On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing
• Monday, April 20, 2009 - Who are the real 'pirates' in Africa?
by Matt Murray
Recent news coverage has been dominated by sensationalized stories of
Somali pirates hijacking ships and taking hostages in order to secure
large ransoms.
Most recently, the Maersk Alabama, a U.S.-based container
ship, was hijacked and its captain, Richard Phillips, was taken
hostage. After a five-day standoff, Navy SEAL snipers shot and killed
three pirates while freeing the captian. The U.S. mass media has
portrayed the killings as a heroic military action. In fact, the
teenage Somali hijackers were out of fuel and ammunition, and had been
frantically pleading to give up Phillips to save their own lives. The
United States refused to negotiate.
Two days earlier, French navy commandos stormed a hijacked sailboat and killed two pirates while freeing four French hostages.
Prior to the killings by the U.S. and French navies, there had
been no fatalities in any of the hijackings. Somali pirates had never
harmed any captives, and in fact, many former hostages have said they
were treated extremely well.
Yet the Western media has relentlessly demonized Somalis
involved without making any attempt at understanding the larger
political context behind these actions. Rather, the Somalis have been
accused of looting and plundering and have been falsely accused of
being terrorists. They have been purposely associated with al-Qaeda to
justify their inclusion as targets in the criminal “Global War on
Terrorism.” Washington is attempting to use the situation to further
justify their bloody imperialist intervention in Somalia and the
region.
There is deep irony in the accusations of barbarity and
brutality being hurled at Somali pirates. Western capitalism was in
fact built on colonial plunder and the extraction of vast wealth from
the Americas, Africa and Asia.
Primitive accumulation: the roots of capitalism
In Karl Marx’s landmark work, “Capital,” he attacked the myth
that hard work, diligence and frugality enabled capitalists to amass
their vast sums of wealth. In fact, the capitalist mode of production
only began to develop after centuries of the “primitive accumulation of
wealth.” This “accumulation” primarily took the form of piracy, raids,
pillage, rape and massacres of whole peoples.
In “Capital,” Marx wrote: “The discovery of gold and silver in
America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the
aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the
East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial
hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of
capitalist production. … If money ‘comes into the world with a
congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head
to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”
Each European capitalist country competed savagely to exploit
the colonial world. In the early 17th century, Spain and England
struggled for control of the African slave trade to the Americas. An
estimated two million Africans died in the “Middle Passage,” as
European traders, planters and manufacturers raked in huge profits.
They would stop at nothing. In acquiring slaves, Dutch
colonizers rounded up entire populations and locked them in secret
dungeons before sending them off in slave ships. Over the course of
sixty years, the murderous Dutch occupation had reduced the population
in one Javan province by 75 percent. Such genocides helped launch Dutch
colonialism to its commercial supremacy by the mid 17th century.
In India between the years 1769 and 1770, the English East
India Company bought up all supplies of rice to artificially stimulate
demand. The result was a devastating famine that caused massive
suffering and death.
Meanwhile, back in England the ruling class carried out a
massive enslavement of child labor to convert the manufacturing
industry into factory. Starting as young as seven years old, children
were snatched from their homes, starved to the bone, and forced to work
grueling hours.
These are the barbaric roots of capitalism. The stage of
primitive accumulation has long since passed—and now capitalists use
the wage system to extract wealth—but the Western imperialists have
maintained a fundamentally pirate-like approach to Africa. From the
Congress of Berlin in 1884 to the present, imperialist rulers have
always viewed the vast human and natural resources of Africa as
“theirs.” Racist ideologies like the “white man’s burden” and “manifest
destiny” have been used by capitalists to justify genocide, the rape of
natural resources, and enslaving tens of millions of Africans. As noted
Pan-Africanist George Padmore stated in 1936, “The Black man certainly
has to pay dear for carrying the white man’s burden.”
A modern-day manifestation of these ideologies was articulated
by U.S. policymakers at a 2002 conference in Washington, D.C.,
entitled, “African Oil: A Priority for U. S. National Security and
African Development.” At the conference, Walter Kansteiner, former
assistant secretary of state for African affairs, declared: “It is
undeniable that this [oil] has become of national strategic interest to
us.”
The roots of Somali piracy
Although Africa has suffered through centuries of forced
underdevelopment, resource extraction, and slavery, it has not been
repaid a single dime in reparations. To the contrary, African nations
remain neo-colonies of Western financial institutions, who leverage
debt obligations to shape African economies and political systems.
This is the context, which the Western media ignores, needed
to understand the isolated incidences of piracy off the coast of
Somalia.
To the United States, Somalia—one of the poorest countries in
the world—is of key geo-political importance. It lies at a commercial
crossroads between the Middle East and Asia, and a large portion of the
world’s oil tankers pass along its coast.
For this reason, the Pentagon has repeatedly intervened to
repress any semblance of independence in the Somali government. In the
aftermath of a total governmental collapse in 1991, the United States
invaded in 1992 and Somalia was left with no central government.
In 2006, the Union of Islamic Courts, a coalition of Somali
judges and courts with overwhelming popular support, was able to
effectively unify the country for the first time since 1991. However,
the UIC did not bow down sufficiently to U.S. dictates, and was quickly
targeted for regime change.
In coordinated actions by the United States and Ethiopia in
late 2006 and early 2007, Somalia was bombarded, invaded and occupied.
The aim was to overthrow the UIC and replace it with the Transitional
Federal Government, a U.S. proxy regime lacking any popular support. As
a direct result of U.S.-Ethiopian aggression, over 400,000 Somalis were
displaced without access to food, clean water, shelter or medicine.
These are the facts on the ground that shape Somali life and
face young men and women just looking for a way to survive. While many
are undoubtedly drawn to the hijacking business for purely economic
reasons, there is a political dimension as well.
Today, Somalia is completely surrounded by U.S. forces and its
many proxies in the region. To the east, the U.S. Navy’s fifth fleet
patrols the country’s coastline. On its northern, western and southern
borders lie Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya, all of which are U.S. client
states.
Without any form of state structure to defend Somalia’s
territory, its national sovereignty has been repeatedly violated, time
and time again. Lacking forces to patrol its shoreline, Somalia’s
territorial waters were soon plundered by commercial fishing fleets
from around the world. The country’s coastline, the largest in the
African continent, became an easy target for commercial vessels
carrying nuclear waste to unload their toxic cargo without oversight.
Somalia is roughly 8,000 nautical miles distant from the United States.
In response to these flagrant violations of Somalia’s national
sovereignty, fishermen stepped in to fulfill the role of naval and
coast guard forces, arming themselves and protecting their territory by
confronting illegal vessels.
“We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” said Sugule Ali, a
spokesman for the so-called pirates. “We consider sea bandits those who
illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons
in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a
coast guard.” (NY Times Sept. 30, 2008)
The U.S. response to the Somali pirates is saturated with
racism, with the aim of building public support for a greater military
presence around the Horn of Africa. Progressive people need to be
clear: Western imperialists are the real pirates in Africa and the real
enemies of progress.
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