Government and Media: Pirating the Truth about Seafarers in Somalia?

Status of Seized Vessels and Crews in Somalia and the Indian Ocean

Map of the Piracy Coasts of Somalia

(NAIROBI, Kenya ECOTERRA) - As of today, 05. July 2010, 12h00 UTC, at least 23 foreign vessels plus one barge still remain in the hands of Somali pirates, against the will of their owners, while at least 424 seafarers - including an elderly British yachting couple - plus the lorry drivers from Somaliland, have not been released.

See the Somali Marine Coastal Monitor from ECOTERRA Intl. for background info and also the map below, of the PIRACY COASTS OF SOMALIA.

LATEST:

GREEK TANKER SEA-JACKED AT STRATEGIC POSITION BY SOMALI  SHIFTA (ecoterra)
At 09h44 UTC (12h44 local time) on 4 July, the tanker's captain reported they were under small arms fire from a pirate attack in position 13°16N / 042°56E in the northern Bab Al Mandeb area in the southern Red Sea. After the initial notification of this attack, unsuccessful attempts were made to contact the Greek-owned vessel. The  capture then was confirmed early on 5 July at Latitude: 11°33N, Longitude: 045°28E in the Gulf of Aden. Position 11°50 / 45°00 is Point A of the internationally protected maritime shipping corridor through the Gulf of Aden, called the Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor (IRTC). The MT Motivator, with a dead-weight of 13,065 tonnes has a crew of 18 Filipino nationals on board, though the Philippine government had ruled out that Filipino crews could be allowed to sail these dangerous waters through the Gulf of Aden. The sea-jacked ship is a Marshall Islands flagged chemical products tanker loaded with lubrication-oil and therefore is posing the potential danger of an oil-spill. While foreign warships head towards a position to intercept the merchant vessel's path towards the Somali coast, it is not yet clear from where the pirate group hails.

SITUATION:

YOU ARE PERSISTENTLY BEING LIED TO WITH IMPUNITY:

The Lie: The navies and their mainstream media claim that they achieved a decline in piracy.
The Reality: Never before in history the cases of piracy have been around the Horn of Africa so numerous than in these times and after the specific multi-national naval operations were launched at the end of 2008; with a thereafter continuously expanding force and naval presence never seen before around the Horn of Africa - even not during WWII. But in the same time piracy has increased to an all-time high with increased violence and escalating armed encounters.

The Lie: The navies have to blow small, captured "piracy" skiffs out of the water, because they would endanger shipping.
The Reality: The EU NAVFOR even leaves  big vessels like the MV RIM  adrift, if as in this case it is convenient to NOT inspect the ship abandoned by the crew after they killed all their captors under the watch of the EU, though credible reports stated that the vessel had been an illegal weapons transporter for groups in Yemen.

The Lie: The navies act under valid UN Security Council Resolutions.
The Reality: The navies have according to international and Somali national law no right whatsoever to enter the 200nm territorial waters of Somalia. The UN Security Council Resolutions, to which repeatedly the navies refer, are explicitly stating that they would be only valid and applicable with the consent of the Somali Government, i.e. the Somali parliament, which never has been given, while a fictive letter of former Somali president Abdullahi Yusuf was never produced and a letter signed "on behalf of the Somali Government" by Mauretanian former UNSRSG Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah is legally nil and void.

