The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [112]
With the cost of future attacks increasingly likely to be measured in blood in lieu of dollars, bringing a swift end to the scourge of piracy has never been more imperative.
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What might be done to solve the piracy problem?
Since the mid-1990s, Somali nation-building has been divided between those advocating for the “building block” approach—supporting stable, autonomous regions from the bottom up—and the top-down approach, as represented by the Transitional Federal Government (TFG). This latter strategy, which has held sway since 2000 (when the first in a series of transitional national governments was proclaimed), has been a disaster from the start. The TFG is a government in name only: its members have no constituents and its ministers no portfolios, and its continued existence rests only on the blind willingness of its international backers to believe that a fantasy is real. Yet the international community has remained steadfast in its patronage. At an April 2009 donor conference held in Brussels, for instance, Western nations pledged $250 million to support the TFG and fund the African Union’s AMISOM peacekeeping mission, the only force preventing Shabaab from driving the few MPs remaining in Mogadishu into the sea. No money, conversely, was set aside either for Puntland or Somaliland.
Piracy in Puntland, I believe, is a direct symptom of the international community’s failed strategy of nation-building in Somalia. The decline of Puntland’s political and economic stability from 2005 to 2008 laid the groundwork for the subsequent piracy outbreak—a crisis that may have been averted had the international community diverted a fraction of its attention to stabilizing Puntland (by helping the administration meet its payrolls, for example). As Puntland came apart at the seams, the United States and other donors continued to put money towards the mortars and machine guns that would buy another stay of execution for the besieged members of Somalia’s official national government.
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If there is one thing on which every commentator on Somali piracy agrees, it is that the problem must be solved on land, not merely at sea. Startlingly few, however, explain what an on-the-ground solution might entail, other than the swift return of a functioning government to Somalia—as if the state collapse of the last two decades were the result of a lack of effort. Other analysts counsel military force, citing the United States’ successful nineteenth-century war against the Barbary pirates—during which US marines ultimately invaded North Africa—as an educational precedent.3 But although the UN Security Council has authorized land-based measures, the current security climate makes deploying ground forces on Somali soil a madman’s proposition, and no country has volunteered (or will) its troops for such an errand.
Non-payment of ransoms is another policy option that has been discussed very seriously at the highest levels—both the UK government and the Baltic and International Maritime Council (the world’s biggest shipping association), for example, have counselled against giving in to pirate demands. Concerns that the pirates may be linked to Al-Shabaab have also led to calls to treat pirate payoffs like ransoms to terrorist groups—explicitly prohibited under any circumstances. Perhaps if shipping companies had taken a firm anti-ransom stance five years ago, Somali piracy would never have developed into the current epidemic. But the time for such brinksmanship is over; after over a decade of steadily increasing ransoms, the threat of withholding payments is no longer credible.
Notwithstanding the savage murders of the four American yachters, the pirates rarely kill, and it is