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The Somali “pirates” have killed zero sailors. Somali groups like the Central Regional Coast Guard patrol coastal waters and charge a “ransom” on foreign shipping for using the coastal waters of the poor nation. 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.