The Lie: EU NAVFOR has an agreement with the Somali government concerning the Somali Waters and the fight against piracy.
The Reality: A paper signed without the knowledge of the Somali parliament in a clandestine meeting by the French Ambassadress to Kenya, Ms Elisabeth Barbier - for the EU - and by one Noor Hasan Hussein (aka Nuur Xasan Xuseen), who was at the time a Prime Minister in the cabinet of former Somali TFG President Abdullahi Yussuf, is legally nil and void and does not give the navies of the European states any permission in Somali waters. Nuur Cadde, as he is widely known, obviously received as reward for such favour and assumable high treason, and after he was chased out of his PM chair and cabinet, the post of Somali ambassador to Italy - the former colonial power, who still serves as ill advised lead-country for the European Union and which is the only statelet of the newly empowered European Union, which still channels directly and without EU consent money to Italy's friends and warlords within the changing governing alliances of the Somali quagmire.
The fake EU NAVFOR framework is misused by states like Norway, who are not even a member of the European Union, but dare to send commando units under EU mandate in mid-night raids into natural harbours of northern Somalia and commit outright murder by killing innocent fishermen from Somalia and Yemen.
In Addition: Nobody gave the EU NAVFOR operation ATALANTA or any European entity the right to monitor fishing in the Somali waters. Though it might have been welcomed if the navies would assist the Somali government and people in the fight against illegal foreign fishing fleets, given the fact that not a single of all those illegally fishing vessels, whose presence had been established, was repulsed by the navies, the "monitoring of fishing" is mere economic spying on the natural resources of Somalia and - as many Somalis claim - the scouting for and protection of illegal foreign fishing ventures.

The Lie: Somalia has no 200nm Somali Waters
The Reality: Since 1972 the international community had respected Somali Law No. 37, which similar to the legal provisions  in other recognized nation states like Benin, Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, El Salvador, Liberia and Peru, declared 200nm as the territorial waters with all the respective rights and duties.
Since 1989, when Somalia was one of the first 40 signatories who also endorsed the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), Somalia has - congruent to its territorial waters - an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of 200 nm, with all the rights and protection mechanisms the Common Law of the Sea provides to all coastal states. Somalia had declared and never given up these rights, but had to suffer from much illegal activity by foreign interests, which caused the African Union (AU / then the OAU) at the Pan-African Conference on Sustainable Integrated Coastal Management (PACSICOM, Maputo, 1998) to decry specifically the constant violation of the Somali rights in Somalia's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and H.E. Ambassador (Egypt) Ahmed Hagag as Assistant Secretary-General of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) declared that everybody must respect the 200 nm EEZ of Somalia.
Since 2009 Somalia has also a Continental Shelf Zone of 350 nm, based on international law and Somalia's claim documented and handed in by Somalia on 17 April 2009 to the UN and the International Seabed Authority before the deadline of 13 May 2009. The establishment of the outer limits of the continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles is the right of all coastal States under international law.

The Lie: There is no illegal fishing in Somali Waters.
The Reality: Illegal fishing continues, but it has like always seasonal peaks and licences still continue to be issued illegally to foreign vessels despite a moratorium by the TFG government since April 2009. The annual loss in the Somali waters is estimated at around 300mioUS$.
The problem of illegal and overfishing is not only a Somali one: The annual consequential costs due to over-fishing of the oceans have reached 50 Billion US-Dollar, as calculated by the WorldBank and FAO. While losses at Wall Street due to the recent credit crunch have so far been calculated to stand at only 1,5 Billionen Dollar, allowing financial institutions and bankers to be "rescued" by a 700 Billion Dollar rescue plan - using taxpayer's money -, NOTHING is done to rescue the oceans!

The Lie: The international community is helping Somalia and the Somalis
The Reality: Hardly any of the funds pledged with top-spin public relations campaigns through the mainstream-media have ever even been set-up to be released. This is not only a Somalia problem and these global lies have now even been criticized by the G20 summit. If some funds were released for Somalia they were for widely criminal WFP operations (now under UN investigations), weapons deliveries and training of fighters, who actually could train their trainers. Even EU NAVFOR escorts for deliveries by ship of only weapons, other military hardware or supplies solely to the AMISOM troops are listed by the navies as escorts of "humanitarian aid".  While the bandwagon NGOs are kept quiet with well-funded "studies" paid for by the intelligence groups, real help on the ground has declined to an all time low since the beginning of the civil war.
Somalia is earmarked to be kept at the lowest end of global misery, which is characterized by unnecessary death: Every hour throughout the world, over 1600 people, most of them children, die from hunger and poverty-related diseases and millions of others struggle to survive without life's basic necessities of clean water, food, shelter, education and health care, while the current global military budget is costing approximately US$160 million dollars every hour, with a minimum of around 15mioUS$ being spent by the naval armada every day around the Horn of Africa. While cynics proclaim that such would be necessary to slow the growth of human overpopulation, it has been proven over and over again that it is only a distribution problem and those who with military or economic powers maintain such inequality are guilty of the worst crimes against humanity.

