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Jordan Zinovich and Hans Plomp:

Before warlords toppled Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, Somalia had a kind of stability recognized by the “community of nations.” As early as 1971, Somalia’s fishery was considered an increasingly promising economic resource. By 1982, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, the UK, and the USSR had negotiated fishing deals with the Somali government.(20) The so-called “piracy” we’re witnessing today seems to have started about 15 years ago in response to the international fleets that moved in to plunder the country’s rich fishery after the Barre regime collapsed.(21) [...]

But Somalia is without a functional government, and boats from many countries now freely ignore Somali territorial sovereignty. Foreign fishermen steal an estimated US$300 million worth of Somali tuna, shrimp, and lobster each year. And they reportedly use such internationally prohibited fishing gear as very small mesh-size nets and sophisticated underwater lighting systems.(23) Peter Lehr, of the University of St. Andrews, characterizes the recent incidents of “piracy” as “a resource swap,” where “Somalis collect up to US$100 million a year from ‘pirate ransoms’ off their coasts [while] the Europeans and Asians poach around US$300 million a year in fish from Somali waters.”(24) [...]

Illegal fishing wasn’t the only assault that forced these young men to sea: the illegal dumping of toxic and nuclear waste in their waters was another powerful motivator.

The UN’s Somalia envoy, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, claims that the UN has “reliable information” that European and Asian companies are dumping toxic and nuclear waste off the Somali coastline, but he refuses to disclose their names for legal reasons.(26) Undertaking its own research, in 2005 the European Green Party presented the world press and the European Parliament in Strasbourg with copies of contracts signed by two European companies — the Swiss firm, Achair Partners, and the Italian waste broker, Progresso — and representatives of the warlords then in power to accept 10 million tonnes of toxic waste in exchange for US$80 million.(27) Both Switzerland and Italy signed and ratified the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, which came into force in 1992, yet they’ve made no effort to prosecute either company.(27) Reports from Kenya have also implicated companies from France, Spain, Greece, and the UK in the dumping(29), though no paper trail has yet substantiated those claims.

Spokesmen for Puntland’s irregular “coast guards” claim that the dumping has gone on for almost 20 years(30), and the tsunami of December 2004 provided evidence to substantiate that claim. The waves that battered northern Somalia brought in tonnes of nuclear and toxic waste.(31) According to a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) assessment, there are hundreds of cases of respiratory infections, mouth ulcers and bleeding, abdominal hemorrhages, and unusual skin infections among people living along the Puntland and Somaliland coasts — symptoms consistent with radiation sickness.(32) And in the period since the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on their beaches, more than 300 local residents have died.(33) Nick Nuttall, of UNEP, notes that, in contravention of general principles of international law, “European companies [have] found it to be very cheap to get rid of the waste, [with dumping off the Somali coast] costing as little as US$2.50 a tonne, where waste disposal costs in Europe are something like US$1000 a tonne.”(34)