Pirates Are People Too…!

Daniela Kroslak in the ‘Independent’ is quick to point out that the outbreaks of piracy off the coast of Somalia are not, as you might have expected, the result of opportunistic criminals, but the fault of the western world’s failure to yet again share their wealth with the deserving third world.

Oh, and of course, America:

Living in the West, you could be forgiven for thinking that Somalia was little more than a dark and dangerous pirate theme park where American ship captains and US special forces go to gain their 15 minutes of fame.

Yes, I’m sure that’s why they rescued those hostages – the CNN appearances.

Hard though it may be to understand, sweetie, but when criminals take hostages and threaten international trading routes, some people aren’t prepared to immediately look to see how they can ‘understand’ and appease them, in order to keep themselves in a safe, secure, well paid job.

But please, continue telling us all how it’s everyone else’s fault that these poor souls are driven to a life of crime:

But piracy off the coast of the Horn of Africa is merely a symptom, not the disease. The underlying issue is that the world has left Somalia to fester as a failed state for 18 years.

Why is it the responsibility of ‘the world’ to resolve the problems of Somalia? It’s a sovereign country. Let it resolve its own problems.

But it seems that there’s nothing that can’t be resolved by having well-paid ‘crisis workers’ on the ground promising aid money to prevent people from having to break maritime laws:

The epicentre of the problem manifested in the piracy upsurge is the semi-autonomous region of Puntland. After being a relative success story within Somalia, Puntland risks becoming another failure. The international community needs to focus on training a coastguard and security forces more widely and engage with pirate groups to draw them into a refashioned security sector.

This has to go hand-in-hand with an economic rescue package that would revive Puntland and create an alternative for those drawn to piracy out of sheer survival.

Or as we prefer to call it in the unenlightened west, ‘protection money’.

Seriously, how is this different from paying the Mafia to not burn your business down? If I employ Rentokil for a vermin problem, I expect them to find and exterminate the vermin, not provide them with an alternative food source somewhere else.

The international community should also draw up a list of individuals who pull the strings of the piracy business, undercut their distribution systems and threaten travel bans and legal procedures against those – the majority, in fact – who have dual Somali/Western nationality.

Who are we talking about here, then? Don’t play coy – name names!

Instead of conducting military operations that would give the pirates and the insurgency a common cause, the international community should bring radicals to the negotiation table and be willing to make concessions to them for the benefit of peace, if and when they abandon their aggressive anti-government campaign.

Sorry, sweetie, but I think we here in the west prefer to reduce the numbers of vermin, rather than encourage them to act less verminous (for a short time) with tempting offers of other people’s money.

It’s a shame if that means that there will be less need for ‘crisis negotiators’ in future, but it’s a tough world…