"War on Pirates": Deal with Mafia to poison Somalis with nuclear waste, starve them by stealing their fish, and call them pirates when the fight back

Many thanks to Br. James Ainsworth for letting me know about this article.

Johann Hari of The Huffington Post writes in a piece called "You Are Being Lied to About Pirates":

"Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates?

"As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains.

"They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as 'one of the great menace of our times' have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side....

"In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

"Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

"Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: 'Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it.' Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to 'dispose' of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: 'Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention.'"

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs.

"More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: 'If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters.'"

Oh, and by the way, where has saviour Obama been in all of this?

Where he's always been: on the side of Western imperialism.