 The violent attack on a cruise liner off Somalia's coast shows pirates from the anarchic country on the Horn of Africa are becoming bolder and more ambitious in their efforts to hijack ships for ransom and loot, a maritime official warned Sunday. Judging by the location of Saturday's attack, the pirates likely were from the same group that hijacked a U.N.-chartered aid ship in June and held its crew and food cargo hostage for 100 days, said Andrew Mwangura, head of the Kenyan chapter of the Seafarers Assistance Program. That gang is one of three well-organized pirate groups on the 1,880-mile coast of Somalia, which has had no effective government since opposition leaders ousted a dictatorship in 1991 and then turned on each other, leaving the nation of 7 million a patchwork of warlord fiefdoms.
| That's... ummm... divide by eleven, carry the six, square root of 29... 14 years of uninterrupted Emma Goldmann-style anarchy. |
Illustrating the chaos, attackers in Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, threw grenades and exploded a land mine Sunday near a convoy carrying the prime minister of a transitional government that has been trying to exert control since late last year. The attack, which killed at least five bodyguards, was the second in six months involving explosions near Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, whose internally divided government spends much of its time in Kenya.
| That's probably the most intelligent thing they could do, next to dropping the idea of trying to govern Somalia. Somaliland and Puntland seem to be getting along okay, so maybe the long-term goal should be to just let the area break up into squabbling ministates. Either that, or tear the whole place down and put in a Wal-Mart. |
Even before the attack on the liner Seabourn Spirit, Gedi had urged neighboring countries to send warships to patrol Somalia's coast, which is Africa's longest and lies along key shipping lanes linking the Mediterranean with the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. U.S. and NATO warships patrol the region to protect vessels in deeper waters farther out, but they are not permitted in Somali territorial waters.
| That raises an interesting question: Somalia has no government, so who is doing the forbidding? And what are they going to do if we simply ignore the restriction? |
Despite those patrols, the heavily armed pirates approached the cruise ship about 100 miles at sea, underlining their increasing audacity. The International Maritime Bureau has for several months warned ships to stay at least 150 miles away from Somalia's coast, citing 25 pirate attacks in those waters since March 15 — compared with just two for all of 2004. Somali pirates are trained fighters with maritime knowledge, identifying targets by listening to the international radio channel used by ships at sea, Mwangura said. "Sometimes they trick the mariners by pretending that they have a problem and they should come to assist them — they send bogus distress signals," he said. "They are getting more powerful, more vicious and bolder day by day."
| The Royal Navy used to be pretty good at cleaning out nests of pirates and hanging them. The U.S. didn't do badly at it, either — think Stephen Decatur. I think it would be a damned legitimate operation in support of the War on Terror to send in the Marines, whether Royal or U.S. or both. |
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