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The National (VAE)
April 25, 2009
Tony Karon
There's nothing new about the United States making tragically misguided judgement calls in Somalia: think of the ill-fated attempt to arrest the Mogadishu warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid in 1993 that turned into the Blackhawk Down bloodbath and prompted a US withdrawal.
Then there was the decision to back an Ethiopian proxy invasion in late 2006 to topple the Islamic Courts Union that had taken control of Mogadishu. That the ICU had restored a modicum of stability and security to a city long plagued by fighting among rival warlords and had managed to tamp down on offshore piracy was less important than one faction of the movement giving shelter to a handful of wanted al Qa'eda men. And of course, once the Islamists were scattered, piracy became a multimillion dollar industry that plagued global shipping.
Which brings us to what may be the latest misguided judgement call: the arraignment in a Manhattan court of Abduwali Abdulkhadir Muse, a Somali teenager captured in the course of a US military operation to free a hostage captured from the US-flagged freighter Maersk Alabama. Most Somalis captured by western navies in the course of anti-piracy operations are handed over for trial in Kenya; even if Muse is guilty as charged, staging his trial in New York is likely to turn him into a hero or martyr in his own community. Somalis tend to take a dim view of the United States to begin with, and many of the pirates that raid shipping off its shores are not viewed by their own communities as criminals.
The Canada-based Somali rapper K'Naan has become a major sensation in the United States, and is seen as an exemplar of a generation that has rejected the warlord violence plaguing their country. Yet at the height of the Maersk Alabama drama, he went public with the admission that cousins of his were pirates, and tried to explain the context of Somali piracy: "A lot of people don't like me for saying this but I'm in support of the pirates," he said. "Massive western companies would come to Somalia and dump toxic nuclear waste containers on the shore because there was no government controlling the shorelines. So these pirates initially went into the ocean to make them pay for that sort of thing." The UN has confirmed that toxic waste has been dumped along the Somali coastline by ships probably originating in Europe, which has caused illness and some deaths. The collapse of the Somali state has meant there's no authority protecting the country's sovereign waters.
Others seeking to explain the piracy phenomenon note that many of the pirates out in their skiffs are former fishermen whose traditional livelihood has been destroyed by foreign fishing fleets taking an estimated $300 million a year worth of fish out of Somalia's unguarded waters.
It may be more than a little naive to accept the pirates' narrative, in which they're a vigilante "coastguard" protecting the national interest and engaging in Robin Hood-style "taxing" of a world economy that passes Somalia by. After all, the major beneficiaries from pirate operations are often kingpins who are some of the very same warlords that have been responsible for the chaos on shore.
Still, that doesn't change the fact that there are few legitimate career options open to those who join the pirate crews, and that there are thousands of young men in Somalia waiting to take Muse's place. And in their communities, their actions are not necessarily deemed illegitimate. Taking Muse to the United States for trial could, in fact, prompt his peers to take new hostages to demand his release, turning what had been an exclusively for-business piracy problem – ships and their crews captured and released unharmed when cash ransoms are paid – into a form of maritime terrorism, with increasingly violent cycles of retribution.
There is a consensus emerging in the international community that, as the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon put it, "piracy is not a waterborne disease" and the problem can be addressed only by restoring a legitimate government capable of imposing law and order on shore in Somalia. To that end, donors in Brussels promised more than $200 million to help the new transitional government of President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed to build new security forces.
The new president is a moderate Islamist who had, in fact, been a leader of the ICU government deposed in the US-backed invasion: the new government has been painstakingly cobbled together in internationally mediated talks aimed at making it as inclusive as possible in the hope of restoring stability. But the new government is opposed by its erstwhile allies in the more radical youth militia known as the Shabaab, some of whose leaders have ties with al Qa'eda although the movement is seen as largely nationalist and confined to activities inside Somalia: in an audiotape released last month, Osama bin Laden exhorted Somalis to overthrow the new government of Sharif Sheikh Ahmed.
If Muse's trial becomes a nationalist rallying point, or if Somali pirates respond to his captivity by taking hostages to demand his release – or otherwise escalate the confrontation – an opening could be created for the Shabaab to exploit popular nationalist sentiment and turn the business of piracy into a kind of coastal jihad.
Much is riding on the success of Mr Ahmed's government and the creation of a viable state in Somalia capable of protecting its coastal waters and offering the prospect of legitimate livelihoods for its citizens. After all, the deployment of more than 20 ships from the world's most powerful navies has scarcely managed even to contain the problem of piracy.
Putting pirates on trial may be part of the solution, but it will be effective only if the courts and laws are seen as legitimate by the communities from which the pirates set sail. It's far from clear that trials in New York and escalating confrontation on the high seas are going to make the job of restoring government in Somalia any easier. And if President Ahmed fails, the chances are that so does the antipiracy effort.
Tony Karon is a New York-based editor who blogs at Rootless Cosmopolitan: www.tonykaron.com
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