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The Hari article gives a quick context of piracy through the Rediker book Villains Of All Nations, portraying the toil of a legitimate merchant marine or navy sailor as grueling, with the sailors often being cheated of wages after years of work under a totalitarian captain. Through the 'golden age' of piracy 1650-1730, pirates mostly weren't the cut-throat bloodthirsty savages that the British propaganda machine tried to portray them as. Most of them shared the loot evenly, elected their captains, and lived side-by-side with former black slaves. So is another propaganda job being done on the Somali pirates? While some are just thugs and gangsters, and surely taking hostages is deplorable, many have taken to patrolling the seas because of the comparative disadvantage that lack of a government has put to them. Being a relatively lawless country with little means of defending their own coastal waters through a navy, Western countries are dumping toxic waste off their coasts and fishing boats from a multitude of nations are pulling millions of dollars of fish from their waters. Some pirates are just trying to stop this kind of egregious pillaging.
The Somali Press article gives a more in-depth view of poaching and fishing on the seas, how the poached fish are 'laundered' by having the fishing boats unload their catches onto larger transport boats (containing fish taken from legal areas too) all while at sea, thus the poachers never have to enter a port and report where they got their catch from. The poaching from sub-Saharan Africa is the worst, and it started in Somalia shortly after the fall of the last government in 1991-2 and the collapse of the official coast guard. It's estimated that poachers steal from $300-450m of fish annually, taking vastly more than the EU's monetary aid to Somalia. The article names the specifics of which countries have registered and received poached fish, and how a syndicate of Somali warlords and business interests set up sham companies to issue sham 'licenses' for fishing. If you seek proof, this article is rife with it.
The last article gives more history of the region. In the name of the War on Terror, the US backed an Ethiopian invasion of the country in late 2006, after the Islamic Courts Union, a government that was trying to return peace, order and prosperity to Somalia, was beginning to make positive strides there. The invasion destroyed much of the ICU's progress yet is a humanitarian disaster and governance quagmire, and Ethiopia is pulling out. Somalia lies in ruins, and nearly 700 commercial fishing trawlers remain on their coastlines, stealing its fish and its population's livelihoods.
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