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Last Updated: Feb 4, 2009 - 11:01:35 AM |
Here's the plot of Pirates of the Caribbean 4. The film opens with
Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow dropping anchor in New York harbor. He
descends on Wall Street with his mates and, after a quick costume
change at Brooks Brothers, storms the boardrooms of Merrill Lynch,
Citigroup, and other major firms. They don't need sabers to rake in the
haul. Jack's a clever pirate. He takes advantage of the tools at hand.
Applying mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt
obligations, Jack seizes billions of dollars in booty. He distributes
huge bonuses to his crew for a job well done. And just before the
government steps in to clean up the mess, the pirates scramble back to
their ship and set sail.
Quick question: Why are more than a dozen of the world's navies
converging on Somalia to battle pirates there instead of sailing into
New York to capture the Wall Street pirates? After all, CEOs benefited
from $20 billion in taxpayer money using tax loopholes, according to an
IPS study. Surely the global economy would be made more secure by
forcing former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, who doled out $4 billion
in executive bonuses even as his company was collapsing, to walk the
gangplank than by cracking down on the bands of privateers in the Horn
of Africa.
"Pirate," like "terrorist," has always been a slippery term to define.
Just as the British considered George Washington a terrorist rather
than a freedom fighter, they portrayed John Paul Jones as a pirate
rather than a naval hero. After the Revolutionary War, the shoe was on
the other foot when the United States fought several pitched battles
with the "Barbary pirates." These fearsome vessels, however, were not
really pirate ships. Rather, they worked on behalf of several Barbary
states that were part of the Ottoman empire. As Frank Lambert writes in
The Barbary Wars, Algeria, Tripoli, and Morocco preferred traditional
commerce and resorted to piracy largely because European powers refused
to open their markets. If terrorism is the weapon of those on the
political margins, piracy is the weapon of those on the economic
margins.
Fast forward to the latest piracy news. The newspapers have been full
of stories about gangs preying on vessels passing through the Suez
Canal and near the Somali coast. They seized dozens of ships last year
- including a Saudi tanker with $100 million worth of crude oil that
yielded a $3 million ransom - with the help of fast boats, GPS, and
submachine guns. The pirates are currently negotiating for a comparable
ransom before releasing a Ukrainian vessel that has 33 Russian tanks,
heavy artillery, and grenade launchers.
As Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) contributor Rubrick Biegon points
out, the Somali pirates did not start out as Jack Sparrows. "Piracy in
Somalia began because traditional coastal fishing became difficult
after foreign fishing trawlers depleted local fish stocks," he writes
in Somalia Piracy and the International Response. "Desperate fishermen
started attacking trawlers until the trawler crews fought back with
heavy weapons, leading the local fishermen to turn to other types of
commercial vessels. The pirates prefer to call themselves the Somali
'coast guard,' noting that, prior to the recent spate of hijackings,
they organized themselves to defend their communities from overfishing
and, according to several accounts, to protect Somalia's coastline from
toxic dumping by foreign vessels."
Piracy blossomed in Somalia after Ethiopia invaded in 2006 with U.S.
support and deposed the Islamic Courts Union. "Under the Courts, there
was literally no piracy," observes one maritime security expert. "While
many Somalis disapproved of some of the more fundamentalist ways of the
original courts, most felt that they were well organized, disciplined,
and effective civil administrators who had certainly provided Somalia
with its first semblance of order and leadership since 1991," write
FPIF contributors Gerald LeMelle and Michael Stulman in Africa Policy
Outlook 2009.
The anti-piracy campaign, argues FPIF contributor Francis Njubi
Nesbitt, is a giant red herring. "Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia in
December 2006, backed by the United States, sparked an Islamist
resistance that led to thousands of civilian deaths, displaced over a
million people, and depopulated the capital, Mogadishu," he writes in
Somalia: Waiting for Obama. "But instead of focusing on the aftermath
of this crisis and helping foster a peace process, the United States,
European Union, and other international actors are engaged in the more
dramatic and media-friendly anti-piracy campaign."
Hussein Yusuf disagrees. "Somalia poses a grave danger to the United
States and the Horn of Africa today," the FPIF contributor writes in
What's Next for Somalia. "Despite the U.S. 'Global War on Terror,'
piracy in the Gulf of Aden threatens the supply of oil and commercial
trade to the West. Islamic extremists threaten the stability of this
region more than ever." Yusuf and Nesbitt offer contrasting
interpretations in their strategic dialogue on this topic.
Everyone agrees, however, that the pirates of the Somali coast have
raked in quite a lot of money, somewhere around $30 million in 2008.
That's more than a few pearls and pieces of eight. But compare that to
the bonuses that Wall Street employees took home last year: $18.4
billion.
At least the Somali pirates were good at their jobs.
Source:Ocnus.net 2009
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