Cause and effect
Chris Milton
Pirates ruled Somalia’s waves last year, but a greater crime is still
being perpetrated by the multinational companies using the mainland as a
toxic dumping ground.
The pirates of Somalia became bandits of international notoriety
during 2008, hijacking ever more prolific targets, including arms ships,
oil tankers and cruise liners, and extracting huge ransoms from their
owners.
National governments and NGOs decried their actions as an affront to
international maritime law, but few examined the pirates’ claim that a
far greater crime continues in Somalia: the illegal dumping of toxic
waste.
For more than 10 years, environmental and human rights organisations
have called on the international community to act to stop this dumping,
but successive wars have ensured the crisis has only deepened. Now, as
Ethiopian troops withdraw from Somalia and the piracy becomes more
subdued, there is hope the issue can be properly investigated and
resolved.
In 1997, in the Italian magazine Famiqlia Cristiana, Greenpeace
published a landmark investigation into the dumping, which showed that
it started in the late 1980s, and exposed Swiss and Italian companies as
brokers for the transportation of hazardous waste from Europe to dumps
in Somalia. Subsequent research has also shown that the company employed
physically to ship the waste was wholly owned by the Somali government.
When Somalia slipped into civil war in 1992, the waste exporters had
to negotiate with local clan warlords, who demanded guns and ammunition
to allow the dumping to continue. Many of the ships, having brought
weapons or waste, then became trawlers, and left Somali waters with
holds full of tuna for onward sale.
An investigation into the murder of the Italian journalist Ilaria
Alpi in Somalia in 1994 quotes the warlord Bogor Musa as saying, “It is
evident those ships carried military equipment for different factions
involved in the civil war”, and it is widely believed that Alpi was
assassinated because she had incontrovertible evidence of the
guns-for-waste trade.
The Greenpeace report briefly made the news and was followed up by
the European Green Party tabling a question in the European Parliament
about “the dumping of toxic waste from German, French and Italian
nuclear power plants and hospitals” in Somalia.
It also prompted a large investigation in Italy, a former colonial
power in Somalia. This concluded that around 35 million tonnes of waste
had been exported to Somalia for only US$6.6 billion, leading the
environmental group Legambiente to assert Somalia’s inland waste dumps
are “among the largest in the world”.
The Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 served to reinvigorate interest in the
continued dumping of hazardous waste in Somalia. Rusting tanks of
unidentifiable ooze were washed up on to beaches; villagers began to die
of unexplained illnesses and coastal ecosystems collapsed.
In 2005, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) concluded its own
on-the-ground investigation in Somalia. Despite being stymied by local
political interests and finding no tangible proof, it concluded that the
“dumping of toxic and harmful waste is rampant in the sea, on the shores
and in the hinterland”.
A year later the Somali multi-clan NGO Daryeel Bulsho Guud conducted
its own survey. With greater local co-operation, it was able to identify
15 containers of “confirmed nuclear and chemical wastes” in eight
coastal areas.
At the same time, the UN and World Bank put together a joint Needs
Assessment (JNA) to plan for Somalia’s return to functioning nationhood.
Updated in 2008, it recommends US$42.1 million be set aside for
environmental activities, including ensuring all “toxic waste [is] found
and removed”. It doesn’t address the cost of human suffering, however,
and ignores the fact that the dumping of toxic waste in Somalia
continues to this day.
Field research in Somalia by Zainab Hassan, a former fellow at the
University of Minnesota and Environmental Justice Advocate, has brought
to light a whole range of chronic and acute illnesses suffered by
Somalis.
These include severe birth defects, such as the absence of limbs, and
widespread cancers. One local doctor said he had treated more cases of
cancer in one year than he had in his entire professional career before
the tsunami.
“Firms are illegally dumping hazardous and nuclear waste,” says
Zainab Hassan. “The international community should do something in terms
of cleaning up, and those responsible should be brought to justice.”
EcoTerra, an NGO with strong connections within Somalia, agrees,
though it refuses to name the companies involved or their countries of
origin. Possibly with one eye upon the assassination of Ilaria Alpi, it
describes the situation as “deadly”.
The UN’s Special Representative for the region, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah,
is similarly sensitive. He confirms that dumping continues on the Somali
coast, likening the situation to the shipping of blood diamonds from
Liberia and Sierra Leone. His office refuses to name which NGOs he’s
asked to investigate the issue, however, presumably for their own
protection, or the companies suspected of being involved.
Bringing those responsible for the dumping to justice may be hard.
Under EU regulations 259/93 and 92/3/Euratom, the originating country is
responsible for disposing of its medical and nuclear waste, as well as
for its retrieval if it is disposed of illegally.
With many of the containers unmarked and much of the paperwork
probably long since lost or destroyed, however, it will take a lot to
enable any legal action to take place.
In addition, a UNDP source described the search for hazardous
material in Somalia as like looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s not
that they don’t know it’s there, he says, but that they don’t know where
to start looking for it.
This makes it all the more urgent that stability return to the
country. Only then will the dumping stop and the clean-up commence.
- Third World Network Features
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