Justifying Piracy?

My initial thought when it comes to piracy is that it is bad. They are clearly criminals who need to be punished. How could someone steal and hold others for ransom but not be considered a criminal? However, after looking more into the issue of piracy in Somalia it is clear that there is a lot of controversy over whether or not what they are doing is justified. Although piracy is considered a crime internationally, there are many reasons that the Somali people feel like the pirates are necessary. There are many ways to justify the piracy occurring there. The piracy has become part of their culture and there will be no fast solution to the problem.

The first issue is that there are boats committing crimes that affect the environment of Somalia. There are boats that fish in their waters and toxic waste is being dumped relatively close to their shores. Of course not every boat that passes is doing that, but tracing which boats are dumping waste is very hard. In Bueger’s article he writes that the poison and toxic waste dumping, “Is now directly linked to health and the physical survival of coastal populations.” This dumping can happen by any ships, including cargo ships. If Spain or France (the chief offenders according to the Bueger article) dumped toxic waste near the US shores, the US would be pissed.  The fishing boats can be taking fish that could instead be used for helping their very weak economy. This fish populations in that area are negatively affected by the toxic waste dumping which means there are already less fish for the fisherman of Somalia to catch. Having foreign ships take fish that are relatively close to their shore could easily affect their economy in a negative way.

It is typically said that fighting fire with fire gets you nowhere. Just because there are ships that commit crimes that affect their waters does not mean that they can turn to another crime like piracy. The problem is that they have very few options. Somalia has very little representation worldwide. As a country, it is not taken very seriously and other wealthier countries can easily take advantage of this. They don’t have a coast guard and have very little protection and order. If a boat were to dump toxic waste, who would reprimand the people responsible? What would stop people from coming to their waters to dump waste? The truth is, they have been ignored and used so it is possible to see why they turned to piracy. They feel as though they are protecting their waters from wealthy countries that do not care about their people.

The biggest issue is that this problem is basically impossible to solve. In the Shortland and Varese article, they explain that providing alternative employment will not work. After attempting to create coast guard positions, they noted “while pirates were more than happy to be paid and trained as coast guards, they reverted to piracy as soon as the returns to piracy outweighed the gains from coast-guarding.” It will be very hard to change the role of piracy in their culture. Even the people believe that the pirates are protecting them and their waters. The only way to begin stopping it will be to find ways to stop the protectors from enabling piracy. So although holding people hostage is an international crime, their piracy can be justified since they have no way of getting their point across. They are making their international presence known and it will take a lot of collaboration and care to begin ending the piracy in Somalia. There are much better ways for the situation to be handled, but until they feel as though other countries respect them, they won’t end this.