Albany Blog

Yesterday the Somali Prime Minister, Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmare spoke at length at Chatham House on two key issues facing his country – ‘terrorism’ and ‘piracy’. That one has attracted more media attention than the other has not been lost on the Prime Minister who suggested that;  

‘Captain Jack Sparrow has a great deal to answer for… even in the 21^st century piracy makes high drama on the high seas and is a news editor’s dream’.

That Somalia, plagued with insurgency, extremist groups, poverty and mass migration is better known for its modern day pirates is damning, but is the Somali Government now using this fact to its advantage?

Whilst acknowledging the recent capture of two British nationals, interestingly the Prime Minister also took the opportunity to re-appraise his audience on current perceptions of piracy. Namely, that piracy is widely regarded as ‘a criminal activity’ rather than ‘a desperate survival measure’ and in ‘many coastal communities the only job available and the only viable means of income’.

This is perhaps the first time we’ve heard exactly why there is piracy off the Somali coast. One argument is that many of these pirates were once fishermen – Somali fisherman who have witnessed the erosion of their livelihoods as a result of illegal fishing by foreigners in Somali waters. With so few fish to catch, they resorted to piracy to deter those who had ravaged their fertile fishing areas. The deterrent was to board and capture any foreign vessels in the area and ransom them for an alternative income.

The irony of the EU, NATO, Combined Maritime Forces, China, India, Japan, Malaysia and Russia having to police an area that has been devastated offshore by the self same international community is nothing short of astounding!

But what is more remarkable was the Prime Minister’s confidence to assert a different narrative, to enter the informational space with reason and credibility, that both terrorism and piracy are interlinked, that fishing in its waters has caused undue hardship resulting in piracy. That the loss of livelihoods and associated chaos, discontent and poverty onshore and inland are fuelling the current insurgency, that the ransoms are indeed funding wider regional instability; that AQ  and Al Shabaab are creating a pool of support amongst the anarchy. At last the two have been connected, that one is dependent on the other and that potentially without the agreement from the international community to observe international fishing licences, the country will further disintegrate and decay.

The new narrative is that Somali people must solve these issues, according to the Prime Minister, they ‘can and must’, there cannot be a solution that ‘entail years of open ended UN resources and commitment’. Them taking responsibility is commendable, that they’ve communicated their narrative with confidence and alacrity is admirable; but painful for an international community purveying a narrative of state failure and years of dependency in its rebuilding, identified as a cause of the problem rather than a solution.

Paul Gibbins is a Senior Associate of Albany Associates