Avuncular American

Avast, Somali Pirates: Payouts, Prosecution and Projectiles

As soon as you start using the term pirate, unfortunately cute or nostalgic images of Johnny Depp and Long John Silver come to mind - "Avast, me hearties!" ("avast" means to stop or cease) and other lusty lingo.  All that is best relegated to the world of children's stories (image, Playwood Toys).  Today's real-world piracy is, as a Somali pirate phoning the wife of a European hostage said, all about "money, money."

We returned to Brussels over the weekend, as news came out about the liberation of the Belgian ship Pompei, which had been captured in April by Somali pirates operating as far away as the Indian Ocean waters of the Seychelles.  No secret was made of the fact that a ransom had been paid, though the exact amount was not revealed.  Belgian police and military personnel set forth to join up with the liberated crew, part of an investigation in pursuit of the pirates, who violated a 1928 Belgian law which provides for international jurisdiction by Belgian courts in matters of piracy committed against nationals.

Somali pirates may not exactly be quaking in their skiffs at the prospect of Belgian prosecutors dragging them off to Brussels, but Belgium's legal approach is at least novel.  The payment, by the shipping company and/or its insurers, was made under duress, and was motivated as much by wanting to avoid physical harm to the crew as to protect its investment in this very specialized "side stone dumping vessel" (used in port dredging operations).  And how many Somali pirates have simply been released after capture by international forces?  At least the Belgians are setting the stage for prosecution.

Payouts to pirates have been made from time immemorial (see Richard Zacks' The Pirate Coast for an account of early U.S. travails with the Barbary Pirates of North Africa, which included ransoming of hostages), and given NATO and EU naval forces' inability to prevent all such incidents, will likely continue when Somalis successfully pick off unescorted vessels.  La Libre Belgique tells us that recently the pirates have even taken to using Somali refugees as human shields when launching their assaults.

Naval patrols, ransom for hostages and vessels, prosecution in the (unlikely) event that names, fingerprints, and perps are matched up ... all these responses are in the panoply of the world's reactions to this scourge of international shipping (see the ICC's Live Piracy Map for a look at how the Horn of Africa is piracy ground zero).  But how about the "kinetic" response?  As Zacks' quotation of an old Barbary pirate maxim - "Whoever acts like a sheep, the wolf will eat" - a more muscular response - "Blow them out of the water!" - should be an important part of the international community's toolkit.

Classic criminals after "money, money," rather than Johann Hari's description in The Independent of the "Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia," are nonetheless an outgrowth of the anarchic conditions that have prevailed in Somalia for the better part of two decades.  As Alain Lallemand in Brussels' Le Soir reminds us, it is in the West's interest to prevent Somalia from sinking under the weight of its multiple dysfunctionalities.

Taking the threats from Somalia seriously and using the impressive firepower on board all those naval vessels (Belgium, by the way, has offered to station armed military on board commercial vessels) has to be part of a wider strategy to encourage Somalia to rejoin the community of nations.  And while the West is righteously indignant over piracy's threat to international trade, it must ensure that its own commercial vessels are not using the free-for-all in Somali waters to dump hazardous waste and rape the country's fisheries, as Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, UN envoy Somalia, alleged last year.

No need to give the "Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia" any patriotic pretexts for its piracy.

Mountaintop Maginot Line - Where It Worked

The past week or so we've been doing some serious hiking in the French Alps, just west of the Italian border and about three hours' driving on twisty roads from Grenoble.  We are in the mountain valley of the Ubaye River - strategic for centuries before the European Union and NATO made war between allies like France, Italy, and Germany unthinkable.

In a museum in our little village, there's a piece of elephant tusk - a reminder that Hannibal's army approached Rome from the unexpected Alpine side.  On the mountaintops overlooking this valley and many others like it, French military engineers working for 17th/18th century Vauban and 20th century Maginot built fortresses that defy the imagination.  "La Route Napoleon" winds through passes and valleys on its way to Italy.

The Maginot Line got its bad reputation because of its northern portion, which guarded the frontier with Germany.  Anyone with a passing knowledge of World War II history knows that the piece that was missing - the Ardennes forest between Belgium, Luxembourg, and France - was the very place that the German blitzkrieg was successful.  The Maginot fortresses with their hardened artillery emplacements and underground railroads were magnificently useless, bypassed by German tanks roaring through the "impenetrable" forest.

