April 12, 2009 "Huffington  Post" --- 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.

Pirates  have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" -  from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that  lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave.  Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the  gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book  Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence  to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the  docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden  Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked  off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine  Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the  end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your  wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They  mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of  working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains,  and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what  Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of  resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in  escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite  clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and  oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they  were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

The words of one pirate  from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into  this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina,  he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go  a-pirating to live." 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."

This is the context in which the men we are  calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian  fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and  trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer  Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone  interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop  illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea  bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in  our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William  Scott would understand those words.

No, this doesn't make hostage-taking  justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who  have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the  overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent  Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what  ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the  piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters."  During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's  founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because  they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is  this so different?

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on  their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to  eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes -  but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for  20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we  really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes -  before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.

The  story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived  and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the  Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea."  The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but  because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it  with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets  sail in today - but who is the robber?
POSTSCRIPT: Some commenters  seem bemused by the fact that both toxic dumping and the theft of fish are  happening in the same place - wouldn't this make the fish contaminated? In fact,  Somalia's coastline is vast, stretching to 3300km. Imagine how  easy it would be - without any coastguard or army - to steal fish from Florida  and dump nuclear waste on California, and you get the idea. These events are  happening in different places - but with the same horrible effect: death for the  locals, and stirred-up piracy. There's no contradiction.

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent  newspaper

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