there's such a thing as bad PR

some famous actress once said, "the only kind of bad publicity is no publicity" (i believe it was elizabeth taylor but i can't seem to find any reference to it so if you know the origin, please let me know).

i have always thought that was the case until this pirate thing came up. somalia has gotten some seriously bad publicity.

finally, the country has an enemy that we can all vilify - these pirates rob aid ships to give to local warlords. not only that, but they seem to be pretty bad at terrorizing. somehow they managed to have a hostage at gunpoint yet they all end up dead or captured.

well, like almost everything else in the world, things are not as cut and dry as the media would like to report. sure, many of the pirates seem to be out for profit, but many more are doing the job of a defunct government.

first of all, the media's portrayal of pirates from the hey day of piracy (around 1700) is just wrong. they were not simply blood thirsty heathens, but were often employed by governments themselves for protection (ron paul is pushing for this now - see below). for example, Sir Francis Drake was one of the first to circumnavigate the globe. To some, he's a great explorer and military men. But to many, he was just a pirate (he robbed many spanish ships).

today, "pirates" from somalia are robbing ships. some are simply criminals, but others, at least began as doing the job that a national navy or coast guard should have been doing. the government of somalia collapsed in 1991. the US and Clinton tried somewhat to bail them out but after the black hawk down incident, we have essentially allowed somalia to exist in crisis ever since.

this set up the situation where you have a coast line nearby a major shipping lane (the gulf of aden) with no policing. international ships began using this area to simply dump toxic waste on the way to or from their ports. that's right, ships began turning somalia into the world's oceanic trash dump.

further, international water rights exist for fishing. but more than $300 mm worth of catches were essentially being stolen without taxation by foreign fisherman.

meanwhile the people of somalia were starving and now they were also being poisoned. so in response, locals began going out to the ships to prevent them from dumping and/or demanding money to fish in the area. and that is largely where the "pirates" of somalia came from.

now, you have dogmatists like ron paul trying to convince the world that we should be instituting the policy of letting private citizens (read: pirates) police that area under the auspices of the united states of america. i'm sorry but the austrian school of economics isn't always the best way of handling things.

i feel badly for the people of somalia. clearly citizens policing waters - whether done by somali's or american's is a bad idea. and some pirates really are thugs. but this super mean pirate who was captured is probably only 16 years old. this is going to turn out to be a mess.

the only clear thing is that somalia needs a lot of help and the world (ie, the UN) must stabilize somalia for the benefit of the world.