Post by Sunday at midnight
1. Mark Whitaker
2. Developed World Were the Pirates off Somalia: Somali 'pirates' started as an unofficial coast guard to keep off developed world toxic waste dumping
3. The Background that the Major Media Failed to Reveal: Somalia's 'conflict trap' went so far as to completely remove its government. And that lack of government meant lack of a coast guard. And that lack of a coast guard meant predatory shippers dumping toxic waste on Africans and predatory fishermen stealing Somali fish protein from starving Africans. And that meant Somalians attempting to defend themselves on the high seas, and then through this learning how to seize ships. The story makes me far more sympathetic to Somali pirates when you understand this is what is happening.
And the U.N. is a failure because it is protecting the powerful countries--organizing developed world depredation as well further on Somalis and covering up the crimes of the developed world that make the Somalis a double victim.
"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."
"At the ICGS Anti-Piracy meeting in Cairo on May 30 2009, Egypt and Italy were two of the loudest countries calling for severe punishment of the Somali fishermen pirates. As the ICGS are meeting in Rome today (June 10, 2009), two Egyptian trawlers full of fish illegally caught in Somali waters and an Italian barge that had been towing two huge tanks suspected of containing toxic or nuclear waste are being held in the Somali coastal town of Las Khorey by the local community, who invited the international experts to come and investigate these cases. So far, the international community has not responded to the Las Khorey community’s invitation.
It should be pointed out that both the IUUs and waste dumping are happening in other African countries. Ivory Coast is a victim of major international toxic dumping.
It is said that acts of piracy are actually acts of desperation, and, as in the case of Somalia, what is one man’s pirate is another man’s Coast Guard."
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3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates
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in Top 25 Censored Stories for 2010
Sources:
Al Jazeera English, October 11, 2008
Title: “Toxic waste behind Somali piracy”
Author: Najad Abdullahi
Huffington Post, January 4, 2009
Title: “You are being lied to about pirates”
Author: Johann Hari
WardheerNews, January 8, 2009
Title: “The Two Piracies in Somalia: Why the World Ignores the Other”
Author: Mohamed Abshir Waldo
Student Researcher: Christine Wilson
Faculty Evaluator: Andre Bailey, EOP Advisor
Sonoma State University
The international community has come out in force to condemn and declare war on the Somali fishermen pirates, while discreetly protecting the illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fleets from around the world that have been poaching and dumping toxic waste in Somali waters since the fall of the Somali government eighteen years ago.
In 1991, when the government of Somalia collapsed, foreign interests seized the opportunity to begin looting the country’s food supply and using the country’s unguarded waters as a dumping ground for nuclear and other toxic waste.
According to the High Seas Task Force (HSTF), there were over 800 IUU fishing vessels in Somali waters at one time in 2005, taking advantage of Somalia’s inability to police and control its own waters and fishing grounds.
The IUUs poach an estimated $450 million in seafood from Somali waters annually.
In so doing, they steal an invaluable protein source from some of the world’s poorest people and ruin the livelihoods of legitimate fishermen.
Allegations of the dumping of toxic waste, as well as illegal fishing, have circulated since the early 1990s, but hard evidence emerged when the tsunami of 2004 hit the country. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) reported that the tsunami washed rusting containers of toxic waste onto the shores of Puntland, northern Somalia.
Nick Nuttall, a UNEP spokesman, told Al Jazeera that when the barrels were smashed open by the force of the waves, the containers exposed a “frightening activity” that had been going on for more than a decade. “Somalia has been used as a dumping ground for hazardous waste starting in the early 1990s, and continuing through the civil war there,” he said. “The waste is many different kinds. There is uranium radioactive waste. There is lead, and heavy metals like cadmium and mercury. There is also industrial waste, and there are hospital wastes, chemical wastes—you name it.”
Nuttall also said that since the containers came ashore, hundreds of residents have fallen ill, suffering from mouth and abdominal bleeding, skin infections and other ailments. “What is most alarming here is that nuclear waste is being dumped. Radioactive uranium waste that is potentially killing Somalis and completely destroying the ocean,” he said.
Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy for Somalia, says the practice helps fuel the eighteen-year-old civil war in Somalia, as companies pay Somali government ministers and/or militia leaders to dump their waste.
“There is no government control . . . and there are few people with high moral ground . . . yes, people in high positions are being paid off, but because of the fragility of the Transitional Federal Government, some of these companies now no longer ask the authorities—they simply dump their waste and leave.”
In 1992 the countries of the European Union and 168 other countries signed the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal. The convention prohibits waste trade between countries that have signed, as well as countries that have not signed the accord, unless a bilateral agreement had been negotiated. It also prohibits the shipping of hazardous waste to a war zone.
Surprisingly, the UN has disregarded its own findings, and has ignored Somali and international appeals to act on the continued ravaging of the Somali marine resources and dumping of toxic wastes. Violations have also been largely ignored by the region’s maritime authorities.
This is the context from which the men we are calling “pirates” have emerged.
Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somali 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.
One of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, explains that their motive is “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 waste, and carry weapons in our seas.”
Author Johann Hari notes that, while none of this makes hostage-taking justifiable, the “pirates” have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalia news site WardherNews conducted the best research we have on what ordinary Somalis are thinking. It found that 70 percent “strongly support the piracy as a form of national defense of the country’s territorial waters.”
Instead of taking action to protect the people and waters of Somalia from international transgressions, the UN has responded to the situation by passing aggressive resolutions that entitle and encourage transgressors to wage war on the Somali pirates.
A chorus of calls for tougher international action has resulted in multi-national and unilateral Naval stampede to invade and take control of the Somali waters.
The UN Security Council (a number of whose members may have ulterior motives to indirectly protect their illegal fishing fleets in the Somali Seas) passed Resolutions 1816 in June 2008, and 1838 in October 2008, which “call upon States interested in the security of maritime activities to take part actively in the fight against piracy on the high seas off the coast of Somalia, in particular by deploying naval vessels and military aircraft . . .”
Both NATO and the EU have issued orders to the same effect.
Russia, Japan, India, Malaysia, Egypt, and Yemen, along with an increasing number of countries have joined the fray.
For years, attempts made to address piracy in the world’s seas through UN resolutions have failed to pass, largely because member nations felt such resolutions would infringe on their sovereignty and security. Countries are unwilling to give up control and patrol of their own waters. UN Resolutions 1816 and 1838, to which a number of West African, Caribbean and South American nations objected, were accordingly tailored to apply to Somalia only. Somalia has no representation at the United Nations strong enough to demand amendments to protect its sovereignty, and Somali civil society objections to the Draft Resolutions—which makes no mention of illegal fishing or hazard waste dumping—were ignored.
Hari asks, “Do 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.”
Update by Mohamed Abshir Waldo
The crises of the multiple piracies in Somalia have not diminished since my previous article, “The Two Piracies in Somalia: Why the Word Ignores the Other,” was written in December 2008. All the illegal fishing piracy, the waste dumping piracy and the shipping piracy continue with new zeal. Somali fishermen, turned pirates in reaction to armed foreign marine poachers, have intensified their war against all kinds of ships in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.
On international response, foreign governments, international organizations and mainstream media have been united in demonizing Somalia and described its fishermen as evil men pillaging ships and terrorizing sailors (even though no sailors were harmed). This presentation is lopsided.
The media said relatively little on the other piracies of illegal fishing and waste dumping.
The allied navies of the world—fleets of over forty warships from over ten Asian, Arab, and African countries as well as from many NATO and EU member countries—stepped up their hunt for the Somali fishermen pirates, regardless of whether they are actually engaged in piracy or in normal fishing in the Somali waters. Various meetings of the International Contact Group for Somalia (ICGS) in New York, London, Cairo, and Rome continue to underline the demonization of the Somali fishermen and urge further punitive actions without a single mention of the violation of illegal fishing and toxic dumping by vessels from the countries of those sitting in the ICGS and UN forums in judgment of the piracy issue.
