On Sat, 11 Apr 2009, Doug Henwood wrote:
> I think this is the guy we saw on the Maddow show the other week, who
> said that the Somali pirates are desperate people who used to be
> fishermen, but that commercial vessels have trawled their waters empty,
> so they turned to piracy to stay alive.
There were several good stories about that when they took that oil tanker There seems general agreement that they were fisherman and their livlihood was ruined by foreign trawlers.
The article that went the farthest was Johann Hari in the Independent:
He argues pirates have always been unfairly maligned, since back in the days of the British navy. He may bend the twig back too far, but it's a refreshing view.
Specifically in re the foriegn factory fish stealing, he says it's still going on; he says that foreign trawlers are stealing $300M annually from Somali waters, which, if true, would mean the fisherman-pirates are still today stealing less than is being stolen from them annually. He also says the coast has become a toxic dumping ground, which is very believable, but I haven't heard it elsewhere.
I wrote him an email trying to get a reference for the $300M figure but he or his assistants never wrote back.
Anyway, it's an interesting article.
Michael