More than a month, I was working and thinking to say something about Somali pirates, how the issue is regarded by public, and more important, authorities. An issue created by corporations and fed by everybody, just to give way to panic and a rule changing. Nobody wins when people are hold for ransom, and whole ships with their cargo are hold as well. The solution seems logical, but nobody applies it. Not any organism. I don’t even know why nobody thinks of who is that organism, the authority which may apply anything. A resolution, a solution. USA? Why USA? They’re busy to implement the corporations in Iraq, Somalia is not an emerging market at the moment. There is a lot of cleaning to do there, after thrash was discharged, during the civil war, and (“pirates” claim) still is.
The pirates say that’s the reason they exist in the first place. More or less radioactive waste discharged on Somali coasts, destroyed the fish banks, so they can’t continue their traditional fishing, this leading to a form of revenge, and more than that, a new way of living, very close with the clashes between “political” or “military” factions, and considerably less dangerous.
Somali pirates (from notesbit.com and AFP)
A boat of five-seven people, armed with automatic riffles and rocket grenades or mine throwers which can take a whole 35,000 DWT cargo ship and keep it, is something of laughing. So it seems and nobody moves a finger. Who cares? It’s not us, the ones under “siege”. Yes indeed, the amount of people affected is minimal.
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So, where is the solution, then? The answer should be logical: United Nations! The military boats in their possession stayed for years at the entrance to the Adriatic, between Lecce and Corfu, controlling and terrorizing the cargo ships passing the zone, keeping up the embargo on petroleum products, imposed by the UN Security Council on former Yugoslavia, giving way to the biggest official gasoline smuggling in modern history, this time on land, on the other side. And they never prevented it, nor the diesel or gasoline leak, nor the weapons feeding, nor the crimes committed against humanity. “History” is prepared with adventure and action movies, showing how cruel are the Serbs, and how nobody actually is looking for the “criminals”. These guys, are “protected”. They are taken out for the public eye, just to implement an idea or other, I dare to say even ritualistically sacrificed, like Bin Laden, in days of “popular feast”, or just incarcerated until the public forget. In Bin Laden’s case, they have not even bother to “show” him, giving way to justified suspicion of this “killing” happening at all. But there’s a logic even to that. Obama is in need of future votes. What he cannot buy with money, is supplementing with “American gratefulness”.
Pirates (from tundratabloids.com)
Ship owners are paying a fortune anyway to transit Suez Channel. They can pay a little bit less now, to the “democratically” controlled Egypt, and pay the difference to UN, to keep there not more than two small war ships. It’ll cost some salaries, insurance fees and diesel oil. And the insurance companies will have to pay less and they’ll never be hostages again.
Of course, unfortunately all this should be implemented by sheer force. An ultimatum for total destruction of the Somali coast if they don’t return the hostages and ships and what remains of any cargo the pirate manipulators possess. After that the cease of any garbage discharge in the area, and after, to put that two ships to patrol the Arabian Sea, even during the monsoon.
But what I read on Clay Maitland’s blog is absolutely horrifying. I’m going to quote the main idea:
“There are said to be increasing operational ties between the Somali Shabab and the Qaeda franchise in Yemen, known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Penninsula, or A.Q.A.P. This group conspired to destroy a passenger plane headed for Detroit on Christmas day, 2009, and another attempt, later, to destroy cargo planes carrying printer cartridges filled with explosives.
The bottom line seems to be that the United States is trying to do what it has done elsewhere, namely, develop a system of proxy allies on the ground in Somalia. This may prove to be a method by which piracy could be handled, if not suppressed, in a somewhat more effective way. A more unpleasant possibility, however, is that the pirates themselves could turn into allies of the U.S. Special Operations Command.
It would not be the first time in history that this sort of “devil you know” transformation has happened. We did it after the Second World War, in certain parts of Europe, during what is now called the Cold War. Our allies then – erstwhile enemies – were in some cases nastier than today’s pirates.”
Clay Maitland is the Chairman of the North American Marine Environment Protection Association [NAMEPA], and Managing Partner of International Registries, Inc (IRI), a valuable word spoken in any marine matter, a maritime law and rule creator. I’m going to quote him more, on my other blog, The Yacht Owner.
Mr. Clay Maitland awarded (from coastguardfundation.org)
More of Shabab, the “militants” political arm, more or less, they are “deep state” there, in another post. The point of this article is that it seems Americans are involved in the most negative way using the same terrorism pretext. “Public opinion” claimed of course, as in all the possible and conceivable situations, “why US is not intervening?”. Again, nobody remembers or even knows that more people die yearly because of tobacco smoking, than “terrorism”. The money invested to cure cancer are hundred times less than the money invested in “the war against terrorism”.
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Copyright © 2011 Rodolfo Grimaldi Blog – Pirates of the Red Sea
