from the hip

As a kid, I used to love playing a pirate. There was something mysteriously romantic and exotic about pirates. When we played pirates, we all had pistols, some of the guys would also have swords or knives. And masks and eye patches, of course, was a part of it, as pirates, in our conception, were usually one eyed.

Later I admit to liking to read historical novels with fights with pirates, like for instance Dewey Lambdin’s books about the fictional naval hero Alan Lewrie or Steve Brennan’s The Gigantic Book of Pirate Stories. But until recently I have considered piracy something remote, something belonging to ancient times, even though I knew that the practice has persisted in the Malacca straits and a few other places.

However. I can’t say that I find the surge in piracy that we have witnessed recently very romantic. Piracy seems, oddly, to have become a booming business in some parts of the world. Sea borne piracy against transport vessels is a significant issue (with estimated worldwide losses of US $13 to $16 billion per year), particularly in the waters between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, off the Somali coast, and also in the Strait of Malacca and Singapore, which are used by over 50,000 commercial ships a year. You can see a list of the pirate prone areas at the ICC web site.

The business model employed by some of the modern pirates, most notably the pirates in Somalia, is fairly straight forward. They hijack ships, take over control, bring them into harbor some place along the coast, and then negotiate a price for freeing the ship, including, usually, its crew and cargo. The modern pirates favor small, fast boats and take advantage of the small number of crew members on modern cargo vessels. They also use large vessels to supply the smaller attack/boarding vessels.

Modern piracy thrive on conditions of political unrest. Thus, countries with limited territorial control provide good bases for modern piracy. You can see a movie of pirates taking a capture super tanker into a little fishing village in Somalia on Guardians web site! (See also New York Times on this).

It is to some extent odd that this practice can exist today. The Romans fought piracy, and at one point largely wiped it out in the Mediterranean. But today, with modern fighter planes, modern navies, efficient guns and rockets, as well as electronic surveillance, that fight should be much easier, even though the seas are still huge. As it is, we don’t really fight them, even though the West sometimes gets into the occasional little fight and some of them are killed or captured.

I think they survive because of leniency from the West. As long as they don’t expand their business too much, and don’t really do too much damage to international shipping, and especially the oil trade, they are more or less ignored – at least in the sense that the West is unwilling to use the level of force necessary to remove the problem completely. Also, who is to pay for it? The pirates to some extent get away with it because the patrols and military actions required to take them out is a collective good nobody at present is willing to pay for.

So, modern piracy is bad, but I think it is bad because we permit it to happen.