Breaking: no one really cares about Somalian pirates
Posted by Thomas Nephew on April 20th, 2009
Last week Secretary of State Clinton announced a number of measures to try to weaken pirates operating in Somalian waters. While attention in the press centered on the possibility of freezing pirate assets, Secretary Clinton only noted that the possibility would be explored, spending at least as much or more time on continued U.S. support of an international “contact group” meeting in Cairo about Somalian piracy and on working “with shippers and the insurance industry to address gaps in their self-defense measures.”
World War II North Atlantic convoy duty, Feb 1942
NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) Collection
Photographer: Personnel of USS PHILADELPHIA
Credit: National Archives
We (don’t) got us a convoy
It is a curious thing. While it’s true there’s a vast ocean and elusive opponents to deal with it’s not as if those challenges haven’t been met before — against a far more formidable foe: during World War II, American merchant and military supply ships traveled in convoys under naval protection from German U-Boot attack.
Moreover, the waters off East Africa appear to collapse to a relatively few, relatively distinct shipping lanes — as determined by the Seychelles to the south and Socotra to the north — which of course helps Somalian speedboat operators find ships to hijack more easily, but also defines where they themselves are likely to appear.
While the convoy argument has been made repeatedly, it clearly hasn’t happened yet – except in the suggestive case when an international cooperative program is affected: World Food Program shipments to the region have apparently been under Canadian and then EU escort for some time. In the Wall Street Journal, Peter Zimmerman suggests (in so many words) that it’s simple class warfare economics — shippers vs. crews:
Shipping companies will protest that it is more economical for ships to travel alone and not be held to the speed of the slowest vessel in a convoy. And certainly the odds of any given vessel being attacked and captured are less than 1% per voyage. At that rate, a $10,000,000 ransom is only an extra $100,000 tacked on per voyage.
As Zimmerman points out, “But this ignores the fate of those sailors who are captured.” John Robb (”Global Guerrillas”) blames the insurance industry:
If the company that owned the rescued ship wasn’t a US defense contractor, its kidnapping insurance company (likely Lloyds) and its designated crisis representatives (likely Control Risks Group) would have negotiated to pay the pirate’s fee to get the hostage back.
Other explanations include the difficulty of coordinating shipping decisions of multiple shippers, and presumably of allocating the authority to do so. In effect, the explanations are all just different ways of saying the same thing: no one actually cares enough about the Somalian piracy problem to do anything that would stop it. It appears to be easier to rush warships to the latest hijacking and hope for a clean shot off the fantail, or to pay a multimillion dollar ransom, than to figure out what to do about Somalian ‘pirates’ and how to do it.
The Somalian ‘Coast Guard’
Given the boardings, hijackings, ransom payments, and killings, it’s a bit of a provocation to put ‘pirates’ in scare quotes. But in what is famously a so-called “failed state,” it may be that seemingly familiar concepts like ‘pirates’ won’t quite do. As Johann Hari pointed out in the Huffington Post (”You Are Being Lied To About Pirates,” people have never been altogether clear on the history of “piracy” in the first place:
Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the “golden age of piracy” - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. [...] 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-pirating to live.”
The same may be the case for Somalian boatmen. David Axe of “War is Boring”:
Recall that Somali piracy has its roots in the 1990s, when the collapse of the Somali government threw open the doors to major foreign fishing companies to illegally enter Somali waters and fish out all the tuna, which once comprised one of Somalia’s major commodities. The first Somali pirates were fishermen who decided to render a “fine” on any boats they found illegaly fishing Somali waters. Well, guess what. Piracy has effectively cut in half tuna hauls for major foreign fishing companies working near Somalia, according to Warships International Fleet Review.
In an October, 2008 Chicago Tribune article, Paul Salopek reported the value of fish poached in Somalian waters at $300 million annually:
“It’s almost like a resource swap,” said Peter Lehr, a Somalia piracy expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and the editor of “Violence at Sea: Piracy in the Age of Global Terrorism.” “Somalis collect up to $100 million a year from pirate ransoms off their coasts. And the Europeans and Asians poach around $300 million a year in fish from Somali waters.”
