US military takes on latter-day pirates
NAIROBI, Kenya - The U.S. military is once again tangling with pirates, intervening in waters off Somalia twice this week to help ships seized by hijackers — and bringing to mind another century's battles off Africa.
Pirates may have swapped muskets and the Jolly Roger for AK-47s and satellite phones, but the root causes of piracy are little-changed from when Thomas Jefferson contemplated how to handle attacks on American merchant ships two centuries ago.
"Instead of swinging from ropes, now it's boarding vessels with automatic weapons," said Cyrus Mody, a senior analyst at the International Maritime Bureau, which tracks pirate attacks.
The Barbary pirates of Jefferson's day took advantage of vast, unpatrolled African territory and leaders that encouraged criminality to prey on American merchant ships.
Today, impoverished and weak governments in Africa have few resources to police on land, much less patrol territorial waters that can stretch a dozen or more miles into the ocean. The lack of security near major shipping lanes has created fertile ground for hijackers, and the U.S. Navy came to the aid of hijacked vessels from North Korea and Japan this week in the waters off Somalia.
"This is a very serious security problem on the African coast. These are not pirates who will remind you of Johnny Depp. These are quite different kinds of pirates," Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill told reporters Friday in Seoul, South Korea.
Virtually nowhere in Africa does a government wield less authority than in Somalia, a land awash in weapons and displaced people, with Islamic insurgents battling government and allied Ethiopian troops. The U.S. military has targeted suspected al-Qaida fighters with airstrikes in Somalia.
Some Somali pirates are linked to the clans that have carved the country into armed fiefdoms. They have seized merchant ships, aid vessels and even a cruise ship.
On Sunday, a U.S. destroyer destroyed two pirate skiffs lashed to a hijacked Japanese tanker carrying highly flammable benzene and 23 crew members. The Navy said Friday it continued to monitor the ship, which is still under the pirates' control.
The U.S. military says it doesn't intend to act as the sole police force on the open oceans, but says a long tradition demands rendering help to any ship that requests it, regardless of origin. Security on the high seas would mean less smuggling, piracy and terrorism, says Cmdr. Lydia Robertson, of the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.
Capt. Sellathurai Mahalingam recalled the 2005 hijacking of the MD Semlow as it carried 850 tons of World Food Program rice from Mombasa, Kenya, to Somalia's war-ruined capital Mogadishu.
Armed with pistols, rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikov assault rifles, the pirates pulled alongside the ship. "They climbed on board tired and hungry," the 60-year-old captain said. "After they threatened us, they went to the kitchen and ate all our food."
The pirates held the crew for nearly 100 days, finally releasing them after prolonged negotiations between the pirates and the ship's Kenyan owner and the U.N. agency, Mahalingam said. "These pirates, I think what they're doing is terrible," he said.
What is your opnion? Us protecting american interests? Or ulterior motive?