THE “SOMALI COAST GUARD”
R. A. Schultz
A thriving business in piracy has evolved along the coast of Somalia, producing large and growing villages supported by these entrepreneurs and their very convenient and profitable business model, thanks in large part to the spineless response of the international community in dealing swiftly and decisively with these thugs
Case in point: The seizure, on April 8, 2009, of the American-flagged container carrier Maersk Alabama and her captain and crew by pirates off the coast of Somalia. The captain, Richard Phillips, persuaded the pirates to let the crew go and offered himself as a hostage. An American naval destroyer arrived on scene within hours.
After more than three agonizing days of hand-wringing panicked indecision by the Obama administration, the captain of the destroyer USS Bainbridge, exercising his authority as On-Scene Commander, determined that Captain Phillips’ life was in fact in imminent danger and gave the order for SEAL snipers to terminate the incident. The outcome was the dramatic rescue of the hostage captain by the SEAL snipers via the night-time simultaneous killing of the three pirates holding him aboard a drifting lifeboat
Of course, the Make-Believe Media hero became the unspeakably incompetent spineless “commander-in-chief” who, according to media spin, was “on top of the situation from the outset.” Accepting the media spin, as always, truly requires a willing suspension of disbelief.
Apologists for the seagoing thugs of Somalia have advanced the spin that the Somalis were only reacting to foreign vessels dumping waste along their coast, further stating that the Somali pirates had become, in effect, the “Somali Coast Guard.”
The Maersk Alabama rescue resulted in an increase in posturing on the part of the Somali pirates, who announced that they would specifically target American-flagged vessels and “slaughter” American crewmembers, in turn provoking a NATO response in the form of Operation Ocean Shield, commenced in mid-August of 2009. NATO member countries supplied naval vessels to patrol the Gulf of Aden and the western Indian Ocean to suppress piracy. Non-NATO countries also increased their naval presence in the region, notably India and Russia.
The naval patrols succeeded in reducing the incidence of piracy dramatically, and Operation Ocean Shield was concluded in mid-December of 2016, the NATO forces being largely diverted to the Mediterranean Sea to deal with the burgeoning immigration problem there.
The only guarantee today that the world maritime community has that the Somalis won’t re-establish their business model is that Donald J. Trump is President of the United States.
