Somali pirates  keep their hostages alive and well-fed (Boston Globe)

(Somalia, January, 13  2009 Ceegaag Online) 

Somali pirates, we hardly knew you!

Consider this a premature obituary for the most enjoyable media story of the past six months - the pirates of Puntland, one of many destitute provinces of the lawless Horn of Africa. Captain Jack Sparrow struck the colors, interest-wise, around the time of the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" sequel, but the Evinrude-enabled Somalis maintain their purchase on our imagination.

Not for long, I fear. A motley band of international revenooers is converging on the Horn, bent on putting our freebooters out of business. Taken individually, the navies of India, China, Canada, Malaysia, the United States, and France terrify no one. But collectively they may achieve their aim, the eradication of piracy off Africa's northeast coast. Somali pirate futures have been trading at all-time lows. If they were a stock, you would sell them.

Middle-class morality insists that we condemn the pirates. Of course, middle-class morality chooses to ignore the salubrious role of piracy, a.k.a. "privateering," in America's glorious revolution, and chooses to hail John Paul Jones as the father of the US Navy, rather than as the pirate king he really was.

Perhaps middle-class morality is too quick to judge. The Somali pirates are not particularly bloodthirsty. They keep their hostages alive and well-fed, all the better to ransom them. Whom do they victimize? (1) Insurer Lloyd's of London (who cares?). (2) The oil-shipping brigands of OPEC (see previous). If anything, the pirates have been helping the world's oil cartel by taking supply off the market at a time when the oil-producing nations lack the discipline to cut back production.

Some say the pirate boom is payback for so-called civilized countries' rape of Somalia's coast. Because Somalia lacks what most people would call a government, countries like Spain, France, and Taiwan haven't hesitated to invade the country's territorial waters and extinguish their fishing stocks. The pirates know those waters intimately, because many of them are displaced fishermen.

More shockingly, Johann Hari of the London Independent reports that European nations have been dumping toxic, radioactive medical waste into offshore Somali waters for several years. "Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome?" Hari writes. He concludes that the pirates "have some justice on their side."

A few weeks ago, a friend and I wondered if we could find a way to invest in the pirates. At a time when purportedly respectable businesses like Lehman Brothers and insurance mammoth AIG - talk about pirates! - are cratering, the Somali gangs looked like a good place to put our money. They run a low-overhead business, with fixed costs limited to such essentials as an open-water skiff, a 250-horsepower outboard, cast-off Soviet weaponry, and "ghetto" do-rags. The risk-reward ratio is quite favorable. For an investment of, say, $2,000, you could end up with $10 million in ransom and payoffs, after taxes. Oh, wait. There are no taxes in Somalia.

Digging deeper, as they say in econ-lingo, we observe the "pirate multiplier effect." The pirates, like Paula Abdul, spread their booty around. According to the BBC, a core group of about seven to 10 pirate/entrepreneurs usually launches an operation, then recruits 50 more pirates to baby-sit their catch, and 50 more to mind their interests onshore.

In a town such as Eyl, a Drambuie-esqe pirate den in Somalia, "it's like the California gold rush," terrorism expert Peter Lehr of Scotland's University of St. Andrews explained to me. "There are new streets, new hotels, and new restaurants all catering to this pirate industry. There's no other business in Somalia, except possibly the black market in weapons. Piracy is the only economic show in town."

Lehr thinks I am writing off the marauders of the Horn prematurely. "You Americans are so optimistic," he chides. (No, pessimistic; I like the pirates!) Yes, the world's navies are closing in, "but you are talking about patrolling 3,000 miles of coastline," Lehr says. "You can't just start shelling them the way America did with the Barbary Pirates in the 19th century. For one thing, you don't know who they are. They aren't sitting around with wooden legs and parrots squawking on their shoulders."

Hmmm. Maybe I will invest, after all.

Source: Boston Globe

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