Petting the Somali Pirates -- Pt 1

It had to happen.

The Somali pirates, having been thus far given free -- or almost free -- reign to range far and wide in the seas off the Horn of Africa, finally tried a few days ago to hijack a  U.S. cargo ship.  And what's more, they chose a vessel fully manned not by an assortment of people of many nationalities but instead  consisting entirely of U.S. citizens -- a situation that I had thought no longer existed.  Or, to use the D.C. Rainbow street parlance in the days of my youth, the pirates tried to "yoke" the ship, or, more accurately, its crew.  Because, in extremis, a ship, being inanimate, can be sacrificed, but never a crew of living people.

And now suddenly, as a purveyor from NY of certain forbidden substances who briefly was seen around in my more recent but still distant days loved to say, seriousness sets in.  Or at least it's supposed to, because this was no ordinary Ukrainian or German or Turkish or Saudi or any other ship of some funny foreign nationality, as always and so profusely in the past.  No, this one -- gulp goddammit! -- was an American ship, with 20 full-blooded Americans aboard!  And that means that now, though it apparently didn't beforehand, something finally has to be done -- something more solid and lasting than merely  grabbing three or four pirates, as an American warship and, before that a frigate from India managed to do just recently and hauled them off to some never disclosed fate and place, which could have involved their release later and their return to their yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum activities.

But the way this most recent incident of piracy has gone down has left me  suspicious, and I wonder if all along different kinds of collusion between the pirates and the shipping companies and others haven't been going on, because, as I have said before, though there's a strong tendency to see things that way, piracy is no joke.  It's not in any way a quaint relic from the storied and now long-gone past, set on the Spanish Main .  Instead it's a form of hijacking, and just as virulent as any other form, and I see no reason why it shouldn't be just as reviled as car jackings or the acts that led to four airliners failing to land safely eight years ago this coming September 11..

This ship,  American flagged but oddly named the Maersk Alabama because Danish interests are somehow tied in, has been described as being a small container ship.  But it is rated at 17,000 tons and it looks gigantic to me, with a windowed superstructure five or six stories high.   Yet, supposedly, after a pursuit, supposedly, of up to five hours, it was boarded by a mere four men from one skiff or speedboat -- both terms have been used in the news reports, though for some undisclosed reason, whatever their arriving vessel was, the pirates themselves sank it, supposedly, after they threw a grappling hook  aboard and climbed up on the Maersk.

Usually the Somali pirates have found it necessary to use nine or ten men to board a ship, but in this case  they succeeded with a mere quartet -- armed with assault rifles and what-not but still a very small number for so much nautical real estate and with five times that number of  red-blooded American sailors aboard.  But their success was short-lived, though we still don't know exactly how that happened, except that the captain, "to save his crew," heroically offered himself as a hostage, and he ended up down on the water in one of the ship's lifeboats, along  with all four of the pirates.   The reports were that the American sailors, supposedly a harder-nosed bunch than sailors of any other nationality, threw these  Somali cutthroats armed with AK-47's and what-not off the ship, which had never been done before by any crew in this era of Somali piracy.

  The ship's crew held on to one of the pirates, so as to use him to negotiate a trade for the captain.  But after that fourth and last pirate was returned to his buddies down in the lifeboat, the Somalis predictably and even understandably didn't hold up their end of the bargain, and  as of now, the heroic captain remains their prisoner, still adrift with his captors in the lifeboat.

But not alone.   Having needed a day to get there, an American destroyer is fully on the scene with all its modern weaponry, including an unmanned drone, which is kept hovering over the lifeboat and sending back pictures, while the destroyer sits close by, and the Maersk is steaming on to Kenya to deliver its cargo consisting of food aid for a great many hungry people in that part of Africa, and while several other U.S. warships are on the way to the lifeboat scene. so they can take part in the fun.

And it is going to be fun, because the pirates still have the captain, and so what now?

I can't possibly be the only one, can I, who sees this whole matter so far as being a big mess-up?  On the face of things the attempt to watch out for and to fend off the pirates was severely lacking.  To all appearances  the hijack attempt on the part of the pirates was misconceived and deeply flawed.   Certain signs suggest that  the crew's resistance to and the ejection of the pirates was bungled and maybe even non-existent.  And it's easy to think that neither the Captain's scheme nor the hostage exchange was  at all thought through to a reasonably likely good end.   Yet, long before it started,  all the parties had had plenty of time to plan what they would do, and had been talking about it.

Now all that remains is to see what the pirates and the American authorities will do.

It's hard to see any way that all this can come out very well, because too many people see themselves as being too distant from it, not only in geographic and human terms, but also in terms of eras.  But maybe one day in these hard economic times, from a TV series that was seriously lacking in worthwhile messages they will at least and at last remember  that one guiding principle behind the things that an American gangster, though a fictional character,  Tony Soprano, did, which he revealed whenever he spoke of  something being "bad for business."