any terrorist organization that you might care to name. Bush alone must bear responsibility for the deaths of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clinton bombed Serbia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq and, of course, Somalia. Obama looks set to send another 34,000 troops to Afghanistan - and at $1 million bucks each, you can bet they won't be playing pinochle. They'll be killing people wholesale.
And the US is more than happy to hold people hostage, including starving people, using secret prisons, keeping them in legal limbo in Guantanamo, and the use of extraordinary renditions. In Somalia right now the US is holding millions hostage, refusing to allow US food aid out of Kenyan warehouses because it might get into the hands of the Islamist al-Shabab movement that is winning the war against the heavily-subsidized and heavily armed - by the US - TFG government in Mogadishu. Even Foreign Policy Magazine has an article condemning the policy, concluding with the following:

The U.S. government is holding the Somalia relief enterprise and its beneficiaries hostage to its counterterrorism policy... Until Washington lets [aid] agencies fulfill their mission unhindered, the U.S. mission to win "hearts and minds" in Somalia, a feared up-and-coming stronghold of terrorism, will be completely undermined. Knowingly allowing millions of people to suffer is no way to win friends.

But there's a second point, that I think is even more important. It is this: that the application of abstract universal values is politically useless to understanding the world, to providing a just framework for action, and to maintaining a coherent, non-hypocritical value system.
Let me put this more concretely. Is it right to say that lying is wrong? Most people would say "yes, of course. Honesty is the best policy." etc. And yet nobody actually believes that. We lie everyday, often several times a day. We lie to our boss - "sorry, I'm late: traffic". We lie to our spouse: "no, you don't look fat in that." We lie to our friends. Because we understand that context is what determines our response. Similarly theft - do we condemn the theft of a loaf of bread by someone so poor that to do otherwise would be to starve? Certainly the British condemned the Irish during the Potato Famine. And what is theft? Is it theft for children in Indonesia to work 12-hour days, being paid sweatshop wages by major multinational garment corporations? Is it theft for the world's largest banks to have gambled wildly and then, having brought the system to near collapse, demand public money, refuse public control, and continue to give out bonuses?
And lastly, of course, killing. Surely we must be against killing. Its a commandment from God himself. There's laws against it. We condemn it. But we don't condemn all killing. We have war memorials to commemorate the occasions of mass slaughter that punctuate our history. We're told to "support our troops", which always means "shut up and support the killing of foreigners in a war somewhere else."
So, unless we are going to consistently tell the truth, never steal and never support any war or violent act, we must permit that sometimes those actions are acceptable. The question is when are they acceptable and this really comes down to "whose side are you on?" It also means a concrete analysis of each situation.
Let's take the pirates since this is where we started. Somalia's pirates are indubitably - even the mainstream media acknowledge this - a response to the lack of a central government to police the waters of the Somali basin, and the devastating poverty of that country. The action of seizing boats might seem extreme but since the pirates aren't recognized as a legitimate sovereign authority, they are forced to use coercion. If we're honest, all state transactions - including taxation and tariffs - are rooted in the threat of violence (whether physical or financial) against the subject. We have created laws to mediate this but behind the laws that threat remains - and as the Branch Davidians or various aboriginal protest movements (or the Black Panthers or the MOVE organization or the trade union movement) have often discovered, it's not that far buried. So, the pirates, without the benefit of legal recognition, are applying the threat.
There's also a question of power implied here. Somalia is a country that is suffering because of the continued meddling, manipulation, invasion, bombardment, etc etc of the USA, et al. The USA support the dictator Siad Barre. They invaded to prevent Mohammad Farah Aideed from consolidating his power. They supported the Ethiopian invasion which forced the Union of Islamic Courts out of power, after they had brought a modicum of stability to the country. And now they are arming and backing a group that has no support outside of a few neighbourhoods in Mogadishu.
The USA is the most powerful empire in world history. It has bases in more than 100 countries. Its military spending alone makes up more than half of the total world military spending. Its economy is the world's largest. It controls the key international economic institutions in the world, the IMF, the World Bank, etc. It has invaded more countries and overthrown more governments than any other country in history.
From these two facts - oppression and domination - I draw two conclusions. The first is that the actions of the oppressed to alleviate their conditions are not the same as those of the dominant powers. The actions of, say, the pirates has a democratic component to it - they are attempting to overcome the effects of imperialism and to affirm their right to self-determination and sovereignty. The actions of the United States are designed to strengthen and affirm the present set-up, in other words their dominance. Thus, their invasions of Iraq or Afghanistan, their support for the Ethiopian dictator (the Jordanian dictator, the Egyptian dictator, the Israeli apartheid regime, of China, etc), are about sustaining domination. They run directly counter to democracy and self-determination. And since I support democracy - in the broadest sense of the term, including in the economy - because I believe that it is necessary for the full development of humanity, I support weakening the forces of domination. So, anything that weakens the Americans, their allies and clients, or other imperial powers (including the Russian, Chinese, British, EU, Canada, etc.) at the very least creates more space for the potential of democratic development. There will be no women's liberation in Afghanistan as long as NATO and the Americans are there. Only once the occupying powers are driven out, will there be the possibility of democratic development.
This doesn't mean that I support all actions putatively directed against the American state or other imperial regimes. Terrorism for instance, while often an understandable response, is usually counter-productive. (and by terrorism I don't mean the usual "anything that opposes us using violence is terrorist" discourse). When al Qaeda blew up the Twin Towers, did that weaken or strengthen the US? It strengthened it. It provided a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and to increase the repressive powers of the US state through the Patriot Act, the open acceptance of torture as legitimate, etc. There is a question here of ends and means - ie. the ends don't justify the means, the ends are determined by the means. And that is why I support the pirates.

