This is an interview with a Somali Pirate before the recent incident with Capt. Phillips!

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News /Somali-Pirate-Yassin-Dheere-Says-He-Was-Driven -To-Crime-By-Anarchy-In-Somalia/Article/200904215260239?lpos=World_News_First_World_News_Feature_Teaser _Region_0&lid=ARTICLE_15260239_Somali_Pirate_Yassin _Dheere_Says_He_Was_Driven_To_Crime_By_Anarchy_In_Somalia

Thank you Fanta. As I said before, you push someone into a corner and you can expect trouble.

It doesn't make it right, but it is a monster created by the greed and inconcern of "peaceful, developed" nations that will now seek revenge or sanctions on the whole of the population.... and most will probably allow it for lack of "press" on the real issues.

UN: Naval escorts are getting food aid to Somalia
AP


By ELIANE ENGELER, Associated Press Writer Eliane Engeler, Associated Press Writer – Wed Apr 15, 5:22 pm ET

GENEVA – The United Nations warned Wednesday that piracy off Somalia's coast could deprive the country's poorest of much-needed food aid.

The World Food Program has managed to deliver a steady flow of relief over the last 18 months, thanks largely to its use of naval escorts for supply boats approaching the Somali capital of Mogadishu, the northeast port of Berbera and Bosaso in Somalia's Puntland.

But before those shipments are turned over to the U.N. aid agency, they are often unescorted and vulnerable to attack.

The recent surge in attacks in the Indian Ocean — including two in a week on U.S. aid ships — has raised questions about whether more escorts are needed.

Both American ships were unescorted as they headed for Mombasa, Kenya, to hand their supplies over to WFP. The Liberty Sun took some damage during its attack Wednesday, but managed to escape and reach the Kenyan port with its crew unharmed.

The incident followed the liberation Monday of the captain of another U.S. ship carrying food aid, the Maersk Alabama, who had offered himself as a hostage to save his 19-man crew from the pirates. The Maersk Alabama had been bringing food aid as a donation for WFP, and was not contracted by the agency.

"The ship escort system has worked quite well," said Emilia Casella of WFP, which has been using naval escorts since November 2007. "When we've had escorts, we have had not any incidents of piracy on WFP-contracted ships."

WFP shipped 260,000 tons of food to millions of Somalis suffering from drought and violence last year, Casella said.

But the agency is worried about a cargo ship hijacked Tuesday while heading to Mumbai, India, to pick up 7,327 tons of WFP food for Somalia. The Lebanese-owned MV Sea Horse was not under WFP contract, but would have flown under the agency's flag once the food was loaded, Casella said.

"We're very concerned that people in Somalia would go hungry unless the Sea Horse is released," she said.

WFP is feeding 3.5 million Somalis this year, or about half of the country's inhabitants. This requires shipping 43,000 tons of food every month — some 90 percent of which is sent by sea, Casella said. Flying in food aid is too expensive, and roads in the lawless country are plagued by bandits.

However, providing naval escorts for all boats and merchant ships in the vast Indian Ocean area would be hugely expensive.

Somali pirates have become bold in launching attacks from speedboats far from their homeland, and the seajackings have brought in millions of dollars in ransom. This year, Somali pirates have attacked 79 ships and hijacked 19.

Six ships with WFP food were hijacked over three years before 2007, when France, Denmark and the Netherlands stepped in to offer naval assistance. The system was interrupted in June, when a Dutch warship left the area, leading to a six-week suspension of WFP food shipments to Somalia. Canada took over escorting the food aid in August, followed by the European Union.

Some aid organizations have been less affected by the surge in piracy, due to logistical differences.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has major aid operations in Somalia, but buys food and other items from local traders, who arrange the shipments themselves, spokesman Marcal Izard said. Other shipments, such as medical gear and equipment for water installation, are brought into the country by air, he said.

