Interesting to see all the articles coming out about the Pirates off the coast of Somalia. The root causes of the conflict seem to be stemming from a few different areas:
1. Fishing fleets from Europe that were coming down and illegally fishing off the coast and depleting the fisheries and impacting the communities livelihoods. Those communities saw pirating (if that is a verb) as a tax on the fleets that were taking away their jobs.
2. Western European governments have been paying the Italian mob to dispose of nuclear waste. That waste was disposed off the coast of Somalia-what better place that has no government! People along some parts of the shore started to get sick and were able to connect the radiation poisoning to the ships and they decided they would exact revenge by holding the ships captive and demanding money that would be used to reimburse families.
3. Other communities realizing that their poverty could be alleviated with some risk...but that the risk brought great rewards to the surrounding communities and so they supported the efforts of the pirates as they came back and distributed the wealth much like modern day Robin Hoods.
I'm not condoning the practice, but the dark pictures that have been painted in the mainstream media fail to capture the whole story. But, I'll give the Washington Post some props for digging deeper to get "...the rest of the story."
Peace...
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