Somali Pirates: Small Acts Of Vengeance Against Imperialism

ON AND OFF OVER THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS, the subject of Somali pirates has made the front pages. There was a brief respite during the reign of the Islamic Courts Union, before they were overthrown by the Ethiopian Army, backed by the US, which claimed - falsely - that they were allied to Al Qaeda.
Somali pirates have once again been in the news, particularly in Britain, with the kidnap of a couple who were sailing through the Indian Ocean on their 38 foot yacht. The pirates have demanded US$7 million or they are threatening to kill them. The British government - unlike the Spanish, which recently ponied up $3.3 million to win the release of 36 hostages plus their ship - is refusing to pay for their release. Apparently the British government doesn't give "substantive concessions" to hostage takers. Unless you're a British bank, of course. The Royal Bank of Scotland threatened to go belly-up and has now received a total of about US$77 billion. In October RBS announced plans to pay out US$8.3 million in bonuses - these are piracy payouts if ever there were. Somali pirates can at least promise to return their hostages safely in return for their ransom.
Back in Somali pirates now hold about 200 people hostage, along with about a dozen ships. Over the years the piracy industry has become something of a lucrative, if dangerous, business. Certainly it is portrayed as primarily a problem of criminals in the western media. But it has to be understood as part of a broader problem related to imperialism and capitalism.
A full analysis would require a book but it's worth noting that Somalia only won its independence from British colonialism in 1960. The damage the British and Italians wrought upon the body politic, including slicing off a chunk of land dominated by Somalis and making it part of Ethiopia, the Ogaden region, and left an under-developed country riven by strife. In 1969 a coup took place bringing Mohammad Siad Barre to power. It was the cold war and rival Ethiopia was aligned with the USA. Barre aligned Somalia with the Soviet Union (later the superpowers would flip, like some kind of geo-political swingers party, with the US supporting Barre and the USSR supporting Ethiopia). Barre used Marxist jargon and had some popularity with promises of developing the country, including gains in literacy. But he was encouraged by the US to invade Ethiopia in 1977, leading to Somalia's humiliating defeat the following year. This undermined Barre's greater-Somalia strategy and weakened the legitimacy of his state. For the next decade, Barre stayed in power by brutally attacking his opponents, backed the whole time by the US and other western countries. He slaughtered thousands and bombed his own cities in order to stay in power.
Eventually, the inevitable happened and in 1991 Barre was overthrown, with the pre-eminent group being the United Somali Congress, led by Mohammad Farah Aideed. With Barre gone along with any semblance of a central, national power, Somalia descended for a time into clan warfare - though it seemed likely that Aideed would fairly quickly win most of the major forces inside the country to his side. It's unclear - at least to me - why the Americans wouldn't back Aideed, he was a naturalized citizen and had even been in the US Marines. The Italians, for their part, gave lots of money to Aideed's main rival, Ali Mahdi.
Whatever their reasoning, the UN invaded, including Canada (remember those pictures of Canadian soldiers torturing Sidane Arone?). Conflict between the UN and Aideed escalated rapidly into armed confrontation, leading to the death, first, of 23 Pakistani soldiers who had tried to shut down Aideed's anti-UN radio station. This ultimately became the first Battle of Mogadishu, immortalized in that spectacularly racist piece of crap Blackhawk Down by Ridley Scott. The result was 18 US soldiers dead - and somewhere in the vicinity of 500-1500 Somalis dead. Aideed wasn't killed or defeated but the UN intervention ensured that he was unable to form a stable national government. And he was killed - perhaps with the help of US special forces - in 1996.
