DESPITE the popularity of successive Pirates of the Caribbean films, real pirates are not cuddly criminals.
Nor are they members of an oppressed minority group suffering from low self-esteem. They are murderers and kidnappers who live by the gun and understand only one thing - force.
Sunday’s successful rescue of American sea captain Richard Phillips, after US President Barack Obama authorised the use of force against the Somali pirates who held him captive, emphasises that reality.
A team of US Navy SEALS aboard the USS Bainbridge freed Phillips after shooting his captors from their position about 30m away, a ridiculously easy shot for trained marksmen.
This followed an earlier rescue of a French yacht crew by French commandos, during which a French yachtsman was killed, possibly by the French rescue team.
A photograph of the French crew taken before their rescue shows an anguished woman held at gunpoint by a young pirate armed with an automatic weapon. Anyone who doubts the ruthlessness of the pirates should use that image as a reality check.
The US effort marked Obama’s first authorisation of force against a group hostile to Americans, and it is reported that he received news of the successful rescue 11 minutes after it was completed, and spoke with Phillips shortly after.
To date the Obama administration has attempted to fudge its commitment to fighting forces opposed to the US.
While it has rebadged the “war on terrorism” as “overseas contingency operations” and terrorist attacks are now to be called “man-caused disasters”, piracy remains piracy. The US is revisiting a sea-borne scourge that has existed since the 14th Century.
Somali pirates still hold about 300 captives and 17 ships but, as few are Westerners, there remains little international indignation about their plight. It was not always so.
When Britain ruled the waves, pirates weren’t tolerated. If captured alive, their trials were short and their sentences terminal. Hanging was the norm.
With American independence in 1776, the US navy’s first major achievement was cleansing the entrance of the Mediterranean of the Barbary pirates who operated out of north Africa.
Using swift galleys rowed by slaves, these pirates enslaved their captives, sent any women captured to harems, and were known for their brutality. They were so successful that they were able to demand tribute from the nations which traded into the Mediterranean, until Thomas Jefferson became US president and deemed the annual ransom had to stop.
In 1801, Jefferson launched a war against the Barbary pirates which eventually saw the US flag fly over Derna, Libya’s second-largest city, a feat which is remembered in the line in the Marine hymn: “From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli.”
The war ran until 1812 when president James Madison sent Captain Stephen Decatur into action against Omar the Terrible, the ruler of Algiers.
Within 16 days of entering the Med, Decatur triumphed with a treaty he said was “dictated at the mouths of our cannon”. Mediterranean piracy was dead.
In the shallow waters around South East Asia however, piracy was in the ascendancy. The narrow straits which ran through the many archipelagoes proved ideal for opportunistic pirates.
The British navy was sent in to deliver justice and accounts published at the time show how successful they were.
In one dispatch published in The Hobart Courier of February 20, 1850, Captain Hay of the Columbine reported that in an action on October 2, 1849, 23 “piratical junks averaging 500 tons, mounting from 12 to l8 guns, three new ones on the stocks, and two small dock-yards, with a considerable supply of naval stores, have been totally destroyed by fire; and of 1800 men who manned them, about 400 have been killed, and the rest dispersed without resource”.
In the same newspaper, there was an account of the destruction of Shap-ng-tsai’s pirate fleet by a Royal Navy squadron under the command of a Captain Hay. In all 1700 were killed.
The West has forgotten some hard-learnt lessons on dealing with pirates.
They are worth revisiting.
Source: The Daily Telegraph
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