US-Marine befreite Kapitän
Somalische Piraten erschossen / Deutscher Frachter bleibt besetzt
Nach fünf Tagen in der Gewalt von somalischen Piraten haben Scharfschützen der US-Marine den Kapitän Richard Phillips befreit. Drei der vier Piraten wurden bei dem Einsatz vor der Küste Somalias am Sonntag erschossen.
Washington (AFP/ND). Der Einsatz zur Befreiung des 53-jährigen US-Kapitäns erfolgte am Sonntagabend (11. April) um 19.19 Uhr Ortszeit. Die in einem Beiboot über das Meer treibenden Piraten hätten mit Kalaschnikowgewehren auf den gefesselten Phillips gezielt, sagte Vizeadmiral Bill Gortney. Der Befehlshabende vor Ort habe sich daraufhin »binnen Sekunden« zum Eingreifen entschlossen.
Die Scharfschützen an Bord des Kriegsschiffes »USS Bainbridge« eröffneten demnach das Feuer und erschossen drei Piraten, der vierte Pirat ergab sich und wurde festgenommen. Nach CNN-Informationen waren die Scharfschützen per Hubschrauber an den Einsatzort geflogen worden. Der überlebende Pirat ist laut US-Medien erst etwa 16 Jahre alt. US-Präsident Barack Obama hatte laut Gortney den Einsatz gegen die Geiselnehmer angeordnet.
Vor dem Einsatz hatte die US-Armee nach eigenen Angaben an Bord der »Bainbridge« mit einem der Piraten über eine Freilassung des Kapitäns verhandelt. Dessen Lösegeldforderung habe die US-Seite jedoch abgelehnt, sagte Gortney. Der Pirat sei daraufhin auf das von den Geiselnehmern genutzte Rettungsboot des Frachters »Maersk Alabama« zurückgekehrt. Phillips hatte sich nach dem Piratenangriff auf seinen Frachter »Maersk Alabama« am Mittwoch nach Berichten von US-Medien als Geisel zur Verfügung gestellt, woraufhin der Frachter nach Kenia weiterfahren konnte.
Die Piraten kündigten Rache für den Tod ihrer Mistreiter an. In einem Telefonat mit AFP sagte der in Eyl (Somalia) ansässige Piratenanführer Abdi Garad, seine Leute würden künftig vor allem US-Bürger angreifen und dies auch sehr weit von somalischen Gewässern entfernt.
Am Freitag (10. April) hatten Spezialkräfte der französischen Armee das vor Somalia entführte Segelboot »Tanit« gewaltsam aus den Händen von Piraten befreit. Dabei starben der französische Bootsführer sowie zwei Piraten. Vier Geiseln kamen bei der Aktion unversehrt frei, drei Piraten wurden festgenommen.
Der vor anderthalb Wochen vor Somalia gekaperte deutsche Frachter »Hansa Stavanger« blieb in der Hand von Piraten. Der Krisenstab des Auswärtigen Amtes bemühe sich intensiv um eine Lösung, sagte eine Ministeriumssprecherin am Montag in Berlin. Der »Spiegel« hatte vor einigen Tagen berichtet, der Krisenstab habe zwischenzeitlich eine gewaltsame Befreiung des unter anderem mit fünf Deutschen besetzten Schiffes geplant, das Vorhaben aber fallen lassen.
* Aus: Neues Deutschland, 14. April 2009
You are being lied to about pirates
Some are clearly just gangsters. But others are trying
to stop illegal dumping and trawling
By Johann Hari **
Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments
would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read
this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of
more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is
sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still
picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains.
They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even
chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most
broken countries on earth. But behind the
arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an
untold scandal. The people our governments are
labelling as "one of the great menaces of our times"
have an extraordinary story to tell - and some justice
on their side.
Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In
the "golden age of piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the
idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage Bluebeard
that lingers today was created by the British
government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary
people believed it was false: pirates were often saved
from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did
they see that we can't? In his book Villains Of All
Nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the
evidence.
If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked
from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry -
you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all
hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you
slacked off, the all-powerful captain would whip you
with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked often, you
could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or
years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.
Pirates were the first people to rebel against this
world. They mutinied - and created a different way of
working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates
elected their captains, and made all their decisions
collectively, without torture. They shared their bounty
out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian
plans for the disposition of resources to be found
anywhere in the eighteenth century".
They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with
them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly - and
subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the
brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and
the Royal Navy." This is why they were romantic heroes,
despite being unproductive thieves.
The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young
British man called William Scott, should echo into this
new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in
Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to
keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirateing
to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed.
Its nine million people have been teetering on
starvation ever since - and the ugliest forces in the
Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to
steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear
waste in their seas.
Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone,
mysterious European ships started appearing off the
coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean.
The coastal population began to sicken. At first they
suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies.
Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped
and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to
suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.
Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells
me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There
is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and
mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back
to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be
passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of
cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European
governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh:
"Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation,
and no prevention."
At the same time, other European ships have been
looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource:
seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by
overexploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs.
More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are
being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local
fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a
fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of
Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there
soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."
This is the context in which the "pirates" have
emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to
dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a
"tax" on them. They call themselves the Volunteer
Coastguard of Somalia - and ordinary Somalis agree. The
independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70
per cent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of
national defence".
No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and
yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those
who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But in
a telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders,
Sugule Ali: "We don't consider ourselves sea bandits.
We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally
fish and dump in our seas." William Scott would
understand.
Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on
their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch
us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London
and Paris and Rome? We won't act on those crimes - the
only sane solution to this problem - but when some of
the fishermen responded by disrupting the
transit-corridor for 20 per cent of the world's oil
supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.
The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised
by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth
century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander
the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by
keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and
responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth;
but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a
robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are
called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets
sail - but who is the robber?
* Monday, 5 January 2009
Independent [UK]; www.independent.co.uk
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