At the ICGS Anti-Piracy meeting in Cairo on May 30 2009, Egypt and Italy were two of the loudest countries calling for severe punishment of the Somali fishermen pirates. As the ICGS are meeting in Rome today (June 10, 2009), two Egyptian trawlers full of fish illegally caught in Somali waters and an Italian barge that had been towing two huge tanks suspected of containing toxic or nuclear waste are being held in the Somali coastal town of Las Khorey by the local community, who invited the international experts to come and investigate these cases. So far, the international community has not responded to the Las Khorey community’s invitation.
It should be pointed out that both the IUUs and waste dumping are happening in other African countries. Ivory Coast is a victim of major international toxic dumping.
It is said that acts of piracy are actually acts of desperation, and, as in the case of Somalia, what is one man’s pirate is another man’s Coast Guard.
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http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/
3-toxic-waste-behind-somali-pirates/
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Christoffer Grønlund
ReplyDeleteAfter Guinea Massacre, an Explanation From the Captain Who Is President
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This article is both shocking, mind-wrecking and awful, but it seems to be something we've already have read. Last week we heard about the traps of the BB and one of the traps Guinea is now situated in. Protesters are being killed as the 'incorruptible' president has trouble finding out how to send all the journalists to nightclubs on his tab! The very wrong thing about such a story as this is, that Hollywood has made movies about similar stories for decades now - earning millions of dollars... just a few of those millions would make a whole lot of difference in Africa. Combined with a non-hostile take-over I (and Collier) believe that there is still hope for these African nations...even though their presidents all seem to be out of their minds.
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CONAKRY, Guinea — At the military camp where he makes decisions — he does not care for government buildings — the captain who is president explained why he did not get to the political rally earlier this week that his soldiers turned into a bloodbath.
Moussa Dadis Camara, 45, this nation’s erratic new leader, said he could not find the keys to his pickup.
Three days after the massacre Monday in which as many as 157 people died protesting Captain Camara’s military rule, he rambled on to a gathering of reporters till nearly midnight as aides fidgeted under giant portraits of their leader. Then he offered to send the reporters to nightclubs.
“Whatever you want, at whatever time,” said Captain Camara, clad in the fatigues he never sheds. “On my tab, as chief of state.” For some reason he added, “I am incorruptible.”
This lush coastal nation of 10 million, rich in minerals and tropical fruits, and dark at night from lack of electricity, has known harsh dictators and army shooting sprees in its 51 years of independence. Neighbors to the north and to the south have experienced bloody civil wars; Guinea, the former French colony that angered Charles de Gaulle with its refusal of partnership, and locked up tight for decades under tyrant ideologues, was too brutalized to unravel.
But it has never known a week, or even a 10-month period, quite like the last one.
Captain Camara, an unknown junior officer, seized power last December, declared war on the drug lords who had held sway, interrogated corrupt flunkies of the previous regime on television and locked them up, and briefly transfixed fellow citizens with his 8 o’clock on-camera extemporizing. It felt, for a rare moment, like hope.
But as the government withered into Captain Camara’s small office at the sprawling Alpha Yaya Diallo military encampment, where aides wore fatigues and twirled AK-47s, and businessmen and officials could wait for days for an appointment, the citizens turned away.
On Monday, thousands demonstrated in the soccer stadium here in the capital against Captain Camara’s intimations of wanting to keep power — an ambition he denied when he first took over.
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Whole article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/03/world/africa/03guinea.html?ref=africa
1. Inyun Choi
ReplyDelete2. Rural India powering economic growth
3. I’ve been curious as to how the people who are in the group of bottom billions know about news from outside somewhere and react to new waves such as new technology.
In this article, the Indian, who live in rural areas, have recently got through cultural changes. They are pleasantly surprised at new things; white machines, mobile phones, etc. on this spot. The reporter said that even though the world was under the extreme downturn, while India’s scale of economy had grown step by step by adding new consumers. However, we can’t be sure if it is beneficial to them in the end because we’ve already seen lots of villages destroyed by economic penetration.
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Indian telecom executive Abhinav Trivedi has travelled to remote villages and dealt with armed retailers in regions known more for bandits than their markets.
"We sold phone connections in areas where life moves at a snail's pace," says Mr Trivedi.
But business has been brisk.
His phone company boosted its revenues because of a rise in sales in these farming villages.
