Untold Stories about Somalia Pirates - European ships dump Nuclear Waste into Somalia Ocean
In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its 9 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 U.N. 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 cleanup, 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 $300 million 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 Coast Guard of Somalia - and it’s not hard to see why.
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Comments
Leave it to western media to twist a story around and say that pirates are attacking and looting ships. Somebody was dumping toxic and nuclear waste and steeling the fish from them, all they were doing is trying to protect their lives. I would have and still will do that today if I need to.
It’s believable, most all ships are still allowed to dump all sewage and garbage they want overboard, the ocean is our dump, and back in the day that’s where everything went.
Especially nuclear waste, humans were smart enough to know enough to dump it into somebody elses back yard as much as possible, and it is still a common practice.
I am utterly astounded. Now I am convinced that Satan rules the “great USSA.” I will pray for the people of Somalia & do all that I can to disseminate this & all the information you send me.
Yeah, Like I am SURE the millions of dollars taken as ransom by the Pirates is going to feed the starving and clean up the mess…
Riiiiight
No references so how can I believe this story?
Joseph Goebbels quote: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Hey Sask Resident-
Before you go throwing around insults better check out Wikipedia - plenty of references there.
And this excellent article too.
You Are Being Lied to About Pirates
Johann Hari
Columnist, London Independent
February 4, 2009
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 pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know “what he meant by keeping possession of the sea.” The pirate smiled, and responded: “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor.” Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper. To read more of his articles, click here. or here.
POSTSCRIPT: Some commenters seem bemused by the fact that both toxic dumping and the theft of fish are happening in the same place - wouldn’t this make the fish contaminated? In fact, Somalia’s coastline is vast, stretching to 3300km. Imagine how easy it would be - without any coastguard or army - to steal fish from Florida and dump nuclear waste on California, and you get the idea. These events are happening in different places - but with the same horrible effect: death for the locals, and stirred-up piracy. There’s no contradiction.
For published research, search Google, using site:un.org and somolia toxic waste. You’ll find several documents showing they commissioned a study in 1995 that was published in 1997 that confirmed the overfishing and toxic waste dumping.
More recently, here is a 2005 report from the UN Environmental Program: http://www.unep.org/tsunami/reports/TSUNAMI_SOMALIA_LAYOUT.pdf
It states:
Further, Somalia is one of the many Least Developed Countries that reportedly received countless shipments of illegal nuclear and toxic waste dumped along the coastline. Starting from the early 1980s and continuing into the civil war, the hazardous waste dumped along Somaliaas coast comprised uranium radioactive waste, lead, cadmium, mercury, industrial, hospital, chemical, leather treatment and other toxic waste. Most of the waste was simply dumped on the beaches in containers and disposable leaking barrels which ranged from small to big tanks without regard to the health of the local population and any environmentally devastating impacts.
This article reduced me to tears. I found it due to the regular op eds that Robert Koehler, syndicated columnist to the Chicago Tribune, sends me.
There’s little use in kidnapping ordinary sea farers and possibly killing them, but, given that the companies who send their employees through these waters know the political history of the area, together with the risks to their sailors, they ought to be tried under maritime laws for failing to take due care of their employees.
I am ashamed, as an EU citizen, that these unscrupulous companies, whoever they are, can get away with this. I hope their executives end up in prison……for murder.
This is the Washington Consensus…..the End of History….the perfect Free Market.. that is supposed to regulate itself: This is how the market will end up destroying society unless it is heavily regulated. Not that there is much of a society left in Somalia…..and who cares…..they don’t have oil. I care, you care, writers such as your correspondents care. Is it any wonder that these pirates are there?
Imagine if all those barrels were dumped off Italy, or Ireland, or Malta?
More of this please.
Who is Soma for?
Soma is for those suffering from muscular injuries or other musculoskeletal pain which requires relaxation and physiotherapy to heal but which is too painful to allow for physical activity or is chronic in its nature and debilitates your daily activity significantly.
Just think about this, those former warlords recruit fighters to become pirates doing the job robbing international ship and we have this so called human rights European countries dumping their waste into someone’s backyard for $2.50 a tonne while they have to pay $1000 a tonne back home. This story will never be released to the general public and it certainty will not appear on all country national television. This is a very sensitive issue, it involves all level within the gov itself, Italian play a big role in this. 30% waste companies are controller by Mafia, therefore we will not rule out that the European company are paying big money to Mafia to dump their waste for them. Its a lucrative business, Somalia government officials laughing all the way to the bank.
We have seen how cruelly that Eu countries that make them selves to advocate for humanity are now endangering the lives of all Somali people, so far we know all companies and countries involved that criminal action, thanks to good people and tv workers that discovered and now we have the evidenced need, also we will not any country that involved that actions to have any future relation with people politically or economically, even no embassy they will have in the country in which they dumped to eradicates its people and we will brought them in international criminal courts .
This story doesn’t make sense. How can you dump nuclear waste into a sea and then you go and capture the fish right where you dumped the NUCLEAR WASTE? If anyone really does that then you are utterly STUPID!!!
It’s sad how nobody tells the truth these days. The world is going downhill fast.
who cares about pirates when people are dumping nuclear waste in the water do they not think what will we drink?
go pirates!