Piracy – Cons-piracy

It’s really amazing how easily we have accepted the rebirth of marine piracy in the 21st Century!

Yes, we did have some piracy in the previous hundred years, notably in the South China Sea in the early 1960s but that was just an offshoot activity in the usual gang war of the Chinese Triads. It was never self-sufficient like the kind of piracy we encounter today in the Gulf of Aden.

An article in the Russian weekly magazine, Profil suggests direct parallels between piracy as a professional occupation in modern-day Somalia and the 17th & 18th century piracy in the Caribbean. In the article, the small port of Eyl in the north-east of Somalia is compared with the island of Tortuga, the ‘capital’ of the pirates of the Caribbean.

I would like to expand this parallel further and look into the origin of piracy in the 17th & 18th centuries. History tells us that Caribbean piracy, like most other historical instances of piracy, was not born spontaneously.

In most cases piracy was born with government support or at least with a claim to it. Governments issued ‘privateer’ licences in times of war to volunteers, who then went forth to disrupt the marine supply routes of the enemy.

The three countries that issued the biggest number of such documents, and mostly against each other, were Spain, Britain and France. Tortuga became the pirate capital, first of all, because it was an island belonging to France situated in close proximity to both British and French colonies in America. Another pirate hub was in Port Royal, Jamaica.

When the war was over the pirates were usually very reluctant to discontinue their profitable activities. So the captains pretended not to admit to the end of hostilities for as long as they could – sometimes for months, sometimes for years. As a result, official navies started hunting them down.

However, even during times when the officialdom was after the pirates’ heads, many pirate captains remained on the secret payroll of the governments. They were, speaking modern spook lingo, the deniable assets of marine covert operations of the 18th century.

The pirates of our day were born not of the state but of statelessness. The chaos that has prevailed in Somalia for the past decade, and the proximity of the Somalian coast to major shipping routes created the combination of circumstances that gave birth to the new instance of organised marine crime. At least, this version of its origin is widely accepted today.

However, we can name a few other places in the world where the same set of circumstances came and passed totally infertile. Why then does large-scale piracy occur in this particular area? There’s no definite answer to this question so far.

That’s where the conspiracy theories come in.

The magazine article quoted above says that the region of pirate activity is included in the area of operations of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. The article says that for the fleet fighting the pirates is a nuisance as its main task is to close up the Strait of Hormuz if Iran becomes hostile.

But is it true? What is a joint anti-pirate operation with other NATO naval assets plus Malaysian, Singaporean, Indonesian and Russian ships, for the American Fifth Fleet? Just another live-fire exercise, and a useful one at that, with elements of coordination between naval forces of different nations led in combat by a U.S. carrier group. Why then is the U.S. fleet reluctant about fighting the pirates?

What if modern pirates are also used as deniable assets for covert operations by an intelligence service of a major power? The capture of the Ukrainian vessel loaded with tanks and military supplies looks very much like a set-up arranged in order to expose an illegal arms trade deal with links to the highest echelons of power in Ukraine.

Some time earlier a mysterious illness took the lives of several pirates while they were holding an Iranian freighter full of ‘mineral ore’ – those who tried to open the crates containing the cargo all died. Some say it was radiation that killed them. It seems feasible, given the symptoms described in the media: headaches, nausea, hair falling out.

Well, one thing that definitely escapes me here is how a small-time hold-up business that started a decade ago from ‘tax’ put by local toughs in Eyl on the catch of foreign fishing boats that fished in Somalia’s waters, then stayed for seven years at the level of small and mid-sized fishing trawlers, and then suddenly, a couple of years ago, moved to hijacking big ocean-going vessels?

What was it? A Marxist ‘quality leap’, when the quantity of repeated operations is supposed to cause an upward jump in the quality? Or did someone ‘educate’ the pirates on organisation and combat tactics? Some people, including me, think the latter may be true.

Media coverage of the crisis over the Ukrainian vessel surprises me greatly. We learn everything from the TV screen – how the Russian Captain died of a heart attack, how the pirates treat the captured crew and feed them well, how the pirates are ready to blow up the boat together with the crew and they even have set up a timer at the exact time when the bomb will go off.

But what we do not learn is where the weapons come from and where exactly they were going on that slow boat. There were attempts to tell that story at the early stages of the freighter’s captivity, but they have long since died out. It feels like there are no takers for such information – while it reeks of a big scandal an investigative reporter would die for.                                

One of the conspiracy theories has it that anti-neocon forces inside the U.S. intelligence community have been at least giving hints to the pirates about the kind of cargo the boats are carrying, and maybe doing even more for the ‘new privateers’. It may be so. Or there may be a totally different explanation in store for us. Let’s wait it out, let’s not spoil the pleasure – we will know when the time comes.

The world of conspiracies, covert operations, political spin and news coverage is very much like a Chekhov play: if there is a shotgun hanging on the wall in the first act, it will definitely be fired before the play’s end.

Evgeny Belenkiy, RT. 

Related links:

Pirates refuse food and water for hostages
Pirates not in control of the situation?
Pirates threaten to blow up ship
Somalian pirates want ransom for Ukrainian arms
Pirates die mysteriously on captured Iranian ship
Pirates seize 33 Ukrainian tanks