Except for here in the French Alps, where the Maginot Line did its job.  In June 1940, Mussolini's troops hopped on Hitler's bandwagon and attacked an overstretched France.  Though outnumbered, the French forts held their ground, but the war was already a lost cause in the north.  After four long years of occupation by Germans and Italians, French and American troops retook the historic fortifications in the cold winter of 1944-45.  Some of the German-held forts only capitulated in the last weeks of the war.

So, back to our June 2009 military tourism.  Imagine our surprise when hiking on a mountain trail (photo top left; altitude approximately 6,000 feet) and seeing a machine gun nest inside a six inch thick steel carapace poking out of its reinforced concrete bunker.  The woods around the lookout are ringed with barbed wire, with trees bulging around their steel embrace for upwards of 75 years (Maginot built his line in the 1930s).  As isolated as this outpost was, it was equipped with an infrared sensor that detected Italian troop movements.

Further back in time, but updated as military technology became ever more sophisticated and lethal, Fort Tournoux (photo, above right) is a remarkable example of "génie militaire," built layer-cake on 2,000 vertical feet of strategic hillside.  Thanks to the collective of local municipalities and an association dedicated to preserving this amazing collection of fortresses, guides take visitors up a hair-raising mule trail to visit "Fort Moyen," the lowest of three Tournoux forts which dominate the confluence of the Ubaye and the Ubayette Rivers.  Though it was built starting 1852, Fort Tournoux's guns only had their baptism of fire in June 1940, when they supported the Maginot forts further up the Ubayette to stop the Italian advance.  The fort was in service in one way or another until the late 1980s.

Up the valley, a testament to an earlier age, the Berwick Redoubt (photo, left) built in the Vauban tradition in the 18th century.  Though its stone construction has withstood the test of time better than its wooden North American counterparts, it is redolent of the frontier forts of the French and Indian War of the same period.

France's mountain military tradition continues, though during our stay a contingent based in another historic fortress lowered its flags for the last time.  A local woman remarked on the imminent closure of another Alpine unit in the valley, at a time when some of Europe's highest mountain passes offer exceptional training opportunities for France's expeditionary missions.  But base closures are never a simple matter for the economies of the communities concerned, and President Sarkozy did promise a major defense realignment last year.  "The cannon recoils; the artilleryman never," the proud insignia etched (click on photo, right) on the high altitude barracks on silent Fort Tournoux.  Ah, but the artilleryman and the chasseur alpin must bow to the new defense realities and the priorities of their civilian masters.

Europe's internal borders are disappearing, and the "chasseurs alpins" are more likely to see action in Afghanistan's rugged mountains than in these parts.  The Schengen Treaty has led to the dismantling of border posts, and EU internal cross-border threats are better handled by customs & immigration "flying patrols" than by the mountaintop Maginot Line.

Vacation Reading 'Til Normal Blogging Resumes

New readers, welcome to Avuncular American!

Those familiar with the site know that usually I post every couple of days.  But for the past few weeks, we have been where the air is too thin for regular internet availability.

It was possible to do some posting from internet cafes in the valley - here is my article on French military fortifications in the Alps.  That will be it for another week or so - we'll be on the move.

For those of you who are new to the site, or "regulars" who are too shy to check out things like "categories" or "archives," here are a few links to major categories of mine:

Diplomacy (there are a few "Diplomacy 101" stories hidden in there)
Film (No spoilers, few Hollywood products, lots of "art" films)
Israel-Palestine (I've been following that since volunteering in the West Bank in the 70s)
Elections (mostly on US elections, but covers other countries too)

If you see anything that triggers a reaction, post a comment or send me an email.  Keep checking in to AA, but I probably won't be back in force until the end of June.  Thanks for your patience!

Cairo: Obama's 3 Rs - Respect, Rectitude, Resolve

No need for me to reprise President Obama's speech today at Cairo University - the White House website should have the text and video up soon, and the BBC already has an annotated version.  With our time zone advantage, we watched it live from our living room in Brussels, and a very stirring speech it was.

Respect was a repeated theme, no small matter for a religion - Islam - which has been the target of Western fear and disdain well before George W. Bush's benighted sojourn in the White House.   Whatever Rush Limbaugh may sputter tonight about the President of the United States quoting the Koran, Barack Obama's use of strategic texts from the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran struck a chord in the Cairo audience.

The man from Illinois had an Abe Lincoln air of moral rectitude when delivering The Truth to the audience.  Islam is too great a religion to be associated with terrorism (the unmentioned word), and there has to be room in the Middle East - specifically Jerusalem - for the people of the three great monotheistic religions.

