Fighting Pirates: The Pen and the Sword

[Are_grits_groceries]

The seizure by Somali pirates on September 25, 2008, of the Faina, a Ukrainian-flagged vessel transporting 33 Russian tanks and depleted uranium ammunition to Kenya for consignment delivery to the Sudan People’s
Liberation Army was startling in its audacity and haul. Even more alarming, however, was the November hijacking of the 1,000- foot supertanker Sirius Star. The Liberianflagged vessel, owned by Saudi Arabia’s
Aramco, was carrying more than $100 million in oil to the United States when pirates seized the ship and its 25 crew members some 400 miles out to sea, then motored for the Somali coast and dropped anchor. Admiral
Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was stunned by the capture, which sent shocks through global energy
markets.
The seizure of a supertanker was unprecedented, and the daring attack so far from shore suggested the pirates were using the shipping industry’s open-access automatic identification system (AIS) to intercept
merchant ships. Merchant ships on international voyages are required to transmit AIS locational data, but criminal gangs at sea operating commercial equipment can receive these signals as easily as do naval forces and maritime law enforcement—and use it to target ships. Since January, more than 97 ships have been hijacked in the dangerous waters off Somalia and Yemen, and the ransom for some vessels can fetch
into the millions of dollars.

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/wopj.2009.25.4.41?cookieSet=1

A long article about dealing with pirates. Worth the read.

[KharmaTrain]

1. Not A New Problem...Nor One That Can Be Easily Solved

Piracy is happening all over the globe. This area gets specific attention due to the amount of traffic that passes the Horn and the scale and sophistication of the modern day pirates. As has been said "it's the cost of doing business". A $2 million dollar ransom for a tanker loaded with over $100 mil in oil is a no-brainer and eventually is covered by insurance and the end-user (us). There's also a lot of piracy in the South China Sea and growing in the Carribean as well. Where there's money on the move, there are those who will try to get their hands on it. The best one can do is to avoid the areas where the worst incidents occur, but to think that sending a gunboat or even the Navy Seals will end this problem are very naive.

I've been amused at those who think we can just blast our way out of this situation...send the Marines back into Somalia or flood the area with gunboats. It ignores the political situation as well as the international scope of the problem. The other day, a freeper, of all people, suggested letting a company like Blackwater deal with the problem. It reminded me of how previous pirates were dealt with...with Privateers...bounty hunters. Here's a problem a Soldier of Fortune could get all excited about.

Somalia as a nation state hasn't existed, if it ever really did, since 1989. We saw in 1993 how difficult it was to control the war lords in this region and how difficult it would be to institute any centralized government...and that was in the Capital city. These pirates operate out of lands hundreds of miles to the north...some of the most remote locales in the world. The ultimate way to deal with these people is through developing an alternative economy in that region that helps encourage building or rebuilding a national infrastructure...and the rule of law that goes along with it. Bombing and trying to shoot our way will, once again, prove futile.

[Old and In the Way]

2. I'd pay the ransoms.

Then, once all hostages are freed, I'd get serious about eradicating the problem. Obviously there has to be a few motherships coordinating these pirate attacks and providing shelter to the pirates. Given our surveillance technology, I can't believe we couldn't solve this problem, quietly, within a week.

On edit, maybe I'm rather ignorant about the entire situation. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-you-are-being-lied-to-about-pirates-1225817.html

<snip>

The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young British man called William Scott, should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirateing to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

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