Unfortunately the Internet does not allow me to link to a pile of magazines at the bottom of my bookshelf. But there is an article about mysterious sinkings in Sci Am, Feb. 2010, which is the first one I came to in the pile.
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What! You mean not all magazines are entirely online and linkable! Well I never! 
I’ll have to look around online and see what I can find…
[ETA]
Al-Jazeera had an overview article:
Johann Hari in the independent:
And for more indepth analysis, it looks like the UNEP did some indepth studies:
http://web.unep.org/publications/
Okay. Maybe check out the links and I’ll check out yours?
Um… with what? Somalia is dirt poor and only recently held elections. How exactly is a failed state meant to get justice in a world where only the nation-state is recognized as having legitimacy to act?
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I have heard that, but I have not seen much evidence presented. It does not really make sense to me that the Italian mafia would take the trouble to travel through the Suez canal, or out the Med and around the Cape, in order to come close to the Somali coast to dump waste. It would seem more sensible to dump it in deep water.
But even so, the appropriate reaction to illegal dumping or poaching is to go after the people doing those things, not the people trying to provide you with aid or fuel.
"In a media report last year, Somali fisherman said they saw foreign vessels dropping containers onto the beach."
http://rense.com/general63/unwar.htm
Think about the logistics of that.
http://faadil.blogspot.com/2005/10/un-probe-team-finds-no-toxic-waste.html
Anything to blame the west for the problem.
If a foreign power is responsible the most likely culprit is actually China. They have agreements with some African nations to allow fishing in their economic areas–but appear to be taking something like 10x as much fish as they are reporting. The kleptocrats get their payoff, the people suffer.
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Sometimes, the west IS to blame. Sorry, that’s just reality. To imagine the former imperial powers and the US (and the Russians and Chinese at times) are utterly blameless in world issues is just missing reality.
That may well be the case. Do you think that means that the west doesn’t also take advantage of situations?[quote=“Loren_Pechtel, post:64, topic:99519”]
The kleptocrats get their payoff, the people suffer.
[/quote]
Just as true here as in China, actually.
Here is a Guardian article about the Chinese overfishing:
Yes. It’s a problem. That doesn’t mean it’s the ONLY one. Stop derailing.
Also, EU is also overfishing:
Same problem of taking shit from others, different century.
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When I was working with fisheries enforcement in the Indian Ocean, Sri Lankan boats seemed to be doing the bulk of the poaching.
We were contracted by local governments to transport the enforcement officials and their boats and gear to different isolated reefs and island groups. When poachers were sighted, we would drop off the enforcement boats, who would do the interceptions and inspections. Sometimes, they would seize all the fishing gear, on rare occasions, they would seize the boats as well. Most of my keychains have little clips taken from seized fishing gear.
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seemed. . .
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Somali Piracy is a sophisticated operation. They have made hundreds of millions of dollars, and patrol over a huge area.
They seem to be able to coordinate attacks on ships over 1000 miles from their base, and have the infrastructure to keep the ships and crews hidden for years while negotiating with shipping companies and Flag states.
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I say that because in the time I was involved, all of the fishing vessels that were found poaching and were subject to enforcement were Sri Lankan. I know that other countries do it, especially China. But I have no direct experience with that.
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Why do you think we should find your anecdotal adventures – during which you had a perspective that even you admit was limited – relevant?
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You are probably right. Having actually worked in and around Somalia, including actually being responsible for anti-piracy operations over the course of several years, hardly qualifies me to post to a blog forum about the subject.
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The questions of root causes and motivations are certainly interesting(and more or less necessary if you want to have a chance of a reasonably permanent solution to the problem); but isn’t it only fair for the crew at immediate risk of being boarded to treat the background as somewhat less relevant than the immediate risk of boarding?
How’s that working out for Somalia?
I’d say your experiences are only a small portion of what was happening in the country. It’s true that you have some direct first hand experience with the country. Fair enough. But you seem to be taking your experiences as the totality of events and as the primary reality. You’re ignoring your own biases and assuming that your POV is the primary narrative that is the most accurate one. If I were writing an oral history of events, there, your narrative would be included, but it would be part of a vast array of voices of the narrative, grounded in other documentation, and taking your own biases into account.
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It is also important for those of us responsible for that security to understand the methods and motivations of the pirate and terrorist organizations well enough that we can use predictive methods of defense.
I’d guess that means including motivations that might include people being concerned with exploitation of the unstable situation both by groups like Al-Shabbab and nation-states, right? And the serious lack of good choices by people in Somalia for their health and well-being? And overreach by people coming in with good intentions?
This is my point more than anything else… that the “problem” of Somalia was never an internal problem of people unable to form what we think of as proper governments. It’s the more complex realities of geo-political considerations of nation-states and those acting within the framework of first the Imperial era, then the CW, and finally this weird-ass post CW world which we all find ourselves in.
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There’s a bit of prior art here. If I take Max_Blancke’s posts at face value, he makes a reasonable case. But if I happen to recall that his avatar used to be the Pegida flag - a German anti-Muslim political group - and that although he claims it’s the name of a relative, if I put Max Blancke into Google the first entry I get is:
Max Blancke, promovierter Mediziner, war Mitglied der SS (Mitgliedsnr. 162.897). Blancke war ab 1940 als Lagerarzt im KZ Dachau und ab 1941 im KZ Buchenwald tätig.
An unfortunate coincidence.
tl;dr He may be 100% truthful and I certainly cannot say he is not, but he has made decisions on how to promote himself in the past that cause me not to accept on sight any anecdotal accounts he produces.
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I agree with you on almost all of that, especially on the fact that expecting Somalis to conform to our expectations is pretty unrealistic. I went there first in 1993 with the UN intervention that failed spectacularly. Since then, I have been there a few times delivering food aid. I am not sure that any of it is helping at all.
For one thing, it was originally a resistance flag. My new background is also a resistance flag, but Dutch. As far as I know, that one has not been appropriated by anyone unsavory yet. If you were to do the search in Nederlands instead of English, you find this:
https://www.joodsmonument.nl/en/page/129074/max-blancke
I think you’re missing my major point here, though - in fact I know you are. That may be because it’s not getting where it needs to go and the entities making the deliveries aren’t trusted to deal fairly with the population. [ETA] also the problem isn’t necessarily they are some exotic creatures we can’t possibly understand, but that it’s a complex set of issues that working for the UN on food deliveries is only one point of view worth considering. The POV of the Somali people matters, too and proclaiming they are the only actors responsible for the state of affairs there completely ignore decades of interventions and the destruction that can cause, even when from the best of intentions.
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