Experts say while the world economy is reeling under recession, India's continuing economic growth has been fuelled by its farm economy - Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has projected growth of "six percent plus" for the financial year to March 2010.
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Boosting incomes
Analyst Gopal Naik says successive good monsoons and higher prices for agricultural output over the past few years have boosted rural purchasing power.
This, in turn, had helped kept the economy chugging along.
"It was a mix of both luck and some serious effort to invest in the social sector by the government that made it happen," says Mr Naik.
In the past four years there was an almost 15% rise in the Minimum Support Price (MSP), the price at which government purchases produce from farmers. This put more money into their hands.
The national jobs for work scheme has helped as it generated employment in the rural non-farm sector as well.
The Wall Street Journal recently said rural income in India will rise from around $220bn in 2004-2005 to US $ 425bn by 2010-2011.
But can the rural economy continue to thrive after a number of states have been hit by drought?
Analysts like Gopal Naik say despite the drought in certain areas, villagers living off irrigated farms would be enough to earn, spend and sustain growth.
Clearly, India's rural economy has never looked so rosy.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8254365.stm
1. Wonmi Nam
ReplyDelete2. French and British governments to allocate more money to the IMF to "help poor countries"?!
3. French and British governments announced that they would allocate more money to the IMF to help poor countries, but this is only funny considering it is only a scheme to keep their places in the IMF's top table. I also strongly hope for a reform of the IMF so that bottom billion countries and other developing countries have a more say in the IMF.
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Pledge for more IMF help for poor
By Steve Schifferes
From the IMF meeting, Istanbul
The French and British governments have announced a $4bn (£2.5bn) allocation to the International Monetary Fund to help poorer countries.
The money will go to the IMF's new loan facility to help countries which do not have enough money to pay for imports as a result of the economic crisis.
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Meanwhile, the British Chancellor, Alistair Darling, has vowed to fight to keep Britain's seat at the IMF's top table.
Speaking to the BBC ahead of the IMF's annual meeting in Istanbul, he made it clear that giving up Britain's executive directorship was not on the cards.
Developing countries are pressing the IMF to reform itself to reflect new economic realities, such as the rise of China and India.
But the UK argues that its voting rights in the IMF are commensurate with its economic size, and that Britain's seat reflects the fact that it is a major contributor to the IMF's coffers.
"There should be no taxation without representation," the chancellor said.
IMF reform
The IMF is urgently discussing ways to make itself more representative of the new world order where developing countries make up nearly half of the world economy, but only have about one-third of the votes in the IMF.
Such reform is needed to convince countries like China that the world economy is being run in their interest as well as that of the rich countries - and thus they should undertake necessary reforms that could boost global growth and create jobs in rich countries.
Last week the G20 said that rich countries' quota in the IMF should be cut by 5% by 2011, but the mechanism for doing this has still not been agreed.
Some countries, including the US, have also proposed cutting the number of executive seats on the IMF from 24 to 12 as a way of proportionately increasing the voice of developing countries in IMF deliberations.
Mr Darling says he supports the idea of changing the overall distribution of votes at the IMF, but wants a discussion in the round, without unfairly targeting the UK seat.
Eight countries have seats as of right at the IMF: The US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, China, Saudi Arabia and Russia.
The UK says if any of these seats are to go, Russia and Saudi Arabia have much smaller economies than the UK.
Tobin tax
Mr Darling also poured cold water on the idea of a new worldwide tax on banks to dampen down speculation.
A request for the IMF to look at the so-called Tobin tax on speculation was included in the G20 communique in Pittsburgh last week at the behest of the French and German governments.
And on Saturday IMF managing director Mr Kahn said the IMF was setting up a working party under deputy managing director John Lipsky to look at the options for raising money by taxing the banks globally.
One option might be a compulsory insurance tax, similar to the deposit insurance protection levy in the UK, which would require banks to pay a central authority some insurance against losses in the case of a future financial crisis.
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The main problem was in getting all countries to agree a common proposal, and Mr Darling pointed out that the US, which has a blocking majority in the IMF, was implacably opposed to such a plan.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8289250.stm