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Somali Pirates Open Up a "Stock Exchange"
reginaldo writes to clue us that pirates in Somalia have opened up a cooperative in Haradheere, where investors can pay money or guns to help their favorite pirate crew for a share of the piracy profits. "'Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 "maritime companies" and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking,' Mohammed [a wealthy former pirate who took a Reuters reporter to the facility] said. ... Piracy investor Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee, was lined up with others waiting for her cut of a ransom pay-out after one of the gangs freed a Spanish tuna fishing vessel. 'I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation,' she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony. 'I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the "company."'"
I'd say they may well get their money back, plus much more. The pirates aren't the same guys as the scam artists. These guys are getting some serious money, but they do need investment upfront to fund the operations... Just because they are criminals in one respect, doesn't necessarily mean they are in all respects.
I think you're missing the point. This is not something Wall Street bankers are going to be investing in. The kind of people chipping in to this operation are probably the sort of people who are just as likely as the pirates themselves to not take being cheated so well, and express that dissatisfaction with automatic weapons.
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Its honestly the other way round. Somalia is a failed state, a pure anarchy, and has been that way for a long time. Many of these pirates are teens that have never known what its like to have a government and are desperately poor and close to starving. Its cheaper for them to buy an AK-47 than to buy a meal. The area is in a terrible famine and drought, farming is not sustainable. The fishing grounds have been bleed dry as they were the only productive food source for a time. They have a choice of joining the islamists as suicide bombers, the genocidal warlords as child soldiers or becoming a pirate.
This is unregulated laissez faire capitalism at its finest. I'm so proud, little Somolia is growing up.
Wrong. There is partial regulation.
In a truly unregulated market the vessels losing millions of dollars would instead pay millions of dollars to have all of the pirates killed.
But they cannot do that because they are regulated.
This is nothing more than an example of uneven regulation (which is usually a sign of corruption, I'm looking at you united nations).
The difference in attitude comes from four things: First, the pirates who are primarily romanticized are pirates from European countries. Since the people doing the romanticization are Westerners this makes them more appealing since they potentially share more (geographicaly, culturally, ethnically etc.) Notice how Americans don't romanticize the Barbary pirates. Second, Somalia in particular has a history of problems interacting with the United States (remember the battle of Mogadishu?) and so the attitude their carries over directly to anything Americans hear anything connected to Somalia. Third, the current piracy more directly impacts our society's well-being. It is much harder to romanticize people when they are taking your goods and capturing people who are alive and have family to tell their stories and hardships to the media. This is directly related to the fourth point, romanticization is much easier when it is something that happened a long time ago. In that regard it is similar to humor (joking about the Inquisition, ok but potentially tasteless. Joking about the Holocaust. You need to be careful. Joking about 9/11? Yeah, that's going to be hard to pull off).
All of that said, I don't think people really romanticize historical pirates that much. Most of it is deliberately silly. Look at all the Ninja v. Pirate junk. The closest one has to genuine romaniticization are the Pirates of the Caribbean movies but those were a) Disney movies and b) utterly ridiculous (heck, the so called pirates did very little actual pirating unless they were clearly the bad guys).
Ya, those cargo and tanker ships are a real threat to the fishing...
If their gripe is with foreign ships fishing in their waters they should be going after the frakking fishing ships, not the merchant ships well outside their territorial waters.
Which the consumer then pays in higher product costs...
Just a brief read of the article about the Dutch East India Company makes me wonder just how different the two really are.
Somalia doesn't really have a functional government.
Somali pirates are operating in a power vaccuum and will go away once it gets filled.
OTOH, the Dutch East India Company was effectively a legally recognized government.
They had the power to raise armies, sign treaties, invade & depose governments, etc.
It's not just a matter of "how long you've been around".
If you don't see the difference then you're being willfully blind.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It could be that it is cheaper just to wear the occasional losses.
Of course it is cheaper. The shipping companies take out insurance for this situation, and the pirates are careful to keep their demands high enough to make a profit, but low enough that they don't scare the ships away, or force the ships to take a different route or escalate the situation into an armed conflict with the west. It is a straight business decision.
NPR's Planet Money blog did a good podcast a while ago about how the pirating business operates.
--
Simon
Don't the warlords who destroyed their country and turned it into a failed state deserve some (most?) of the blame for that? If they still had a functioning state they would have a Coast Guard and the ability to regulate their waters. Why don't they turn all of those AK-47s and RPGs on the warlords?
It's a matter of willingness to kill. Sure, to well-fed, comfortable, hypocritical activists, us westerners might look like the evil scourge of the planet in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, factory-ship fishing, and industrial waste. But to some poor 18-year-old Somali guy with an AK-47, we're a much friendlier, nicer target than the local warlord. If he shoots at us, we'll try and talk it through with him and he may even get some cash out of the deal. The aforementioned warlord will just have some 9-year-old kid shoot him in the face the moment it looks like he's even thinking about stepping out of line.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
In a New York minute. Better to die on your feet than live on your knees and all that. If freedom isn't worth fighting for, what is?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
That is the propaganda and lies that the pirates have been using to rationalize their lawlessness and I'm surprised anybody literate enough to post to slashdot is foolish enough to fall for it. They have been seizing ships far outside the 12 mile territorial limit and even far outside the 200 mile exclusive economic zone. They are now seizing ships off the Seychelles, which is many hundreds of miles south of Somalia. Seas outside of the exclusive economic zone are free to fish for any nation's fleet. So if this is their reason, why are they seizing yachts which are clearly not outfitted with commercial fishing gear and are hundreds of miles outside of the Somali EEZ? Because they are murderous thieves and thugs; that's why.
"Why don't they turn all of those AK-47s and RPGs on the warlords?"
