From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Tue Feb 24 2009 - 00:53:56 EST
http://www.fpif.org/fpifzines/wb/5834
Our Pirates and Theirs
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 captured over $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.