Off Topic · Pirates (like real pirates) Make the News (page 1)

Pirates Free Tanker After Ransom
By MOHAMMED IBRAHIM and GRAHAM BOWLEY

MOGADISHU, Somalia — A Saudi-owned supertanker held by pirates off the coast of Somalia for two months has been released for a ransom of $3 million, according to one of the pirates and residents of Xarardheere, a pirate town on the Somali coast near where the tanker was being held.

The supertanker, about the length of an American Nimitz class aircraft carrier, was the largest ship known to have been seized by pirates, and it was fully loaded with two million barrels of oil.

The pirates were due to leave the ship after the money, paid by the ship’s owners, was received by the pirates on Friday, according to the pirates and residents, who later said that the ship had moved away from the coast where it had been anchored since November.

News agencies had reported that the pirates had originally asked for $25 million in ransom for the fully-laden oil tanker, known as the Sirius Star, but ”they have agreed on $3 million and the pirates will disembark tonight,” a pirate in Xarardheere who gave his name as Jama said.

He said he had spoken to the pirates who had gone to the ship to receive the ransom payment. The money had been paid in Kenya and reached the Somali pirates on a boat from Mombasa, Kenya, the pirates said.

The International Maritime Bureau in London, a clearinghouse for piracy information and maritime-safety issues, said it could not yet confirm that the pirates had released the tanker.

“We have not got confirmation of the release of this vessel,” a spokesman for the organization, Cyrus Mody, said. “The information that we have from the owner is that the vessel is not yet released.” The owner, Vela International Ltd., could not be immediately reached for comment.

But a regional maritime group confirmed the release. Andrew Mwangura, of the East African Seafarers Assistance program, based in the Kenyan port of Mombasa, was quoted by Reuters as saying: “The last batch of gunmen have disembarked from the Sirius Star. She is now steaming out to safe waters.”

The Sirius Star was seized in November by the group of armed pirates about 420 nautical miles off the coast of Somalia, in seas where pirates have struck with increasing audacity in recent months, hijacking other vessels, including a Ukrainian freighter laden with armaments. That vessel, the Faina, which was carrying 32 armored tanks and other heavy weapons, is still being held in the region.

Mr. Mody of the maritime bureau in London said there were currently 15 vessels being held by pirates off the coast of Somalia, involving 290 crew members.

Amid the increasingly frequent attacks, China said last month it would send naval ships to the Gulf of Aden to help in the fight against piracy there, the first modern deployment of Chinese warships outside the Pacific. And on Thursday, the United States Navy said that a new international naval force under American command would begin patrols to confront Somali pirates in the Horn of Africa.

As for the supertanker, Abdi Ahmed, a Xarardheere resident said, “the big fishes left Xarardheere on Thursday afternoon to the Sirius Star ship to get the ransom money and to set free the ship.”

The pirate who identified himself as Jama said he was waiting for his share of the ransom from his cohorts.

“When the pirates receive the money, they will divide in shares on the spot, so that they will disembark tonight from the ship with everyone’s share in pocket,” he said.

Mohammed Ibrahim reported from Mogadishu, and Graham Bowley from New York.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/world/africa/10somalia.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

What's up SC?

Here is some more info on Pirates

Johann Hari: You are being lied to about pirates
Some are clearly just gangsters. But others are trying to stop illegal dumping and trawling
Monday, 5 January 2009

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.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-you-are-being-lied-to-about-pirates-1225817.html

That was an awesome read dude... I think it just gave me some career options. Check your email

Posted by SupremeCommander:

That was an awesome read dude... I think it just gave me some career options. Check your email

I didn't get the email. Try sending it again



[Edited by - bigc on 01-17-2009 5:02 PM]

Check your email