But the number of agencies willing to work in Somalia has been curbed by other plagues, such as abductions and killings.

CARE International pulled out of central and south Somalia in October after receiving public threats by some local militia groups. The militia accused CARE and another aid agency, the International Medical Corps, of committing "crimes against Islam and the jihad" and warned them to leave areas controlled by Islamic forces.

The country has been without an effective government since 1991, when warlords overthrew a dictatorship and then turned on one another.

I posted this once but clearly it needs re-posting


The Independent April 13, 2009 by Johann Hari

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.

Read this interview enderra.

Straight from the horses, uh pirates mouth!

Somali pirates hold many hostages for months
AP


By PAUL ALEXANDER and TERESA CEROJANO, Associated Press Writers Paul Alexander And Teresa Cerojano, Associated Press Writers – 2 hrs 52 mins ago

MANILA, Philippines – Ruel de Guzman seemed destined for a life at sea.

Several relatives have served in the U.S. Navy, and growing up in the Philippines, he envied the nice houses neighbors were able to buy on a seafarer's salary, much more than he could make on land.

For 20 years, the sea was good as de Guzman married, then started a family. He had risen to second mate on the MT Stolt Strength, a chemical tanker, sending home nearly $2,000 a month to support his wife Vilma, their four children and his 81-year-old mother.

"In the province, people flaunt their wealth, and so he wanted a nice house, too. His father was a tailor and his mother was a teacher. He was the first to finish school," Vilma de Guzman said. "He became a seaman to help his family."

Then on Nov. 10, Somali pirates swarmed aboard as the tanker sailed through the Gulf of Aden while hauling a cargo of phosphoric acid destined for Japan. Since then, the 46-year-old de Guzman and 22 other Filipino crew members have languished for months with scant rations, little water and constant threats as negotiations for their release drag on.

For them, a military rescue like the one that freed American Capt. Richard Phillips is unlikely because the Stolt Strength is anchored in a pirate stronghold. Their only hope is that a ransom will eventually be paid.

While sailors from richer countries get freed relatively quickly in exchange for multimillion-dollar ransoms, those from poorer countries like the Philippines, Bangladesh and Indonesia often wait for months, stuck in the middle because the companies they work for can't afford to make a big payoff.

Almost half of the nearly 300 seamen currently held by Somali pirates are Filipinos — a Greek-owned ship was snatched Tuesday with 22 Filipinos on board, starting a fresh ordeal for a new group of families.

Vilma de Guzman was at the shipping company with other hostages' wives when her husband called last Friday for only the second time since the pirate takeover and talked with their three daughters, ages 15, 10 and 7, and their 9-year-old son.

"He told them, `Take care of mommy, take care of your siblings, love each other,'" Vilma de Guzman told The Associated Press. "He was saying goodbye to his kids just in case he does not come out of this ordeal alive."

"I know when you are a seaman, it's really a high risk. But to say that you'd be taken hostage by pirates, we never imagined that would happen to him. We continue to receive his salary. He gets a big salary, but what will we do ... if we lose my husband?"

In a sign that the on-again, off-again negotiations between the pirates and the Stolt Strength's owner, Sagana Shipping Inc., might be picking up again, de Guzman called again last Saturday, trying to track down the phone number of the Philippine company's general manager.

"He said the pirates asked them to call to put pressure on the company to pay ransom," Vilma de Guzman said, adding that her efforts to get more details were met with a chilling reply: "Don't ask too many questions because we can be heard on the speaker.'"

Relatives of the hostages say that during the five months their loved ones have been held, the pirates have lowered their ransom demand from $5 million to $2.2 million. But there's no sign any payoff will come, despite the pirates' threat to haul the tanker further out to sea and use it as a mother ship to seize other foreign vessels.

Relatives blame Sagana Shipping, saying they have been misled about efforts to free the captives, and their complaints have spurred a Philippine government inquiry into the handling of the case, according to a report last month on the Web site of the maritime industry journal, Lloyd's List.

