Word: foreigners
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That's exactly what happened this week when French daily Libération revealed that Sarkozy had delivered some astonishingly unflattering comments about several foreign officials - including American President Barack Obama. During a lunch with a group of French legislators Wednesday, Sarkozy reportedly described Obama as inexperienced, ill-prepared by advisers, and thus far "not always up to standard on decision-making and efficiency." And those turned out to be relatively kind words. Sarkozy said German Chancellor Angela Merkel had been reluctantly forced by economic realities to copy his own policies for dealing with the recession. Spanish Prime Minister Jose...
...years to defend their own fishing expeditions out of ports such as Eyl, Kismayo and Harardhere - all now considered to be pirate dens. Somali fishermen, whose industry was always small-scale, lacked the advanced boats and technologies of their interloping competitors, and also complained of being shot at by foreign fishermen with water cannons and firearms. "The first pirate gangs emerged in the '90s to protect against foreign trawlers," says Peter Lehr, lecturer in terrorism studies at Scotland's University of St. Andrews and editor of Violence at Sea: Piracy in the Age of Global Terrorism. The names of existing...
Ever since a civil war brought down Somalia's last functional government in 1991, the country's 3,330 km (2,000 miles) of coastline - the longest in continental Africa - has been pillaged by foreign vessels. A United Nations report in 2006 said that, in the absence of the country's at one time serviceable coastguard, Somali waters have become the site of an international "free for all," with fishing fleets from around the world illegally plundering Somali stocks and freezing out the country's own rudimentarily-equipped fishermen. According to another U.N. report, an estimated $300 million worth...
Beyond illegal fishing, foreign ships have also long been accused by local fishermen of dumping toxic and nuclear waste off Somalia's shores. A 2005 United Nations Environmental Program report cited uranium radioactive and other hazardous deposits leading to a rash of respiratory ailments and skin diseases breaking out in villages along the Somali coast. According to the U.N., at the time of the report, it cost $2.50 per ton for a European company to dump these types of materials off the Horn of Africa, as opposed to $250 per ton to dispose of them cleanly in Europe...
...misdeeds is next to impossible - Somalia's current government can barely find its feet in the wake of the 2006 U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion. And many Somalis, along with outside observers, suspect local officials in Mogadishu and in ports in semi-autonomous Puntland further north of accepting bribes from foreign fishermen as well as from pirate elders. U.N. monitors in 2005 and 2006 suggested an embargo on fish taken from Somali waters, but their proposals were shot down by members of the Security Council. (See photos of dramatic pirate rescues...