Somali Pirates Chose The Wrong Target

“Should have gone to Specsavers” is an advertising slogan almost anybody knows in the United Kingdom, but it seems it should be applied to Somali pirates as well. Instead of a civil trade ship, they attacked the La Somme, a transport vessel belonging to the French navy on its way to resupply war ships stationed near the Somali coast as part of the European deployment against pirates.

The pirate trade has been the most notable export commodity of Somalia for some years, and its turn-over figures showed a steep rise up to the point where the European Union and the United States decided to step in. The pirates’ modus operandi was to kidnap a trading vessel and its crew to blackmail the owners of the ship into paying ransoms amounting to several million dollars each time.

Unbelievable as it is, paying ransom has not been outlawed under terrorist acts even though persons paying ransom are directly colluding with terrorists. Instead, several European nations and the US have deployed naval forces near the coast of Somalia to safeguard the passage of trade ships. The French navy is part of this deployment under the code name Atalanta. The bill for it all is not footed by the companies directly profiting from the naval action but by the taxpayer as is normal with very rich companies belonging to very rich families.

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The Somali pirates seemingly assumed that the La Somme was a civil transport vessel and attacked it from small boats firing several volleys from their Kalashnikovs. I imagine that the pirates were slightly taken aback when the attacked ship turned round and took up their pursuit. A French naval spokesperson issued a statement to the point that nobody had been hurt in the incident and that five pirates had been apprehended.

By default, the French might have found the solution on how to make their job easier. There are many civil transport ships lying idle all over the world that could be requisitioned and transformed into pirate traps. If a mouse trap works for a mouse, a pirate trap should work for a pirate, wouldn’t you agree? As the whole operation is paid for by the taxpayer so that private companies might send their ships by way of Somalia to the Suez Channel, it should be paramount to keep the time spent y the navies in Somali waters to a minimum.

Luring the pirates out to prepared traps would certainly help shorten manpower available to pirate chiefs and make the recruiting of new members more difficult. Using the attraction of a seemingly helpless ship manned by marines would certainly be more efficient than waiting for a pirate attack on a real civil transport with the chance that no naval vessel is nearby. It certainly beats the awful thought of chasing pirates over the dusty hills of Somalia by miles.

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