ECOTERRA Intl. states: " What many people seem to not understand or for specific reasons refuse to understand is that more than half of the Somali dominion is based on the Somali seas and thus vital to the survival of the Somali people. Somalia has since 1972 as Territorial Waters (TW) and - overlaying the same area - since1989 as Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) an area of 825,052 square km of Somali Waters and an additional 55,895 square km as Somali continental shelf zone (CSZ), forming together the marine and maritime dominion of Somalia.
The sum of the total internal land area of Somalia with its 637,657 square km and together with the marine area provide for a total of 1,462,709 square km of recognized total Somali area, which with the additional CSZ is expanding to the present Somali sphere of 1,518,604 square km.
The sovereignty over the Somali sphere extends to the air space over the territorial sea as well as to its sea-bed and subsoil, which is now extended to 350nm off the coast.
All creation in the Somali Sphere of 1,518,604 square kilometres of earth - be it on the 637,657 sqkm of land (42%) or the 880,947 sqkm of the waters (58%) - has a right to life and must be respected.
These figures and this outline hopefully make it also clear to anybody what importance the marine waters have for the Somali people and the Somali nation and why many from the outside try to get their hands on this territory and its natural resources, thereby trying to push the indigenous Somali interests back and condemning the Somali people to abhorrent poverty and war unless they would give up at least parts of their inherited wealth.
While diversity provides stability, the strife for dominance by an outside aggressor within any given sphere leads ultimately to the annihilation of the aggressor."

a) Imposing strictest control on all vessels entering the Somali waters, starting from the 350nm continental shelf zone and especially on foreign fishing vessels and waste-dumping ships. Compulsory installation and monitoring of all IOTC authorized fishing vessels with Long Range Identification and Tracking (LRIT) as well as gear- and catch-control monitoring via satellite-transmitted NV-CCTV-real-time observation day and night.

b) Development of coastal regions along the two Ocean coasts.

c) Strengthening of local institutions in regional self-governance.

d) All vessels, including naval ships must stay outside the EEZ, i.e the 200nm zone of the Somali Indian Ocean coast and outside the 50%-part of the waters of the Gulf of Aden, which belongs to Somalia, unless a permitted and secured approach to the three legitimate harbours Berbera, Bosasso and Mogadishu has been received by legitimate authorities of the Somali government. In the Somali half of the Gulf of Aden as well as in the 350nm continental shelf zone of the Indian Ocean coast of Somalia foreign research vessels have to abstain from any activity.

e) An independent tribunal, authorized by the UN must carry on an independent assessment on the alleged duping of toxic and radioactive waste in Somalia, particularly in the area of the port of Eel Ma’aan, the Garowe-Bosasso road and Bosasso harbour; while the Italian Government must create a strong coordination among all the investigative Authorities (Procura della Repubblica) which have been, and still are, working on the issue of toxic and radioactive waste trade, to identify and neutralize the network of people and enterprises managing illegal waste trade and dumping. The EU must finally and fully implement its own toxic waste prevention measures and implement measures to curb illegal fishing as well as trade in illegally caught marine products.

f) Independent monitoring of the Somali waters  with respect to illegal fishing and waste dumping must finally be funded and implemented.

g) Foreign Navies must contribute to peace-making and not be an obstacle to it by siding in or triggering further warfare on the waters around the Horn of Africa or commit crimes or injustices themselves.