--- On Sun, 12/28/08, [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Message
Aletheia,
thanks again as always for the interesting links. It was fascinating to
see pictures of Somaliland, even if those included in the slide show were
heavily weighted toward traffic jams and depressing concrete buildings.
gladly my friend
this is great fun for me anyway
indeed rather than jams or depression
what i saw & heard there was a vibrant & hopeful if slightly crimped reality
standing tall by sheer self determination
in sharp contrast to the prevailing helplessness & moonscape elsewhere in somalia
You write (I
am truncating as instructed)
i appreciate that
it is not easy to keep trimming the tree & retuning the instruments
but well worth it for the life of the party
that there is today no place outside the international territorial
& boundary system to resettle & rehabilitate pirates as pompey could so
easily do except perhaps for marie byrd land & a few guano rocks.
Fair enough. In another story,
Plutarch tells how the young Caesar was hijacked by pirates. This was long
before he was the leading man of Rome. He arranged for ransom, and told them he
would be back to kill them all. They thought it was bravado, but he
equipped an expedition, went back, captured them all, and put them in the Roman
prison at Pergamum. When the local Roman governor dithered around "and
kept saying that he needed time to look into the case, Caesar paid no further
attention to him. He went to Pergamum, took the pirates out of prison and
crucified the lot of them, just as he had often told them he would do when he
was on the island and they imagined he was joking." Plutarch, "Life of
Caesar," §2.
I
would be satisfied with either approach. Maybe crucifying them is extreme,
but hanging them aboard the ship that captures them is not -- that was the
practice for centuries and should be resumed. And once hanging them, I
would not be too quick to cut them down, either. Moslem practice requires
bathing a corpse, and enshrouding it, and burying it in alignment with
Mecca. Deliberately omitting these formalities might have a deterrent
effect, as pinning the heads of highwaymen to town gates used to do.
All this may seem atavistic, but so is piracy -- not part of the modern
civilized world.
yes lets be modern & civilized about this
but when you talk about destruction
dont you know that you can count me out
& going out of ones way to disrespect the dead & or offend the living
doesnt seem very becoming either
of the world i would prefer to cocreate
One
reason the European navies are reluctant to detain pirates is the thought that
they would have to give them a full-dress European trial, with appointed counsel
and bail and appeals and so on. That is not necessary in this context,on
the high seas. Pirates caught on board a hijacked vessel could be tried by
the captain of the capturing ship, or before a board of her officers. Any
ship suspected of piracy could be hailed and boarded, as was done in
earlier anti-piracy and anti-slavery campaigns, by the British and many other
nations. If the ship tries to evade boarding, it may be sunk. If
once boarded there is evidence of piracy (why would an innocent fishing vessel
need rocket-propelled grenade launchers, for example?) the captain and his
officers can make their own judgment. This is on the high seas, of course
-- in territorial waters other considerations might obtain. But
international law allows pirates to be tried anywhere -- they could be delivered
to the nearest place not under pirate control, as the Indian naval ship did by
delivering their prisoners for trial in Yemen. There is no need to land
them on the beach at Eyl, where they will be honored as brave pirates and
treated to a feast celebrating their escape from the foolish
Europeans.
You are completely right that in the present
case the piracy is just the familiar petty warlordism transferred to a maritime
venue by former fishermen & other unemployed & devastated people of a
warlord nation whose legitimate livelihoods in every case were first despoiled
& plundered by outsiders next to whom btw they & their onshore warlord
counterparts are sweetness & light by
comparison. But when transferred to a maritime
venue,
then it becomes a world problem and not just a local one
do you really assume the somalian failed state is just a local problem
& perhaps only a peculiarly local aberration at that
& that the pirates have merely overstepped the boundary of their local failure & dysfunction
& have bumbled thereby into the fully functional & successful global state of international law
& that by doing so
they have somehow lost yet again their previously forfeited integrity
the nerve of them enlarging such already total failure like that
have they lost their minds as well as their country
how dare they act so globally while thinking so locally
& locoly
when only the bigs are supposed to do that
,
and all the nations of the world have a right and indeed a duty to suppress it
vigorously.
yikes a duty to suppress
really
when suppression only empowers
& in fact creates the opposite of what is intended
please spare us all forever from such a heavy & self defeating duty
And indeed the same could be said, although with much less
precedent and international authority, for the anarchy and warlordism on land in
Somalia.
I realize this is getting rather far away from boundary
issues.
ahh but do you really think so
for it seems to me you are finally arriving here at what this entire discussion of nearly 3 weeks may well have been groping toward
as it evolved from african boundary maintenance to somaliland self determination to piracy control
for in our modern & civilized world
any failed state
but especially a perennial or recurrent one
is a failure not so much of that state as of our sovereign territorial state system as a whole
as underwritten & buttressed by our boundary law & practices
yes our modern & civilized world itself is the primary failed state
& thats what needs to be corrected first & foremost
& happily all it needs is just a dab more self determination
wherever & whenever & however possible
or in other words
allowing & even encouraging what comes naturally anyway
the sovereignty & integrity of human beings acting decently
as they so often do
are far higher & grander & more effective than the sovereignty & integrity of states behaving badly
as they so often do
so it seems we just need to civilize & modernize a bit
