Barry Artiste Op/Ed
Some critics say, “Nuke their Country back to the Stone Age” to which I counter, “they are already in the Stone Age”. Though I bet their country would look pretty from space as a big chunk of “Decorative Glass”!
http://news.sympatico.msn.ctv.ca/abc/home/contentposting.aspx?isfa=1&feedname=CTV-TOPSTORIES_V3&showbyline=True&newsitemid=CTVNews%2f20081121%2fpirates_somalia_081122 New brand of pirates lured by easy cash and girls They’ve made headlines around the world, collected millions of dollars in ransom, and terrorized the high seas.
By Parminder Parmar
But despite their notoriety, little is known about the pirates who have been hijacking ships off the coast of Somalia for the past decade.
The relatively lawless nature of Somali society, where a functioning federal government has been all but missing for more than a decade, has created a lack of knowledge about who is behind the spate of ship hijackings in recent months.
Even one of the world’s foremost experts on international piracy says there is limited information about the makeup of the pirate ships because most of their crews come from isolated villages in a remote part of Somalia, the quasi-independent region called Puntland. But Peter Lehr, a professor of terrorism studies, says scholars and security experts have concluded that most of the crew members on the Somali pirate ships are not what most people would imagine pirates to be from the movies or novels.
Forget images of seafaring bearded men with eye patches and hooks for hands, he says. Instead, the crews on the Somali boats are sometimes no older than pubescent boys.
They generally range in age from teenagers to men in their thirties. And the phrase “pirate” is probably not the most accurate term for people who have generally spent their lives as fishermen. Ironically, that’s what makes them good pirates.
“(They) have very good maritime skills because of their fishing background,” Lehr told CTV.ca by phone from Britain. At one time, those skills would have allowed the men to provide for their families.
But Somalia’s collapse into near anarchy since the 1990s has left the country’s economy in shambles.
Tags: opinion | World | nukes | Somalia | piracy | SHIPS | naval | Decorative glass