June 23, 2009
by Tristan McConnell, for the Pulitzer Center
Until pirates showed up on the world’s media radar few people would have been able to point to Somalia on a map. That all changed in April when a gang of pirates attempted to hijack a US-flagged ship with an American crew. They failed but took the ship’s captain hostage.
The days-long stand off ended with the deadly sniping of three pirates by US Navy SEALS.
Dozens of international warships now patrol the waterways between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean. Flying over the Gulf of Aden, cargo ships can be seen on the seas below steaming along in two-by-two
formation guarded by foreign navies against the pirates’ little wooden
skiffs.
While millions of dollars are thrown at the anti-piracy patrols,
Somaliland is doing its own thing — unsupported as usual. Berthed in
Berbera the Somaliland Coast Guard’s three little grey gunships patrol
500 miles of coastline. They’ve already caught three dozen pirates who
are now locked up in prisons in Berbera and Mandheera.
These successes are a source of pride in Somaliland – yet another
example of how different this self-declared republic is from Somalia,
a country that stands no chance whatever of patrolling its own waters.
But it also reveals the schizophrenia of Somaliland’s national pride
after 18-years of lonely struggle: fiercely independent yet desperate
for acceptance.
Everywhere people ask, part forlorn part indignant, why their country
is not recognized by the outside world and by the West (“We do
everything right. We even fight piracy!” declared the president in an
interview).
The unsatisfactory answer – the West is waiting for an African nation
to go first – is then followed with muttering about not needing the
outside world anyway, “We’ll do it ourselves, we don’t need anyone
else,” they say.