Some illegal fishing operations literally made money coming and going:
In the early 1990s, for example, Somalia’s unpatrolled waters became a cost-free dumping ground for industrial waste from Europe. Fishing boats from Italy were reported to have ferried barrels of toxic materials to Somalia’s shores and then returned home laden with illicit catches of fish. Rusting containers of hazardous waste washed up on Somali beaches as recently as 2005, after a powerful tsunami roared through.
Mmm… sushi. (Somalian shores were once particularly abundant in tuna.) Somalian ‘pirate’ claims that they are a “Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia” are not as far-fetched as they may sound.
Of course, the Maersk Alabama wasn’t stealing tuna or dumping rad waste, and the particular men and boys who hijacked it and held its captain hostage may well have not cared one whit about either issue. But ones who hijacked a Ukrainian ship holding weapons last October did, or said they did, the New York Times’s Jeffrey Gettleman reported: “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” [pirate spokesman Sugule Ali] said. “We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.”
Give a man a fish — 21st century update
Of course, not giving much of a damn about the consequences of failed states or environmental rapine has been par for the course in our capitals and boardrooms.
But that may be changing; the question is, will we try to solve the problem of piracy by killing Somalians, by helping them survive, or by continuing to simply pay them off? In an editorial last week, the Washington Post recommended “a concerted push to strengthen the most recent attempt at a Somali government — a not-unpromising coalition between moderate Islamists and various clan-based factions. The government needs massive economic aid, training and equipment for an army and coast guard, and help in brokering political deals.”
Fair enough — except maybe we can save them some money on a coast guard. If Western naval forces are to patrol Somalian waters hunting for pirates (rather than simply protecting convoys from them), let them (with Somali governmental consent) at least also operate as an interim — and legitimate — “Somalian Coast Guard.” To update the old saw: give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach him to fish, he eats for a lifetime; make sure his fish aren’t stolen from him, and he might not hold the next ship he sees ransom for $10 million.
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UPDATE, 4/20: It turns out that some of the pirates become wealthy, engage in conspicuous consumption, and are not universally liked in Somalia — Stephanie McCrummen, Washington Post, “Somalia’s Godfathers: Ransom-Rich Pirates — Coastal Villagers Find Blessings And Ruin at Hands of Sea Robbers.” The article notes the fisheries connection, but notes “[g]iven the challenge of patrolling more than a million square miles of ocean, attention is turning toward fighting piracy from the Somali shore.”
NOTE, 4/21:Shipping lane and convoy discussion links lead to crossposts at USNI.org (US Naval Institute) blog by “Eagle1″, a retired Navy Reserve captain. The “attention in the press” link leads to “US to target pirate assets,” Matthew Lee, 4/15/09, AP via Washington Post; “announced” and “international contact” links lead to State Department material.
UPDATE, 4/21: I found more discussion of the convoy issue here: Convoys: the solution to the Somali piracy crisis?’, by Todd Pittman (4/16/09, AP, via Washington Post):
Cyrus Mody, of the International Maritime Bureau, said there are only 15 to 20 warships deployed in the Gulf of Aden and off Somalia’s eastern coast at any one time _ a fraction of what is needed to guard tens of thousands of ships, even in convoys. At the Pentagon, officials dismiss the use of convoys, partly because of the high number of personnel such a mission would entail. Also, the military has been adamant that ship security be the responsibility of shipping companies. One senior defense official said privately that it would be impossible, with the number of U.S. and coalition ships available, to both escort convoys and patrol the gulf at the same time.
So maybe I’m (gasp) wrong, though the “responsibility of shipping companies” and “at the same time” phrasings above could be read either as the simple truth or institutional aversion to nonglamorous convoy duty.
Category: Post. Tags: piracy, somalia.
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