:/
They do? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somali_Civil_War
400,000 dead sounds like they are making an effort.... Gotta love how informed people are when it comes to black people dying compared to other people dying.
Reminds me of rememberance day when I was in middle school. A jewish ex POW or somesuch came to my school to talk about the horrors in assembly. She said remembrance day was to make sure we never had such ethnic slaughters again, to remember never forget. I asked her why she hadn't even mentioned the millions of people currently dieing in Africa in similar or worse conditions than her own people. She seemed quite unaware that there was even a war occurring in Africa at the time... several in fact. And _I_ got a trip to the principals office for that. People suck.
Wait, so...
The shipping companies don't lose money because they're insured, and the insurers don't lose money because they up the premiums, yet the premium increases don't come out of the shipping companies' pockets?
Sir, I think you have described a perpetuum monetare, a perpetual money machine. While Madoff would be proud, the second law of thermoeconomics says it can't exist.
Think of it this way: if a set of goods is on one set of hands instead of another, the other set of hands is (duh) not having those goods. It lost the equivalent to the amount of money those hands value the goods at. It can spread the loss around (some to itself, some to the insurance company, some to their customers, for instance), but there is a loss.
Otherwise, contemplate the world where I steal everything from everybody, own all the land, and won't trade with anyone; you can all shuffle dollar bills back and forth between insurance companies and the insured, but that won't get you your cars, computers or factories back.
This is a commonly noted reason, but another major reason is that contrary to the Call of Duty playing internet crowd's belief, engaging in a firefight with multiple decade battle hardened militants isn't actually that safe or easy an idea.
People sailing the boats are civilians, they do not have military training, they have never been in combat, by putting them up there against the pirates you're risking far more people getting shot, whilst being hijacked sucks, it's better than having the crew killed.
I'd imagine many people have this vision of the crews being able to see the pirates coming and just gunning them down with a chaingun, but the reality is the pirates often manage to sneak up on vessels either using bad weather, blind spots or the cover of night, so many firefights would involve close quarter combat on the decks of the ship itself. That's really not something you want civilians to be doing against people who have been in a country where they have been shooting at each other for near 20 years now. This is especially important to note also when you realise that against crews of 15 you're sometimes seeing as many as 80 pirates- even if you catch them before they board the ship do you really want to put yourself in the line of fire of even 50+ pirates and start trying to pick them off under fire of 80 or so AK-47s and the odd RPG being returned at you?
The mentality of many people online of "just shoot them" as a solution to many problems is rather ignorant to the difficulties of the reality of the situation. If it was as simple as many online commenters seem to believe, then they would have simply done it by now. The legal barriers are the least of problems, because if it was a real solution to just arm crews then as this is a problem that basically has unilateral agreement from the world's major nations including the 5 permanent security council members then an exception for ships passing through Somali waters would be no big deal. Perhaps the closest solution to arming the crew that would not be as likely to involve the death of half the crew of each ship that encounters pirates would be for security companies like Blackwater (now Xe services) to keep a supply of trained security professionals both north and south of the troubled areas such that ships could pick up a squad of security personnel at one end and drop them off when safely at the other, but of course, whether shipping companies would be willing to foot the bill is a different story and it's questionable how much use even trained personnel would be when outnumbered, and even they're still not immune to hails of gun and RPG fire in return either.
Says someone with a comfortable life.
Because the group of individuals known as a government can't protect your "right" to health-care, basic food, shelter or a job without taking those things from other individuals under threat of imprisonment if they don't cough up. So a "right" to food means someone else has to grow it on their land and hand it over, either being paid with money that been taken from *other* productive members of the village or point blank stolen and handed over to the person asserting their "right". Some right ey?
The right to "basic food" means the right to take something that someone else has put a lot of effort in, what or who gives *you* that right just by virtue of being born? And what if ther people growing their food stop growing it and demand their rights too? Property rights are the core of all rights, without being "allowed" to own any singular item or piece of land how can one be at all free? Given the track record of societies that don't recognise property rights but *do* recognise the "right" to strike, housing, healthcare and food *cough*Eastern Bloc*cough* there's an extremely strong historical argument for the basis of what the libertarians are saying.
I'm not even nearly a "lie-bertarian" and even I understand that....
I seem to remember the Somalians in Mogadishu being able to take down our choppers and engage our forces using tactics that were taught to them by Mujaheddin which they picked up fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. That's not to say there's not a lot of cannon fodder or that they're all trained and skilled fighters but the single largest mistake anyone can make in entering combat is to dismiss or underestimate your opponent. The country does not have a complete lack experienced fighters and with paydays we're talking about here it's going to draw the talent.
And as an employer, if these shipping companies put weapons in the hands of their sailors and tell them to resist rather than evade, hide, and lay low, then they are legally taking responsibility for their ability to fight. You don't hand someone a gun and say good luck. You give them that weapon and tell them to defend themselves you have to TEACH them how to defend themselves, give them tactics and training. That's a large investment in both time and money. A lot of people want the sailors armed because they want the pirates dead, but the shipping company's first priority is to not have ANY of their sailors killed, 2nd is to have the ships not hijacked, third is to have the ships not delayed on route, and the pirates being dead a distant fourth. They don't want to have to go into combat as a company, that's not their business. That's what the Navy's of the world should be taking care of.
Lastly, if you don't agree with what I've said about needing training, what makes in untrained maritime sailor with small arms a better combatant then a supposedly untrained pirate? Is the untrained sailor supposedly better at close quarter combat because he's white or has some level of education, high school or further? I don't remember any CQB training at my High School. I'm interested in what makes the untrained merchant sailor a better fighter then your theory of untrained pirates that have just experienced "random violence" which, by the way, does a lot of good during a firefight if it's not your first time seeing a buddies head get a hole blown through it.
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