Oh what fun it is to be a pirate these days! Of course, there are no Spanish galleons loaded with gold doubloons, but Saudi oil tankers loaded with crude oil worth $100 million isn’t a bad substitute. True, oil isn’t as fungible as gold, but just like people, it can be ransomed:
Somali pirates who hijacked the Sirius Star, a Saudi-owned supertanker, are demanding $25m for the ship’s return, according to Mohamed Said, one of the pirates.
“We are demanding $25m from the Saudi owners of the tanker. We do not want long-term discussions to resolve the matter,” he said on Thursday.
“The Saudis have 10 days to comply, otherwise we will take action that could be disastrous.” […]
Somali pirates have now seized three ships off the coast of the Horn of Africa in the past three days. […]
Amid the anarchy and lawlessness in most parts of Somalia, northern coastal towns like Haradhere, Eyl and Bossaso, the so-called pirate economy is thriving, due to the money pouring in from pirate ransoms that have reached $30 million this year alone.
With eight ships being hijacked in the past two weeks, the IMB’s piracy reporting centre has described the situation as “spiralling out of control”.
Which begs the question: with so many US naval vessels in the region, how exactly was this situation allowed to get to this point? Exactly what does the most powerful Navy in the world have to do right now that’s more important than keeping the shipping lanes open? I thought the war in Iraq was all but won, correct? I guess Bush is a lamer lame duck than we thought.
Bush is a blithering idiot as always and from the look of the man he is in a more or less state of permanent shock. The economy is tanking fast, banks are going under, unemployment increases, the war in Afghanistan goes badly, Iraq is still unsettled, and, now, those damn pirates are getting everybody upset.
Use the navy to take control of that area of the world. Come on, BooMan, you are crediting this lamest of all lame ducks with intelligence. A dangerous accreditation, indeed.
Naval piracy has been going on quietly for years off the coasts of Africa, Asia, and South America. Ships get hit and ransomed off and it’s written off as the cost of business. Big cargo ships these days are largely automated, meaning crews of a couple dozen can run an entire vessel. Ironically, that only makes them more vulnerable to piracy (cost cutting for the loss.)
Still it wasn’t a big deal. Until last week.
The fact that a group of pirates hit a Saudi Oil Supertanker was their big mistake. We know what happens to you under the Bush regime if you screw with the flow of energy company petrodollars. These guys have now graduated into An Actual Naval Threat(tm).
I’m sure the Saudis and the energy companies phoned Darth Cheney personally and said “You will put a stop to this. Now.” Their masters want results for the country they bought and paid for.
And you’d better believe things are going to get ugly out there off the Horn of Africa.
That’s right. I read a New Yorker article on the topic 20 years ago.
For Bush there wasn’t enough of a profit motive to have the Navy there, until now.
I was one wondering how they were planning to fence $100,000,000 in oil. Very few pawn shops have sufficient docking facilities.
What would be wrong with mopping up all those pirates with an exploratory force from India or the U.S.? You catch enough of the criminals (or kill them in combat) and it’s over, right?
By the way, cartoonist Don Asmussen has some panels about this latest threat, the Arrr Qaeda, here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/19/DDASMUSSENBR.DTL
Just what we need on top of everything else. If those pirates blow that ship up and it leaks its cargo of oil, there will be a massive environmental catastrophe.
So much for the US being the world’s policeman.
This Saudi tanker was well out to sea, 200 miles I think, when it was taken. That far out it leaves a lot water to patrol and makes it difficult to protect shipping. That, and the fact that this is such a large ship, combined with a big increase in ships taken (I think eight this week alone), represent to big change in the pirates game.
The US actually has a problem doing anything about it because of Gitmo. Our legal standing to do anything is a bit murky because we muddied the waters. The Navy brass is said to be hesitant to act.
Other nations apparently would have less trouble knowing what to do with these pirates if they were captured. China publicly executed pirates and it pretty quickly stopped piracy in their waters.
Somalia is one of the great but lesser-known disasters of Bush’s foreign policy legacy — the rise in high-stakes piracy is only a symptom of a much wider humanitarian and political catastrophe that the UN is now calling worse than Darfur.
I remembered reading some things about Somalia over the past year or two, and dug up this diary on DKos by gjohnsit that covers some of the history there.
On MSNBC the other night, they were saying that the pirates are former fishermen who can’t make a living at fishing anymore… Bush’s support of the Ethiopian invasion in the name of the great “War on Terror” that pretty much destroyed the Islamic Court system that was the closest thing to a stable government the country had seen in years, turning to piracy might be the only option some of those men saw for survival.
The answer to the problem of Somali pirates is not to send in the navy and marines (or worse, Blackwater) — the war and devastation going on already is horrendous enough. Especially when Bush’s policies are a large part of why things are so bad over there right now.
It’s hard to believe that Bush could have fucked up anything worse than he did with Iraq… but in Somalia, he actually did. And what’s happening now in the Gulf of Aden is just another consequence of Bush’s failed foreign policy legacy.
But all the news reports are about “pirates” — and damn few in the media seem to be talking about the conditions of utter horror in Somalia that lead to piracy becoming an avenue to survival — terrorism for profit — for people who have very little left to lose.
“Which begs the question: with so many US naval vessels in the region, how exactly was this situation allowed to get to this point?”
Honor among pirates?
APM’s Marketplace had a brief “interview with a pirate” a couple of weeks ago. This guy was working in the Straits of Molucca rather than off the horn of Africa, but I suspect the motive is the same. No work, no prospects, but a boat and some friends and a few guns and you can make a shot at being a pirate. For the fellow Marketplace interviewed, it was a hit-and-miss proposition complicated by the idea that if you scored, you were expected to share the wealth, leaving you about as well off as before.
I think I remember seeing yesterday on Rachel Maddow that India has taken an interest in the waters off Somalia because of the amount of Indian shipping that goes through there, and the Indian navy has taken on some of these pirates. Even so there are a lot of them, and they apparently have little to lose, so the threat is going to remain for a while.
the indian’s are now playing hardball…perhaps taking a cue from the chinese, who, according to andrew longman’s ref above, executed a few:
India ‘sinks Somali pirate ship’
given the conditions that janetT describes, and the fact that somalia hasn’t had what one would call a functional govt for nearly 2 decades, it’s little wonder this is happening.
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Pune, India – After Somali pirates shook the international maritime community on Tuesday, hijacking a Saudi supertanker with more than $100 million worth of crude oil, the Indian Navy has struck back. At least 91 ships have been hijacked this year off the coast of Somalia.
An Indian warship came under attack from a suspected pirate “mother ship,” but managed to destroy the pirate ship, sending three speedboats packed with pirates fleeing for safety.
Meanwhile, the INS Tabar, a Russian-made, high-tech Indian warship, managed to thwart the attempted hijacking of an Indian cargo ship off the coast of Somalia.
Hijackings off the coast of Somalia accounted for a third of global piracy incidents this year, reports the International Maritime Board. Since January, at least 91 ships have been hijacked in the Gulf of Aden, a 1 million-square-mile waterway between Somalia and Yemen.
Presently, pirates are holding as many as 17 captured vessels with more than 300 crew members, including the Saudi supertanker, the Sirius Star, and the Ukrainian vessel carrying at least 30 Russian-designed T-72 tanks.
While warships from eight different countries, including India, have deployed to the Gulf of Aden to combat piracy, the issue is particularly important for India.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I realize this story is old and I’m commenting on it rather late but just wanted to mention that Blackwater is now operating ships on “anti-piracy” missions off the coast of Somalia.
Pax