Few people may have noticed, but last week seemed more or less world Somali piracy week in Holland. There were conferences, debates and seminars on the subject. While most of these gatherings centred on criminal and naval law, one of them caught the attention of Bridges with Africa: ‘Piracy in Somalia and its effects on the world economy.”
 

Alberta Opoku went to the Bel Air Hotel in The Hague where the Somali diaspora discussed the matter from a Somali point of view. “The whole world is talking about us, but not with us. So we thought it necessary to discuss the issue from our viewpoint with both Somali and European speakers,” says Guled Yusuf, coordinator of the Netherlands-Somali diaspora organisation Nedsom.
 

The piracy along Somalia’s coastline started as some sort of protest by Somali fishermen who were being put out of business as a result of the dumping of nuclear waste along the coastal area, and over-fishing by European and Asian mega-fishers. But nowadays the ‘protest’ has grown into organised crime involving Somalis and non-Somalis.
 

The international response, so far, has been everything but effective. “The international community is focussing on just one of the symptoms, piracy, and neglecting the actual problem,”says Dr Yusuf Mohamed Ismail Bari-Bari, Somalia’s ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations. “The problem in fact is poverty, lack of development and the absence of an effective government,” adds economics professor Abdiwali Mohamed Ali from the Niagara University in New York.
 

Listen below to the report by Bridges with Africa to find out how the Somalis would solve the problem of piracy: