Finally some reportage that gave some commonsense analysis on this latest move in Somalia. Hizbul Islam are attacking pirate havens because they want to control the ports. Shabab has their ports, and Hizbul Islam wants their ports. It totally makes business sense, and strategic sense, if they want to capitalize on all the piracy related operations going on out there.
Now what is interesting to me is how the media sucked into the spin that Hizbul Islam was trying to produce about their latest move. That somehow what they were doing was righteous and piracy is an anti-islamic business. pffft. Whatever chews your khat. Bravo to Mr. Wadham for calling it like it is and getting the real story out.
One final point. We show sorrow and outrage over the tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico with the oil spill disaster there. So my question is what happens when pirates take a chemical tanker (oops, that just happened) on behalf of an extremist group like al Shabab or Hizbul Islam, and they sink that thing or crash it into some western port? Will we then realize that assigning armed escorts to each boat/floating weapon system out there is something that should be required? Why must we wait for a disaster like this to happen, before we do something about it? –Matt
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Somali Pirates vs. Islamists: A Dispute Over Business
By Nick Wadhams/Nairobi
Friday, May. 07, 2010
Even by the jaded standards of the failed state of Somalia, this week’s news was enough to raise eyebrows: one of the country’s two competing Islamist factions, Hizbul Islam, stormed into the coastal city of Harardhere and drove out the pirates who have run amok in the waters off the Horn of Africa, wreaking havoc on global shipping and confounding the world’s navies.
“Piracy has become too much. It’s an anti-Islamic business, and we won’t accept it,” Hizbul Islam spokesman Sheik Mohamed Ali Abdinasr told TIME. “We want to bring law and order to that country of Somalia, and we want to show the good name of Somalis.”
But what may at first glance appear to be a showdown between two trends that have coexisted in relative peace in Somalia until now — piracy and Islamic radicalism — is actually a cunning power play for resources.
First, a bit of background. One of the best ways to thrive as a Somali businessman is to import just about anything — cars, food or clothing, for example. Very little gets produced in Somalia. And in the absence of central government authority, which collapsed 19 years ago, the best way for any armed group to finance itself is to control one of Somalia’s ports.
The Western-backed Transitional Federal Government gets much of its very limited revenue from the Mogadishu port, one of the few patches of Somali real estate over which it maintains control. Hizbul Islam’s capture of the pirate lair at Harardhere may have been motivated primarily by the fact that it was driven out of the southern port of Kismayo late last year by the al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabab militia. Experts say Hizbul Islam attacked Harardhere because it needed a new port to control.
“They lost their foothold in Kismayo when they fell out with Shabab,” says Roger Middleton, a piracy expert at the London-based Chatham House think tank. “Moving to Harardhere seems to me like a move to find some territory that they can control and to have a port in order to try to make some money.”