Somali Pirates

[Diet Coke]

MOMBASA: Somali pirates fired grenades and automatic weapons at an American freighter loaded with food aid but the ship managed to escape the attack and headed to Kenya under US Navy guard, officials said.

One of the pirate commanders said yesterday the attack on the American freighter Liberty Sun late Tuesday was aimed at "destroying" the ship in revenge for an operation that freed a US captain.

"This attack was the first against our prime target," pirate commander Abdi Garad told AFP. "We intended to destroy this American-flagged ship and the crew on board but unfortunately they narrowly escaped us.

"The aim of this attack was totally different. We were not after a ransom. We also assigned a team with special equipment to chase and destroy any ship flying the American flag in retaliation for the brutal killing of our friends."

Despite US President Barack Obama's vow to halt their banditry and the deaths of five pirates in recent French and US hostage rescue missions, brigands seized four vessels and more than 75 hostages off the Horn of Africa since Sunday's dramatic rescue of the American freighter captain, Richard Phillips.

That brought the total number of sailors being held by Somali pirates to over 300 on 17 different ships — a distinct surge in the number of captives over the last few days.

Pirates can extort $1 million or more for each ship and crew — and Kenya estimates they raked in $150 million last year.

The Liberty Sun's American crew was not injured in the latest attack but the vessel sustained some damage, owner of the Liberty Maritime Corp. said.

Still, the attack foiled the reunion between Richard Phillips and the 19-man crew of the Maersk Alabama who he had saved with his heroism.

Capt. Phillips was planning to meet his crew in the Kenyan port of Mombasa and fly home with them yesterday. But he was on the USS Bainbridge when it was diverted to help the Liberty Sun, and the crew left Mombasa without him yesterday on a chartered plane.

"We are very happy to be going home," crewman William Rios of New York City said before departing. "(But) we are disappointed to not be reuniting with the captain in Mombasa. He is a very brave man."

Maersk spokesman Gordan van Hook said crew members would arrive at Andrews Air Force base in Maryland. Their reunion with Phillips will now take place in the United States, he said, without elaborating.

Liberty Sun sailors used one of the same tactics Phillips employed to foil the pirates — blockading themselves inside the engine room.

"We are under attack by pirates, we are being hit by rockets. Also bullets," crewman Thomas Urbik, 26, wrote his mother in an e-mail Tuesday. "We are barricaded in the engine room and so far no one is hurt. A rocket penetrated the bulkhead but the hole is small. Small fire, too, but put out." The Liberty Sun "conducted evasive maneuvers" to ward off the pirates, said US Navy Lt. Nathan Christensen, spokesman for the Bahrain-based 5th Fleet.

"That could be anything from zigzagging to speeding up to all kinds of things," he said. "We've seen in the past that that can be very effective in deterring a pirate attack." The USS Bainbridge responded to the Liberty Sun's call for help but the pirates had left by the time it arrived five hours later, Navy Capt. Jack Hanzlik said.

The ship, with 20 American mariners, had left Houston with a load of humanitarian food aid for the UN World Food Program. Some of that aid was destined for Somalia, where nearly half the country's seven million people depend on food aid.

This year, Somali pirates have attacked 79 ships and hijacked 19 of them. One pirate declared they are grabbing more ships and hostages now to prove they are not intimidated by Obama's pledge.

"Our latest hijackings are meant to show that no one can deter us from protecting our waters from the enemy because we believe in dying for our land," Omar Dahir Idle told The Associated Press by telephone from the Somali port of Harardheere.

Pirates say they are fighting illegal fishing and dumping of toxic waste in Somali waters but now operate hundreds of miles from there in a sprawling 1.1 million square-mile danger zone.

In another development, a French warship patrolling waters off East Africa as part of an EU anti-piracy force captured 11 pirates near the Kenyan coast yesterday, the French Defense Ministry said.

The frigate chased the pirates 500 nautical miles east of the Kenyan coast after tracking them overnight from the scene of a failed attack on a Liberian-registered vessel, a ministry spokesman said.

"The pirates were sailing a 10-meter mother ship carrying 17 drums holding 200 liters of fuel each and two assault skiffs," he said, adding that the captives were being held on board the French warship, the Nivose.


These guys obviously fear no one, least of all the US Navy it seems.

[ziggysego]

I know a guy that was kidnapped by pirates a few years ago. Scary handing.

[under the bar]

The Somalian fishermen have been raped by the international community for years.   Due to the civil unrest,  huge super-trawlers have been breaking international laws by fishing close to the shore under cover of darkness, decimating the fish stocks and leaving nothing for the fishermen to earn a meagre living off.  In fact many have been killed in their small boats at night by the cruising trawlers that turn all lights off while pillaging the Somalian waters.   The pirates are mainly made up of these disgruntled fishermen.    Who can blame them?

[Declan]

Interesting alternative view

You Are Being Lied to About Pirates

by Johann Hari

Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William Scott would understand those words.

No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?

[T Fearon]

Not one of them bears even the slightest resemblance to Johnny Depp either

[Diet Coke]

I have to say I think I'll pass on the glow in the dark fish supper.

[Donagh]

 

Somali pirates attack French military vessel

By ELAINE GANLEY (AP) – 2 hours ago

PARIS — Somali pirates in two skiffs fired on a French navy vessel early Wednesday after apparently mistaking it for a commercial boat, the French military said. The French ship gave chase and captured five suspected pirates.

No one was wounded by the volleys from the Kalashnikov rifles directed at La Somme, a 3,800-ton refueling ship, said Rear Admiral Christophe Prazuck, a military spokesman.

La Somme "was probably taken for a commercial ship by the two small skiffs" some 250 nautical miles off the coast of Somalia, said Prazuck.

"They understood their mistake too late," Prazuck said.

One skiff fled, and La Somme pursued the second one in an hour-long chase.

"There were five suspected pirates on board. No arms, no water, no food," Prazuck said.

France is a key member of the European Union's naval mission, Operation Atalanta, fighting Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden. It has aggressively tracked and caught suspected pirates and handed over at least 22 to Kenya. An additional 15 suspects were brought to France for prosecution after allegedly seizing French nationals' boats.

President Nicolas Sarkozy called for tougher action against piracy last year after dozens of attacks.