<nettime> Piracy and commercial fishing

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

The NYT has a fascinating story about the current piracy drama off the 
coast of Somalia. What makes that one different is that the pirates 
happened, by chance it seems, upon a ship carrying weapons officially 
destined for Kenia, but according to the pirates, actually for Dafur. How 
does the NYT know this? Well, the pirates these days have official 
spokespeople, one Sugule Ali in this case, the only person on the ship who 
is "authorized to be quoted". 

Anyway, what is interesting is the origin of piracy in Somalia, as act of 
self-defense against robbery by commercial, presumably European, Chinese, 
and Japanese fishing fleets. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/world/africa/01pirates.html?hp

The piracy industry started about 10 to 15 years ago, Somali officials 
said, as a response to illegal fishing. Somaliaâ??s central government 
imploded in 1991, casting the country into chaos. With no patrols along the 
shoreline, Somaliaâ??s tuna-rich waters were soon plundered by commercial 
fishing fleets from around the world. Somali fishermen armed themselves and 
turned into vigilantes by confronting illegal fishing boats and demanding 
that they pay a tax. 
â??From there, they got greedy,â?? said Mohamed Osman Aden, a Somali diplomat 
in Kenya. â??They starting attacking everyone.â?? 





--- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------------- out now:
*|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.Scheidegger&Spiess2008
*|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 
*|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 




#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org