Two weeks ago I wrote on this page about the problems associated with the intensification of piracy off the coast of Somalia.

The hijack of an American ship, with the holding as hostage of its captain, led to the storming of the hijacked boat and killing of three pirates. An under-aged pirate was captured and flown to the USA for trial.

The American and other Western media outlets dramatised the killings of the pirates and the capture of the young Somalia boy. In response to the heightening of piracy, there has been a chorus of calls for tougher international action which has resulted in multinational and even unilateral naval action, which essentially have taken over control within Somalia's territorial and EEZ waters.

The UN Security Council has also passed Resolutions 1816 and 1813 which give license to any nation to have a piece of the Somali maritime cake. NATO and the EU issued orders to that effect as well as Japan, Russian, India, Malaysia, Egypt, and even Yemen. It seemed that whoever could afford to put a gunboat to sea to similarly join the going.

Resolutions 1816 and 1838 were objected to by a number of West African, Caribbean and South American nations, but were then tailored to specifically apply to Somalia. It is the country, after all, which has no government worth its name in place and able to strongly state its case at the United Nations. Even the objections by what ever existed as Somali civil society were ignored by the major powers that seemed intent upon protecting illegal fishing activities in the waters of Somalia.

But the pretext deployed was the need to protect the busy shipping trade routes of the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean from Somali pirates who threaten to disrupt these international water ways.

The collapse of the Somali state since the fall of the Siad Barre regime in 1991, has led to the massive illegal foreign fishing regime of poaching and destruction of Somali marine resources which has not been part of the international concern in the same why that the menace of piracy has been highlighted. Illegal, Unreported Unregulated (IUU) fishing fleets from Europe, Arabia and the Far East, have been active in Somalia waters over the past 18 years damaging economic and environmental life of the Somali people.

The situation today is that a combination of biased UN resolutions, big power orders and tendentious news reporting by the major international news outlets have raised the stakes internationally about Somali piracy, but they have failed to mention the need to project Somali mineral resources from IUU violation in the same waters. It is in fact appearing as if the anti-piracy campaigns have as object the effort to cover up and protect illegal fishing activities in Somali waters.

Somali sources are saying that with the international anti-piracy regime in place it has become dangerous and certainly difficult for Somali fishermen to prevent IUU for fear of being labeled as pirates, and therefore becoming liable to attacks by the foreign navies unlawfully controlling Somali waters.

Yet IUU fishing has become a serious problem globally, according to the High Seas Task Force, (HSTF), "IUU fishing is detrimental to the wider marine ecosystem because it flouts rules designed to protect the marine environment...In so doing, they steal an invaluable protein source from some of the world's poorest people and ruin the livelihood of some legitimate fishermen...".

This is contained in the HSTF reported titled "Closing the net: Stopping Illegal fishing on the High Seas". HSTF puts worldwide value of IUU catches at between four and nine billion dollars, with a large part of these illegal catches coming from sub-Saharan Africa, but particularly from Somalia.

The IUU's practice fish catch laundering, a practice by which vessels can remain at sea for months, refueling, re-supplying and rotating their crew. IUU fishing vessels do not need to enter ports, because they transfer their catches onto transport ships, according to the HSTF. Countries said to be used to launder Somali fish include Seychelles, Mauritius and the Maldives.

Before the collapse of the Siad barre regime in 1991, a survey by an international team estimated that 200,000 tonnes of fish could be caught per annum by both artisanal and industrial fishing in Somali water. However, with the state collapse in Somali and its unprotected seas, that has become the objective of the international fishing racket.

This is taking place against the backdrop of the EU closure of much of its fishing waters for 5 to 15 years for fish regeneration; as well as the fact that Asia has over fished its seas and finally the increased international demand for nutritious marine products, itself a product of the international fear about worldwide food shortage.

Somalia has therefore become a helpless victim of this massive international process of maritime rape! The collapse of the Said Barre regime in 1991 led to the disintegration of the Somali Navy and Police coast guard services.

There were severe droughts in Somalia in 1974 and 1986; tens of thousands of nomads whose livestock were wiped out, were re-settled in villages on the long, 3300 kilometers, Somali coast. They developed into large fishing communities whose livelihood depends on inshore fishing.

From the beginning of the Somali civil war, around early 1991, reports say that illegal trawlers began to trespass and fish in Somali waters, including the 12-mile inshore artisanal fishing waters. The poaching trawlers began to encroach on local fishing grounds, competing for the abundant rock lobster and high value pelagic fish, in the warm, up-swelling 60kms deep shelf along the tip of the Horn of Africa.

This was the origin of the conflict between local Somali fishermen and the IUUs. Local Somali fishermen have documented cases of foreign trawlers pouring boiling water on fishermen in canoes; their nets cut or destroyed; smaller boats crushed, killing all the occupants and other forms of abuses suffered, as they tried to protect their national maritime turf.