| Ander Nieuws week 42 / nieuwe oorlog 2008 |
The National (VAE)
October 04, 2008
Tony Karon
As the world economy creaked slowly over the edge of the abyss last week, business was booming in the East African seaside village of Hobyo. There, a local entrepreneur called Sugule Ali worked the international media by sat-phone as he pondered the gains from his latest hostile takeover – of the freighter Faina.
Ali could be called a captain of industry in what's left of Somalia. His business is piracy, and business is booming: pirates have attacked 62 ships this year, exchanging the vessels and their crews for ransoms estimated at $30 million.
That infusion of cash has jump-started the local economy in nearby towns such as Eyl, sparking a boom in construction and support industries like restaurants to feed the hostage crews while pirate "accountants" carrying laptops and sat-phones negotiate with shipping companies (who usually pay). Ali initially set his ransom for the Faina at $30 million, expecting to make as much as the whole industry had taken this year for just the one ship – because of its cargo. The Ukrainian vessel, flying the flag of Belize, was carrying 33 Russian T-72 tanks, a large number of RPGs and other armaments. He soon dropped his price to $20 million, and lower – maybe because the US Navy had sailed a warship to within spitting distance of the pirate camp, and a Russian frigate was on its way.
The urgency of America's response to the Faina's hijacking was driven by its primary strategic objective in the region – pursuing al Qa'eda and all who would associate with it. The danger of a shipload of heavy weapons falling into the hands of radical Islamists needed to be nipped in the bud.
Of course, the US pursuit of al Qa'eda may inadvertently have nurtured piracy. There is no government authority in most of Somalia, and the last force capable of enforcing security and stability in Mogadishu – the Islamic Courts movement, which largely stamped out piracy during its brief period of authority in 2006 – was driven out of the city by a US-backed Ethiopian invasion two years ago because it harboured a handful of al Qa'eda suspects.
But they remain popular and powerful, continuing to challenge rival Somali and foreign troops, and the restoration of a state capable of ensuring law and order is unlikely without a political settlement involving them: a situation not unlike Afghanistan, some might say, where the prospect of a military defeat of the Taliban is highly unlikely.
What prompted the Russians to send a ship from their Baltic Fleet to the Horn of Africa is a little more complex. Sure, three of the Faina's crew members are Russian citizens, and the weaponry on board is traditional Soviet fare. But it was sent not from Russia but from Ukraine, its Nato-inclined neighbour, and the destination of the tanks raises the geopolitical stakes even further: the Kenyan government insists that the arms shipment was destined for its own military, but the worst-kept secret in Nairobi is that it was being sent to the Kenyan-backed rebel administration in southern Sudan, whose three-decade civil war with Khartoum may be about to reignite.
Indeed, Sudan's government urged the Russians to attack the pirates, and bearing in mind Russia's recent naval exercises off Venezuela, Moscow may be taking the opportunity to flex its muscle in support of a potential client state (Sudan) and signal its reluctance to allow the US to continue playing solo global sheriff. Moscow may also want to ensure that the Faina's cargo never reaches its destination.
For Ali and his men, it's simply about business – a business they say they were forced into as fishermen whose waters were no longer protected by a state, who first armed themselves to defend those waters against fishing vessels from other countries. These days they like to paint themselves as Robin Hood figures, taxing the shipping of the rich countries on behalf of the wretched of the Earth.
Whatever the outcome, the Faina standoff is simply another symptom of the declining post-Cold War order. Indeed, last week's events in the Gulf of Aden are not unconnected with last week's events in Washington, where a political class steeped in the theology of unregulated capital markets struggled to slow the tsunami of financial collapse that those very markets had created. The Cold War spy novelist John Le Carre once remarked that "the right side lost the Cold War, but the wrong side won", indicating his disdain for the swaggering US geopolitical juggernaut. But America's reign as sole superpower seems to have been all too brief, and last week's events made clear that US dominance of the global financial system is now likely to go the same way as its geopolitical hegemony: it's unlikely that the contraction of the American economy even as it expands its gargantuan national debt will allow for continued expeditionary military deployments on anything close to their current scale.
So, despite declarations of intent to police the waters off Somalia by the US, Europe and Russia, the pirates of Puntland may not have too much reason to worry.
Their lifestyle will be seriously threatened only when those seeking to secure the coastline recognise that it can't be done without stabilising Somalia – which, in turn, can't be done without reconciling, or at least coexisting with, the very radical Islamists that the US had hoped to destroy: just like in Afghanistan.
The post-post Cold War world is upon us, and avoiding the "war of all against all" will require an ability to make peace, or at least find ways of agreeing to differ, with most.
Tony Karon is a senior editor at Time.com and publishes the website Rootless Cosmopolitan
© Copyright of Abu Dhabi Media Company FZLLC.
Original link
| Ander Nieuws week 42 / nieuwe oorlog 2008 |