Confessions of a pro-pirate

OK, I admit it. I am rooting for the Somali pirates.

First of all, how fisherman in the Horn of Africa became pirates overnight is problematic. The media has been quick to cry piracy, and can you blame them? In a faltering economy, pirate drama is the stuff of an editor’s dream.

A pirate headline immediately conjures up images of parrots and cannon battles, treachery and adventure. Next to some sort of government sex-scandal, struggling media outlets couldn’t ask for more.

But calling these fisherman pirates is too easy.

The labels that we give to people – be it pirate or savage or slut – always do some kind of work for us. By calling someone a pirate, we are able to write him off as a bad person and move on. We aren’t required to step back and think about what might have caused them to act the way that they are acting – after all, they are just pirates.

But their actions are worth re-examining.

After the fall of the Somali government in the early 1990s, the country’s rich waters were left completely unregulated, which left the resource-rich coastline open for pillaging – not from African pirates, but from Westerners.

According to Time, a 2006 United Nations report described how, since the fall of the Somali government, fishing vessels from all over the world have flocked to Somalia’s rich, unregulated coastline.

This influx of new fisherman has drained Somalia’s resources. The U.N. report estimates that around $300 million worth of seafood is being pillaged from the Somalian waters every year.

The native Somali fisherman could not compete with the technologically advanced foreign vessels, so their revenues decreased.

Without the fish supplies that they depend on and sans any sort of functioning government, the native fisherman of Somalia sought to defend their dying industry.
And then we in the West, whose insatiable fishing industries drove them to this, dubbed them pirates.

But it makes you wonder – who is really the greedy scallywag in all of this?

It seems this is the way it has always been with pirates. As Johann Hari’s article “You are being lied to about pirates” describes, pirates were in fact one of the earliest groups of people to include blacks in their ranks and to make decisions democratically.

They were shiphands who were repressed and mistreated by the harsh British Navy of the 17th and 18th centuries who sought to create a new way of sailing the high seas.

But the newspapers and the British propaganda machine wrote them off as mere outlaws, and they were transformed into pirates.

Moreover, regardless of what pirate has come to mean, the idea of piracy still holds some romantic sway over me. In a constantly connected, highly institutionalized society, the idea of a group of people, pirate or not, defending their livelihood to the point of gunfire is exciting.

They are sticking it to the proverbial man in a way that most of us only dream of.

So in the name of self-defense and independence, I’m rooting for the Somalian fishermen/pirates.