Rex Weyler | San Antonio | June 27
Weyler is a Greenpeace co-founder and contributes to The Agonist frequently

The Agonist - After the December Tsunami had swept 3000 kilometers across the Indian Ocean, Somali fisherman Hassan Abdi discovered a large metal container in the surf north of Mogadishu. The dirt-poor people of Somalia recycle any material resource, thus Abdi and his friends hauled the three-meter container into town to cut up as scrap metal. Warned not to tamper with it, the fishermen left it outside a former government building in Mogadishu.

Photos can be found here. More after the jump

Meanwhile, villagers along the fifteen-hundred-mile Somalia east coast discovered similar metal containers, some 2 meters in diameter and up to 4 meters long, and began salvaging them for metal. On May 10, villagers near Barawe, north of Mogadishu, opened a container with axes until the spewing contents blinded three people and poisoned several bystanders, men, women, and children.
 
Police, traditional leaders, and a local aid agency, Daryeel Bulsho Guud (DBG), launched warnings over the radio and in print media. Journalist Mihiyadin Ali Jumale filed reports relayed to German journalist Marc Engelhardt. I learned about these events from two members of the German relief organization Diakonie Emergency Aid, visiting Vancouver.
 
Displaced, nomadic Somalians live beyond the reach of media. In spite of the public warnings, on May 19, fishermen in Kismayo beach, 500 kilometers South of Mogadishu, attempted to open a container with axes. The container exploded, killed four people, and severely burned the skin of eight others. Toxin containers have now washed up at fifteen known sites. In addition to the deaths and burns, exposed Somalian villagers have suffered respiratory infections, mouth ulcers, abdominal hemorrhages, and skin lesions.
 
“Somalia is a UN no-go zone,” explained Roswitha Brender from Diakonie, “so their aid agencies stay away. We’ve been working with the local DBG, but we need toxin experts and financing for an intervention.”
 
In April, Diakonie approached UNEP Nairobi, the United Nations Environmental Monitoring Centre, which referred them to UNEP in Geneva. The German aid organization urged the UN to send a team to Somalia, including monitoring scientists, doctors, and information staff to warn the public. On June 9, UNEP met, assessed the toxin catastrophe in Somalia, but declined to send a team or investigate the source of the containers.
 
“The UN Institutions, and the Somali Representatives are not showing any interest in learning where the toxic waste comes from,” said Jürgen Prieske at Diakonie. “To the contrary, they’ve said that this question ‘should not be raised’ for the time being.”
 
Hannelore Hensle, who has worked with Diakonie in Africa and around the world for 35 years, asked Greenpeace to step in and help, but the environmental group has not yet committed to the project. Somalia is not an attractive or safe place to go unless one is doing cash business. The country is factionalized among warlords and provisional governments. Journalist Engelhardt describes Somalia as “pure market-economy, without regulation. Goods are imported and exported,” explains Engelhardt, “telephone networks and power lines are established, as long as it promises profits. In this system, environmental concerns don’t feature at all.”
 
Multinational resource corporations covet Somalia’s uranium, iron ore, copper, natural gas, and possible oil reserves. It appears now, that these global corporations and/or nations dump toxic and radioactive waste in Somalia’s waters, likely with pay-offs to local officials and warlords to keep quiet. The UN estimates that dumping waste off the coast of Somalia can be achieved for 1/100th of the cost in Europe or North America. As a UN no-go zone, the country provides the perpetrators with protection from scrutiny. However, the tsunami has exposed this destructive shadow of free-market globalization.
 
In a land of poverty, oppression, sweltering heat, droughts, dust storms, famine, deforestation, monsoon floods, soil erosion, and desertification, one may now add industrialism’s most deadly waste and the world’s indifference.
 
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 Rex Weyler is Editor at large for Shared Vision Magazine.

More about Rex at Rex Weyler.com and at Raincoast Books.