Confessions of a pro-pirate

By Erin Chapman | IDS

POSTED AT 09:00 PM ON Apr. 19, 2009

OK, I admit it. I am rooting for the Somali pirates.

First of all, how fisherman in the Horn of Africa became pirates overnight is problematic. The media has been quick to cry piracy, and can you blame them? In a faltering economy, pirate drama is the stuff of an editor’s dream.

A pirate headline immediately conjures up images of parrots and cannon battles, treachery and adventure. Next to some sort of government sex-scandal, struggling media outlets couldn’t ask for more.

But calling these fisherman pirates is too easy.

The labels that we give to people – be it pirate or savage or slut – always do some kind of work for us. By calling someone a pirate, we are able to write him off as a bad person and move on. We aren’t required to step back and think about what might have caused them to act the way that they are acting – after all, they are just pirates.

But their actions are worth re-examining.

After the fall of the Somali government in the early 1990s, the country’s rich waters were left completely unregulated, which left the resource-rich coastline open for pillaging – not from African pirates, but from Westerners.

According to Time, a 2006 United Nations>>>