The Truth, to Israeli listeners, also means that settlements are a major roadblock to a negotiated solution.  Hamas was addressed in a civil tone, perhaps a hint that change is afoot in the US attitude towards the party that won the Palestinian elections.

No one who has witnessed this President's first several months in office, or who listened to his speech in the Arab world's largest city, can doubt his resolve to do his utmost to bring a solution to the Israel-Palestine question.

More proof that Americans did themselves proud when they elected this man who, almost single-handed, is bringing the 3 Rs back to America's place in the world.

Images of Immigration: Welcome, Visitor... to Eden

No, this is not a report on a film festival dedicated to "undocumented aliens" or "clandestins" as they're known in France.  In fact, it's not even the first time that a number of films treat the theme of immigration - Siegfried Mortkowitz of Deutsche Presse/Agentur thought the 2006 Cannes Festival did that.

But the last few months have seen at least three films treating "illegal immigrants" as individual human beings, surely not a bad thing when the tendency is to treat them as an abstraction - mere numbers, or faceless, nameless shapes furtively crossing the US-Mexican border at night, or washing up on Europe's shores.

Welcome

"Welcome" (poster, Mars Distribution), Phillippe Lioret's 2009 film, is an effective treatment of citizen solidarity with illegal immigrants.  The setting is Calais, the French port from which car ferries shuttle across the English Channel.  It's also a kind of no man's land for streams of young men (mostly) from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, desperately hoping to sneak their way across to Britain.

France dismantled its processing center at Sangatte years ago, but demolition of the building did nothing to stop the flow of immigrants.  Instead of congregating in one center, they are now dispersed among the region's woods and sand dunes, camping rough and dependent on the charity of the region's residents.  While "Welcome" was still playing in French theaters this spring, protesters organized demonstrations against the "délit de solidarité" (the law whereby helping a clandestine immigrant can land you in jail, even if you are just distributing food) by parading with signs daring the authorities to "arrêtez-moi."

Welcome manages to depict this mess - for that's what French immigration policy is - credibly, and shows the authorities going about their grim business in a brusque but businesslike way.  The casting is first-rate, and there is no yielding to temptations for either stereotyping or happy endings.

The Visitor

In Tom McCarthy's The Visitor (released in Europe late 2008/early 2009), more kudos for casting, and for showing the diversity of the US immigrant scene beyond the Sonoran Desert.  Here it's New York, and the intertwined lives of an American teacher who stumbles into solidarity with a hapless guy who overstays his visa, a Syrian who falls afoul of the Patriot Act's roundup of people with a Middle Eastern look or name.  I found the depiction of the windowless detention center very effective, and Richard Jenkins' college professor is justifiably enraged by his impotence at the hands of the "please stay away from the window, sir" security guards, who are now ubiquitous in America.  Imagine how the immigrants feel (though the 2007 film more accurately portrays the aura of the Bush years, the laws have remained unchanged).

McCarthy, who toured the Middle East thanks to a State Department grant, came back wanting to delve more into the culture of an area of the world that so few Americans know first-hand.  The Visitor is by no means that cultural primer, but it does show in microcosm some of the difficulties of adaptation into post-9/11 America for people who just want to do what immigrants have always done in the US - settle down, earn a living, raise a family.  Hopefully America's immigration chief - Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who appears to have a nuanced understanding of her remit - will see The Visitor.

Eden à l'ouest

Costa-Gavras (he does have a first name, Constantin) has produced a sort of immigrant fable, "Eden à l'ouest."  It is an interesting addition to his oeuvre, which mostly consists of hard hitting political films like "Z" and "Missing," dealing with dictatorships, impunity, and repression.  Costa-Gavras, who himself made his way West to France in the 1950s, sees his film as an Odyssey - others have seen his principal character Elias as an updated autobiographical reference to Costa-Gavras' own journey.

There is a certain Euro-speak use of English in Eden à l'ouest, but it can be forgiven when put in its context of a Mediterranean resort dealing with an influx of boat people.  Other than "Eden" (Paris), you're never sure where the rest of the action is taking place.  Again, when migrants ditch their passports in the Med, people's origins - like those of Elias - become blurred.

Everyone wants a piece of Elias, symbolic perhaps of what Western societies get out of illegals.  We're happy to have our trash picked up by people whose papers may not be quite in order - Elias winds up working at some point for a recycling firm which profits from the precarious situation of its "temporary" employees.

