The Huf­in­g­ton Post has an inter­view with Steve Han­sch of the Open Soci­ety Insti­tute. Han­sch just returned from Soma­lia after research­ing the pirates and polit­i­cal cli­mate in the country.

Piracy began threat­en­ing inter­na­tional ves­sels in one of the main inter­na­tional ship­ping routes lying off the Somali coast after the col­lapse of the gov­ern­ment there in 1991. Who are the pirates?

They are often unem­ployed young men, pri­mar­ily from Punt­land in Soma­lia, who have seen their fish­ing decline because of over­fish­ing of their waters by inter­na­tional fish­ing. They’ve found that if they occa­sion­ally inter­cept peo­ple, the insur­ance com­pa­nies reward them for it.

Has piracy been affect­ing the dis­tri­b­u­tion of aid relief to the local civil­ian population?

No, the pirates have on occa­sion boarded food ship­ments, but over­all an enor­mous amount of aid has been deliv­ered. There’s a com­pletely dif­fer­ent phe­nom­e­non going on in Soma­lia which I don’t want to refer to as ‘piracy’. In the cen­tral part of Soma­lia where the main aid needs are, aid work­ers and doc­tors have been taken hostage. It’s obvi­ously sim­i­lar to the piracy, but it’s not the same as board­ing a ship. Now there are no longer ex-pat aid staff work­ing in Soma­lia. The level of ex-pat aid staff work­ing in the area is the low­est area per aid dol­lar spent in any country.

Aid agen­cies have been say­ing for some time now that Soma­lia is a highly dan­ger­ous place to work in given the con­tin­ued polit­i­cal insta­bil­ity, vio­lence, and kid­nap­pings. After the recent assaults on UN offices in Soma­lia, a UN offi­cial said yes­ter­day that the UN would not ‘back out’ of the coun­try, but is it fea­si­ble to con­tinue human­i­tar­ian efforts in this environment?

A gang takes peo­ple hostage and hopes it will make them mil­lion­aires because the gov­ern­ment of those hostages will step in and pay the ran­som. Gov­ern­ments have cre­ated a mar­ket by being will­ing to pay mil­lions of dol­lars. Most aid pro­fes­sion­als are work­ing for NGOs and the ran­soms that have been paid have not been nego­ti­ated at the ini­tia­tive of those orga­ni­za­tions, which could use their posi­tion to work through medi­a­tors. Gov­ern­ments have leapfrogged the NGOs.

Are aid agency ex-pat staff likely to return in the com­ing months?

I don’t know when they’ll go back in. Crime is a funny thing. In the long term his­tory, some things don’t seem to change.

What is the sit­u­a­tion regard­ing aid dis­tri­b­u­tion now?

Aid is not just about tak­ing stuff and dis­trib­ut­ing it. The largest share of U.S. gov­ern­ment aid is in food aid, and it’s being dis­trib­uted through local Somali NGOs. But the more pro­fes­sional peo­ple from other coun­tries are the peo­ple who would do the project super­vis­ing and mon­i­tor­ing, and they are not able to get through. One of the things human­i­tar­ian peo­ple do is make sure that key things are done; it’s not just about spend­ing dol­lars. That’s been dra­mat­i­cally reduced, and that phe­nom­e­non is really being seen this year. Effec­tively in 2009, there are no ex-pats work­ing in Somalia.

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