Since then, there has not been a stable national government in Somalia - though regions, like Somaliland, do have more or less stable governments. And the UN and others have attempted to set up pliant regimes, the most recent being the Transitional Federal Government in 2004. But the TFG had no legitimacy inside of Somalia and it was notoriously corrupt. It was overthrown in 2006 by the Union of Islamic Courts, which at least promised to end inter-tribal strife and the widespread corruption. But the US has made it clear that either Somalia will have a government of their choosing, or they will have no indigenous government at all. The US trained, armed and greenlit the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia at the end of 2006, which overthrew the UIC, leading to three years of war. There is now a government of sorts in the central region of Somalia with Western backing but it is shaky and its remit very limited.
This history of warfare and imperial intervention is the backdrop to Somali piracy. Without a central state to organize and fund a coast guard, Somalia's coastline - rich in fishing - has become the target of illegal, industrial fish trawlers. These trawlers actively prevent Somali fisherman from fishing in their own waters and steal about $300 million worth of seafood each year. In addition, with no policing functions available, there has been widespread dumping of toxins and wastes off the Somali coast, also damaging the fishery and creating health problems for the local population. This feeling of being a force that is not committing piracy but is, in fact, defending the homeland is embedded in the names of pirate fleets, like the National Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia, and the Somali Marines. And many of these pirates are really just kids, often teenagers, engaging in the only lucrative economic activity within several thousand kilometres. That sense of a mission comes out loud and clear in a fascinating interview that Wired Magazine did with a Somali pirate:

Nine years ago everyone in this town was stable and earn[ed] enough income from fishing. Now there is nothing. We have no way to make a living. We had to defend ourselves. We became watchmen of our coasts and took up our duty to protect the country. Don’t call us pirates. We are protectors.

The pirate also has a keen sense of the order of things:

We attack many ships everyday, but only a few are ever profitable. No one will come to the rescue of a third-world ship with an Indian or African crew, so we release them immediately. But if the ship is from Western country or with valuable cargo like oil, weapons or … then it’s like winning a lottery jackpot. We begin asking a high price and then go down until we agree on a price.

It's hard to argue with the points raised by the Somali pirates. And seeing through the western propaganda about dangerous criminals, it becomes clear that the pirates have taken on the responsibilities of a state since the Somali state was destroyed with ample help and weapons from the West. 
It ought to impress our leaders, so enamoured with neo-liberal privatization. You'd think that a privatized coast guard, imposing tariffs to pass through the Somali basin, would be a model that the IMF, the US and others would want to hold up (pardon the pun). However, don't hold your breath. As the pirates know all too well, it's not really about free enterprise or defense of territorial sovereignty as an inalienable right - it's about power and domination. That's why the Royal Bank of Scotland will get its $77 billion without hesitation but the UK government will hum and haw about negotiating a ransom that will probably end up being $1 million (pirates generally demand around 10 times what they eventually receive). What the pirates have also discovered is that a fly moves faster than an elephant and so, for the moment, this has allowed them to survive and even make a living.