Some may be put off by a subplot involving a magician, and there have been comparisons to an immigrant version of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton.  But the stress remains more on the realistic than the magical, and the lot of the modern migrant is more likely to be rags than riches.

Aldous Huxley: Political Uses of Crowd Delirium

This is not a full-blown book review, but having invested several weeks' worth of bedtime reading and just having finished Aldous Huxley's 1952 nonfiction work, "The Devils of Loudun," I feel that it's worth comment.  I confess that I first came across the subject thanks to Ken Russell's 1971 demoniacally extravagant epic, "The Devils," seen when I was less squeamish in my choice of films.  English novelist Huxley is best known for his futuristic 1932 novel, "Brave New World," discussed a couple of years ago by Margaret Atwood in The Guardian.

The Devils of Loudun is not an easy read by any means, but it is a fascinatingly true story told with erudition and insight.  A 17th century tale of possession, madness, and power in Louis XIII's France.  The power was exerted by Cardinal Richelieu (who is synonymous with "éminence grise"), the possession was probably bogus, and the madness was the mass hysteria over witchcraft that Richelieu's henchmen stirred up as a means of dealing with the Cardinal's (or the state's) enemies.  Huxley coined phrases to describe the phenomenon: "crowd delirium" and "herd-intoxication."  Think housing bubble and "irrational exuberance" in our contemporary context.

Huxley wrote The Devils of Loudun in the early Fifties, when he  had already been living in California for a number of years.  With the ravages of Nazism and Fascism still very much in evidence, and the Cold War putting a chill on the wartime cooperation with Soviet Communism, isms were central to Huxley's tale: Catholicism under threat from Protestantism, and exorcism to banish the devils that were conveniently identified with an inconvenient priest in a town that was too tolerant of Protestants.

Huxley's book is anything but dated.   Just read this:

By the beginning of the eighteenth century witchcraft had ceased to be a serious problem.  It died out, among other reasons, because almost nobody now bothered to repress it.  For the less it was persecuted, the less it was propagandized.  Attention had shifted from the supernatural to the natural.  From about 1700 to the present day all persecutions in the West have been secular...  For us, Radical Evil has ceased to be something metaphysical and has become political or economic.  And that Radical Evil now incarnates itself, not in sorcerers and magicians, but in the representatives of some hated class or nation.

In 1952, Huxley was all too aware of the McCarthy Red Scare sweeping the US.  His pacifism had attracted the FBI's attention, which at one point took a student's shorthand markings in a copy of Huxley's "Brave New World" for a secret code.

There have been other Scares.  If Reds inspired mid-century senators to hunt Communist witches, early 19th century officials were more concerned with the Black Flag, the anarchist movement that, as Barbara Tuchman reminded us in "The Proud Tower," was responsible for the assassination of six heads of state, including US President McKinley, in the two decades preceding World War One.  Here's Tuchman, writing in 1962:

No single individual was the hero of the movement... which had its theorists and thinkers, men of intellect, sincere and earnest, who loved humanity.  It also had its tools, the little men whom misfortune or despair or the anger, degradation and hopelessness of poverty made susceptible to the Idea until they became possessed by it and were driven to act.  These became the assassins.  Between the two groups there was no contact.  The thinkers... issued trumpet calls for action...  Unknown to them, down in the lower depths of society lonely men were listening.

Tuchman and Huxley wrote decades before Al Qaeda was conceived, but the worlds they describe resemble our own.  A century ago, anarchism was as ubiquitous and as deadly as Al Qaeda and its spinoffs are today.  Three centuries ago witchcraft "ceased to be a serious problem [and] died out... because almost nobody now bothered to repress it."

This is not to suggest that law enforcement and intelligence agencies cease their efforts to round up terrorists inspired by Al Qaeda and other obscurantist movements.  But I do think that the kind of fear-mongering that former VP Cheney and others exerted during their years in office needs to be buried, along with their reputations, in the trash heap of history.

Almost a century ago, fears about the end of the world at the hands of anarchists were overtaken by the very real-world butchery called World War I, started by nation-states and ending several of them.  Louis XIII's worries about witches' spells were the least of Louis XVI's concerns - he had the French Revolution and the guillotine to contend with.  Anarchists and devils were overtaken by even bigger threats.

Al Qaeda-inspired terrorism is serious, but let's put it in perspective, and deal with a few bigger concerns - accelerating climate change, worldwide deflation, populations outstripping resources - all of which are world-class show stoppers.  Witches, anarchists... Al Qaeda too will pass.