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April 17, 2009
Gulliver and the Pirates
It’s disheartening that piracy is still with us. When human beings first went to sea to fish and later to trade (5,000 years ago), sea-goers moonlighted as pirates, which paid them better than their primary work. For millennia, captured pirates were hanged, but that was the cost of doing business. Pirates had a free hand until Rome became a power.
The Romans made their Mediterranean fishing and trading routes safe by horrifically punishing pirates. But after Rome fell, travelers and merchants were once more prey to pirates who seized cargos, enslaved crews, and held wealthy victims hostage for ransom.
During the 16th century Religious Wars, the Protestants gave pirates special licenses to hunt down Spanish (Catholic) ships carrying New World looted gold and silver. In one pirate raid, Dutch pirates defeated and towed a Spanish treasure ship to Amsterdam, enriching their money-stressed government. Queen Elizabeth I of England also licensed pirates (one of them the famous Sir Walter Raleigh) to harass and take Spanish treasure back to England. The Queen got the lion’s share, but the pirates did really well too. European-inspired piracy declined as Europe got richer from colonial activity. It went out of style.
Muslim pirates from North Africa then took up the trade in the 18th century. President Thomas Jefferson, not a warlike man, initially paid ransom to get American merchant vessels and their crews returned – but eventually had to send the U.S. Navy in to clean up the pirate dens in Morocco. A century later, when pirates held an American diplomat for ransom, President Teddy Roosevelt sent in the Navy. Piracy stopped.
Beginning in the 1980s, pirates infested Indonesian waters and the Straits of Malacca, which, by 2004, constituted 40% of worldwide pirate attacks. At first, they went after small boats carrying Vietnamese refugees, which they looted and raped all the women on board. Nobody went after these thugs until they began threatening the oil tankers and other important cargo ships going through the Straits of Malacca. The Chinese largely cleaned house. Captured pirates were executed.
The plague of airplane hijackings by Palestinian terrorists in the 1980s was never called piracy, but it was. The 1985 seizure of a tourist ship (the Achille Lauro) off the coast of Egypt was traditional piracy, with passengers held for ransom and one elderly man in a wheelchair deliberately thrown overboard to die. As these hijackers were hunted down and most countries, under pressure, stopped giving hijacked planes landing rights, this criminal activity dwindled.
Now we have a big problem: Gulliver (the U.S. and Western powers) is being challenged by Liliputians – the nobodies of the miserable failed state, Somalia. This piracy, like the Indonesian, takes on oil tankers, an easy way to score big money. So far, the Somali pirates have been less violent than their savage Indonesian colleagues, but it is only a matter of time. With the American response to our first modern pirate attack ending in killing the pirates, the Somali warlords are now threatening revenge. They see themselves as Noble Heroes, who are only bringing home loot stolen fair and square – a tradition since the 7th century.
Teen-age Somali fishermen are licensed by clan warlords to replace fishing (the fish are running out) with hijacking for ransom. The elders take most of the loot. Because this shipping carries such valuable cargos, ship owners are more willing to pay ransom (paid for by their insurance companies) than to go after the pirates. It is obvious that with the volume of shipping and the vastness of the ocean, they cannot find enough armed protection.
To stop this thuggish activity, the great powers will have to destroy pirates and their bases or we will all be paying more for everything going by ship. So far, the French, U.S., and India have shown some guts. Pacifying criminals only encourages more, and to permit it is beneath contempt.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman is an historian, lecturer, and author who also writes for the Santa Cruz Sentinel. You may contact her at Lfarhat102@aol.com or http://www.globalthink.net/.
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