By Moyiga Nduru
NAIROBI, Apr 1 1996 (IPS)

Banned from passing through the Suez Canal by the Egyptian authorities and threatened by Somali gunmen, a ship carrying a cargo of leaking toxic waste bound for Britain has been forced to sail south for the Mozambican port of Beira.

The Belgium-registered ‘Doal Ukca’, with 16 containers of chemical waste that had been off-loaded in the Kenyan port of Mombasa in December, was escorted by the Kenyan maritime authorities into international waters for the start of its long journey to a disposal site in Britain via Beira.

However, six hours before the vessel’s departure on Friday, a group of Somali leaders here, acting on what they said was a tip- off that the cargo was to be dumped off the Somali coast, warned the ship owners to avoid Somali territorial waters.

“We have to impress upon the owners of the ship in question, that the Somali people would not be held responsible with regard to the fate of the ship and its crew if it enters Somalia territorial waters,” spokesman for the Nairobi-based Somali Affairs Monitoring Committee, Hussein Ali Dualeh, said.

“We have already informed the authorities in the coastal areas of Somali and the government of Somaliland of the intention of this ship carrying toxic waste. We shall also be alert and take appropriate action should this ship be sighted within Somali territorial waters,” he said.

“We know that the ship will never be allowed to pass through the Suez Canal where Egyptian authorities have imposed stringent regulations on toxic cargoes. And the only place for them to dump the chemical is off the Somali coast,” Dualeh observed.

Hussein Dimbil Warsam, a senior member of the Committee, stressed to IPS that they had the capability to stop the vessel and in the past two years had detained “a number of Korean ships” fishing illegally along the Somali coast.

Dr S. Shariff, the senior medical officer at Mombasa notes that the ‘Doal Ukca’s cargo “is highly toxic if it is inhaled or accidentally ingested. And it is very harmful to anyone who does not know or is not warned about the handling of such chemicals.”

The toxic sludge came from the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar, as part of a donor-backed clean-up campaign under the supervision of the British firm Rechem International Ltd which was transporting the 30,000 kgs of waste for disposal in Britain.

But the Liberian-registered container ship ‘MV Barrister’, which Rechem hired through the Kenyan-based shipping agents Mackenzie Maritime Ltd, off-loaded the cargo at Mombasa. It was originally kept close to the refrigerator block where food is stored and workers at the port complained of eye and skin irritation caused by the fumes given off by the leaking load.

Since December, at least eight Suez-bound ships have refused to carry the consignment. The Egyptian authorities maintain a strict control on chemical waste passing through the canal.

Rechem, a specialist waste destruction company, based at Gwent, England, said the firm had been contracted by the Dutch government last year to collect and repackage the waste from over 20 different locations on Zanzibar.

“With no facilities able to deal with this waste anywhere on the African continent, the material was then dispatched for final destruction at Rechem’s UK facilities,” said Rechem’s John Shaughnessy.

The cargo, he said, contained a cocktail of contaminated soil, banned or out-dated pesticides, and redundant pharmaceutical products such as old malaria medication. “Much of this had originally been donated as government aid more than a decade ago,” said Shaughnessy.

According to him, most of this waste from Zanzibar has in the past been properly and safely destroyed in Britain. “As partners in previous UN, UK and other aid-agency funded ‘clean-up’ operations, we are keen for these containers to continue their journey to the UK so that we can destroy the contents and officially complete our part in ‘Project Zanzibar,” he said.

What has environmentalists on the alert here however is that rather than waste being destroyed safely in the West which has the facilities, it is increasingly being dumped in Africa to circumvent the red tape surrounding chemical disposal and save money.

In Western Europe, disposing of hazardous waste can cost up to 500 dollars per tonne. In Africa it can be as cheap as three dollars per tonne, according to a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) publication, ‘Outreach’.

UNEP notes parts of the South Pacific and the Caribbean have long been dumping grounds for toxic waste. When these sites began to fill up in the 1980’s, Africa became the alternative.

“What has complicated the problem is that a number of impoverished West African countries have been lured by the prospect of the payment of millions of dollars to agree to become the dumping ground for millions of tonnes of waste from the industrialised West,” notes the publication.

“Since the start of the civil war in Somalia,” said Warsame, “we have on many occasions received information that ships of unknown registration enter Somali territorial waters mostly at night to dump materials.”

In the late 1980’s, UNEP took action by drafting the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal. The aim of the Convention was to impose strict controls on the international movement of toxic waste and eventually reduce their production.

The Basel Convention came into force in May 1992, but there was a growing recognition that the treaty did little to halt the trade. In late 1992, the then UNEP director, Mostafa Tolba, called for a complete ban on waste shipments to developing countries and Eastern Europe.

Many developing nations have long supported a complete ban on the export of hazardous wastes. Some have taken active steps to prevent the dumping — either legal or illegal — of hazardous wastes in their countries.

For example, members of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) have set up a ‘Dumpwatch’ body for this specific purpose.

Dualeh urges the South African Defence Force to honour its commitment, which was negotiated by the OAU, to monitor the Somali coast until a new government is formed in Somalia.

“If they don’t help,” he said, “the chemicals will affect all the countries along the eastern coast of Africa.”

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