Yeah - whilst the fishing thing was certainly one of the reasons for start of piracy in Somalia, the other is that they can make loads and loads of money, and Somalia has plenty of weapons, and, thanks to decades of civil war, high unemployment. Even if there was loads and loads of fish there, there is no way fishing would be remotely as lucrative (between $30-75k per pirate for a successful job, according to the Economist, in a country where the average GDP per capita is $600). Piracy is financed by middle-men, often in countries elsewhere in the region, who take much of the take. This is big business for these guys- not subsistence fishermen trying to avoid starvation.
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A certain dystopian fascination in watching hired guns fend off (or just flat-out kill) desperately poor people from one of the most wretched countries on Earth on behalf of probably some LLC in the Cayman Islands. Not a fan of pirates, exactly, but…
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Okay.
The piracy thing didn’t start happening until after the central government in Somalia collapsed.
They had a rather large supply of young men with guns who were accustomed to fighting for one warlord or another.
The warlords saw an opportunity to use the knowledge and skills possessed by the fishermen for profit, which they split equally with the fishermen, who could now feed their families again.
I’m trying to figure out what else the fishermen could have done.
Move inland and take up farming? Gotta buy or rent land, wrong skillset, fishing boats make lousy tractors.
Go back to school and get a STEM degree? And get a job in Somalia’s thriving high tech sector? (I’m sorry, that’s kind of snarky)
Become a refugee? Be welcomed in the USA? Saudi Arabia? Southern Europe?
Walk to Djibouti, Ethiopia, or Kenya? And eat what?
Watch their families starve?
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Historically? Not really that big of a jump.
Oh, Elcid Barrett cried the town, HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOW!
For twenty brave men all fishermen who
Would make for him the Antelope’s crew
– Stan Rogers, Barrett’s Privateers
Stan may not have all the facts right in this song (see lyrics explained) but the promise of easy money is a strong one, especially in the cases where your usual livelihood has been destroyed.
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There is a scene in the film “The Rover” set in the Australian outback after some kind of withering collapse of civilization, where Guy Pierce’s character stops his car at a railroad crossing for a long freight train, and the cars all have armed men in kevlar vests sitting on top eyeballing him as they pass.
The way humanity is moving this could be all our future.
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Or, y’know…not.
It’s not like pirates/bandits haven’t always existed in some form or fashion in wild/unpoliced areas.
It’s interesting to see the factors (other than money) motivating people to adopt piracy. And just as interesting seeing what modern, private defenses are instated to deter the pirates. Swap out those AR-15s and RPGs for cannons and muskets, and I bet this is the same general way it went down in the 1700s.
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I wonder that often these days.
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I wonder how you get licensed or otherwise obtain legal permission to defensively shoot at people in international waters?
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I suspect that the detour through ‘vigilante squad’ makes the trip a lot shorter.
The stated goals of the vigilante squads were hard to argue with; but that doesn’t change the fact that applying violence only where justified is comparatively thankless and low paid compared to more entrepreneurial applications(and far stronger states than Somalia have been seriously troubled or more or less destroyed by an inability to keep their security forces from turning to banditry, so it’s not as though there was much institutional pressure keeping them in line).
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Here’s how to resolve your conflicting feelings: Suppose someone who is out of work and hungry pulls a knife on your loved ones or children and threatens their life if they don’t hand over their money and jewelry, then stabs one or two to show they mean it. Not deadly but enough to make someone bleed and leave a scar?
Still conflicted?
How about if hijackers threaten to shoot a truck driver if he/she doesn’t give them his or her cargo and occasionally shoots one just to make sure the world knows they mean it? Truck driver has a family and doesn’t even know what is in the truck. Got that conflict resolved yet?
Suppose you find out after that this person or group is doing this professionally and hauls in millions of dollars a year. Conflict gone yet?
They take hostages. They hold people not involved with their problem (assuming they are the ones with problems, which has not been established) for months or even years. They torture and kill some of the hostages. They ruin other people’s lives for their own purposes. Does anyone have that right?
At what point does one group of people have the right to take by force things from someone else? if you are hungry, is it OK to kill for a loaf of bread if someone won’t give it to you? is it justifiable to hold people hostage until you get fed.
On top of this, keep in mind some of these groups are smart enough to hire PR people to present their “case” for being “poor starving fishermen” to the world. Track where the ransom goes. There’s been a hell of a lot of ransoms paid. And the coastal villages are still poorer than dirt.
Satellite imagery shows some pretty sophisticated docking complexes now for handling those ships. Astonishingly well organized for “poor starving fishermen” in fact. It’s a business, just like drug smuggling. The smart groups get rich and put yup a nice front to fool people.
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I suspect that there are few people standing up for the Somali pirates. If they leave to plunder and never return, it is unlikely that any investigations are launched.
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You don’t. In international waters they’re subject to the country they’re registered. So if they fly an American flag for instance, they can carry weapons and shoot at anyone defensively they want.
Before they enter national waters, they usually offload their weapons onto various floating armories that exist.
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Traditionally pirates were hostes humani generis, enemies of humankind, and you could not only shoot at them but try them and hang them.
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Yes - damned empathy!
Piracy seems a suitable label for any accumulation through dispossession (think enclosure, colonisation etc). A 17th century folk poem puts it this way…
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
I’m not defending piracy here as much as defending nuance (I’ve been wanting to sail those waters my whole life yet cannot do so safely - even by flotilla).
There just seems to be a lot of ambiguity around the use of force and self defence that contributes to the conflicting nature of the above video.
The way I see it, we can choose to make an effort to ensure all our neighbours maintain the ability to supply their basic survival needs and avoid treading on their toes…or we can pillage, hoard for ourselves, and go down the barbed wire and guns path.
One of these paths leads to peace and prosperity and the other to war and waste.
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Annoys me a little that the security guard next to the cameraman is casually shooting over the head of his fellow security guard who is better positioned to engage the target. Amateur move. This is how fratricide happens.
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Become bootstraps merchants!
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So that (along with illegal fishing) destroyed the livelihood of the fishermen. Dumping waste. And on the ship’s superstructure are the words “protect the environment”. I see.
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