Patches On Both Eyes

Pirates are getting a lot of news coverage lately, and not the fake, filmed kind based on Keith Richards. Early this week, there was the dramatic rescue of an American captain who had been taken hostage by a group of Somali pirates, three of whom were gunned down in a precise sniper strike. It's notable - and more than a little creepy - that so many reports of the incident featured the kind of breathless, awed language about the snipers' capabilities that one might expect to hear from teenagers playing Doom. 

Then again, it's hardly surprising that the dead pirates were treated as more or less equal to video game casualties. For one thing, Somalian lives have been one of the world's weakest currencies since the UN's failed attempts to bring order to the the essentially lawless country in the early 1990s. For another thing, these young men, and countless others like them, make a regular habit of hijacking ships at gunpoint - not exactly an act of high moral character.

It's easy to understand why Westerners might want to simply throw the book (or the sniper's bullet) at pirates for their illegal activity. Punishment to fit the crime, and all of that. But as in most crime issues, punishment is unlikely to serve as an effective deterrent unless deeper causes are addressed. That means asking crucial questions, the first being: who are these pirates?

Slate's Fred Kaplan takes a rather dim view. Kaplan concludes this article by writing:

These pirates are nasty criminals, nothing more. And the fight against them should be treated, and seen, as a routine and legitimate procedure to stamp out nasty crime.

Fair enough. Clearly, a nation has the right to defend itself against criminal acts such as ship hijackings and hostage-takings, as the French did yesterday. But methinks Kaplan has glossed over some of the complexities surrounding these "nasty criminals." He might want to ask himself, as would others who see the issue in simple black-and-white, whether he, if he lived in an impoverished country run by brutal warlords, would refuse to commit piracy if it was the only means of survival available to him. And even if these pirates are paid by the warlords and thus part of a criminal gang, one must consider the fact that refusing the requests of the top gangsters is probably the equivalent of putting a gun to one's head. 

And that's leaving aside the contention, made in this entry on the Huffington Post, that Western countries have plundered the fish and dumped radioactive waste in the waters off of Somalia, taking advantage of a country that has no Coast Guard to defend itself. I'm a little skeptical of these claims - the sources the writer refers to seem somewhat questionable - but not so skeptical that I can completely dismiss them. Somalis certainly haven't - the HuffPost article cites a poll that found 70% of the country's citizen's supported piracy as a means of national self-defence.

I don't excuse piracy in Africa any more than I excuse murder in Toronto, and I fully support bringing criminals to justice. But these kinds of crimes will continue to go on - angry pirates have seized several ships since Monday's rescue of the American captain - until powerful nations go beyond law-and-order.

One person's "nasty" is another person's "desperate." If we remain blind to that, we remain blind to any possible solution.