"To the shores of So-mal-iiiiiiiii(a)!"

The Somali pirates who have been hijacking ships for years now have been in the news again after releasing a ship they had held for over 80 days:

Somali pirates release 20 Filipino seamen

According to the story, about a third of the world's shipping crews are Filipino:  270K sailors.  Filipino working class folks are worldwide, serving coffee in Dubai and Dayton, manning ships from New York to New Delhi.  I wonder how many Filipinos are ship officers, or coffee shop managers (or owners of either). 

That story wasn't as publicized as the current negotiation for the Ukrainian ship MV Faina.  The Faina was carrying 33 T-72 tanks.

From  Time: 

Oct 3: Arrr! The Somali Pirates and Their Troublesome Treasure

Oct 9: The Somali Pirates: Tanks, But No Tanks

(Unsurprisingly, even TIme can't resist an "arr" in the original headline.)  

In September, lots of folks linked to the story about the MV Iran Deyanat, an Iranian ship which was carrying "chemicals".  The pirates who had captured it started mysteriously dying.

Pirates die strangely after taking Iranian ship

"Somali pirates suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill “within days” of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died."

All of this -- except the mysterious illness part -- has superficial similarities to the Barbary Pirates, best known to Americans for Tripoli's place in the Marine Hymn.  

The Barbary Pirates had been around for hundreds of years, and were in the Mediterranean.  The Somalis have only been doing this since their civil war kicked off in the early '90s, and hit ships off the East coast of Africa.  In both cases, though, the US Navy has tangled with the pirates.  In the case of Barbary, it was a way to make some bones on the high seas for Jefferson, and to build up a US Navy in the first place.  (And a personal to Bill Monahan: fuck this Boston gangster shit; get your Eaton screenplay produced!)

I really enjoy the juxtaposition of these justifications:

1786

It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy's ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once.

- Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, Tripoli's Ambassador to Britain, in 1786, supposedly talking to Thomas Jefferson, as reported to the Continental Congress

2008
"We hijack every ship we can," Sugule Ali, a pirate captain, told TIME by satellite phone this week.   "We were forced into this work," he argues, speaking from the Faina's bridge at anchor off the village of Hobyo. "We were fishermen. I used to work in the sea every day. But ships from other countries fish our coasts illegally, destroy our nets and fire on whoever approaches them. We were refused the right to fish. They even dump toxic waste. We couldn't work. So we decided to defend ourselves." Ali insists that piracy would stop if the pirates' fundamental grievances were addressed. "If the world stops stealing our property and harming us, we have a solution," he said. "We will stop the piracy and go back to our normal jobs."
- From Time Magazine, the "Arr" story linked above.

I suspect farming and fishing wouldn't pay as well, though: "A report Thursday by a London-based think tank said pirates have raked in up to $30 million in ransoms this year alone."