Capt. Dexter Custodio, the spokesman for Sagana Shipping, denied suggestions the company hasn't been doing enough to free the hostages, saying it has tried to negotiate with the pirates but that has proven difficult.

"They don't want to talk to us. They would just slam the phone...The main thought is it's a business and discussions will go to that — how much ransom do they want?" Custodio said.

A spokesman for the ship's London-based charter company, Stolt-Nielsen, said arguments between different factions of pirates holding the vessel has hampered efforts to free it. "These disputes have made communication with those holding the ship and crew more difficult," spokesman Martin Baxendale said Wednesday.

And while the manpower companies that contract the seamen have to pay double-pay for hazardous duty in pirate zones and carry insurance for payouts to their families in case of injury or death, it's unclear whether that is enough for a multimillion-dollar ransom, said Nelson Ramirez, president of the United Filipino Seafarers union.

As the months drag on, the crew has been kept confined on the ship's bridge with little to eat or drink and wearing only the clothes they were seized in, according to relatives.

Anything of value — including clothing, her husband's wedding ring and all the money he had saved to send home — were grabbed by the pirates, Vilma de Guzman said.

"They take a bath but can't change their clothes," she said. "He said they eat very little. My husband holds the medicines and takes care of the other crew because he has some medical training. He said, `Many of us are getting sick.'"

Among the ailing is 36-year-old Rodell Boretta who was shot in the leg by a stray bullet during an argument between two of the pirates, according to his wife, Catherine, who said she feared the wound was now infected.

She and other relatives described mock executions and other psychological abuse when ransom negotiations break down.

"When the pirates and the office have a disagreement during negotiations, the hostages are asked to line up and the pirates scare them by firing their guns near their heads," Catherine Boretta said.

The wife of the ship's 62-year-old captain, Abelardo Pacheco, said that during the brief phone conversations she has been allowed with her husband, she hears pirate voices in the background, dictating what to say.

"The crew has been there for a long time now and are mentally tortured," Asuncion Pacheco said.

For the wife of Carlo Deseo, the ship's 31-year-old third mate and a father of 4-year-old and 5-year-old daughters, the hardest part has been the distress she hears in her husband's voice.

"We talked only twice, on Nov. 26 and last Friday," Doris Deseo said.

On Friday, "Carlo was sobbing. He asked me not to cry and wanted me to be strong. He told me that their homecoming is in the hands of their office," she said.

"The office people told us that all the hostages' accounts could be scripted and could be part of a psych war. I asked them: 'Is the crying part of the script? I know my husband, and he is not an actor.'"

___

Associated Press writers Jim Gomez and Oliver Teves in Manila and David Stringer in London contributed to this report.

Put "merc's" on the freighters & let them handle it.
Sink their boats, a little blood in the water.
Let nature take it's course.

If it comes up, here's a world view of just Nuclear, munitions and reactor dump spots.
This isn't including toxic waste or other chemicals.

What did you do to the right margin, Willing?

What's a merc?

I didn't do it. It was the other guy!
It's a Ford car.
Naw, It's a Mercenary Soldier, privately paid.

Eh, let the Europeans and the UN deal with the Somali pirates. The US is already busy being the world police in other places.

Rather than having the US government spend money to protect those ships, we should just let them buy their own defensive military equipment, or rely upon the support of other Navies.

A Mercury.

I am sure we walked away with an entirely different take in what that interview was about.

To me it was about people driven to extreme measures because others were exploiting their means of survival. To me it was about how the UN, needs to step in and become the Coastguard for this impoverished country. To me is was about how easy it is for people thousands of miles away that live in one of the wealthiest contries on earth, who also condone a get it anyway you can mentality to pass judgment on people that are following that example.

I don't think what the pirates are doing is right, but I also know that slaughtering them and other Somalis is not going to solve the original CAUSE of this terrible EFFECT.