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The first bit was. My point was that the horn of Africa isn't exactly awash with opportunities for its citizens. Conversely, its offering good prospects for the various navies patrolling its seas - they've never had it so good...

The same could be said of a fair proportion of our populous.

The people of the Horn of Africa have precisely the same opportunities to better their lives as the rest of us. Hard work, the rule of law etc. They choose piracy.

Regardless of whether you approve of it or not, whaling is a legal activity which does not interfere with world trade.

yamagata ken
 

You say, "whaling is a legal activity"; so was slavery. Both repulsive activities cloaked in legal niceties.

I won't be returning to argue the point, so don't waste your time responding.

Tanimbar

I'm with you Tanimbar, whaling is a game for the childish, suspicious & cruel; which is a label we've learned to put on Japan since Dec' 7th, 1941.

No B.S. is going to remove that; it's said the attack on Pearl Harbour was modelled on Taranto; difference is, chum, that we were already at war, not a sly back-stabbing move like the Japanese made.

There's also the fact that the Japanese were extremely cruel to POW's - I met a pensioner who broke into tears as he related 400 nurses being marched off a beach then machine-gunned; so don't expect any sympathy from me re. the Atom bombs.

I will never buy anything with a Japanese ( Or German ) label on it.

DZ

Double Zero

A quick glance at your last few posts makes it quite clear that you have a rather unpleasant BNP smell about you.....

so far we know that you don't like Germans, Kenyans, Somalis and Japanese.
Any more that you would like to add?

Tourist,

The ony unpleasant smell abut me is from last night's curry.

I have lived in France but don't call them 'Cheese eating surrender Monkeys' ,( copyright the excellent Simpsons ).

I have tried to teach Africans on aircraft systems with an open mind, have you ?

I don't give a toss about colour of skin, but I do draw a line at people getting control of arms then shooting themselves and anyone in range to bits !

The Somali's are just begging for Darwin at an accelerated rate...and I wouldn't touch the BNP with a disinfected barge-pole, one of the greatest laughs I had in France ( Burgundy ) was when our skipper, who spoke like a native, was apporoached by the French eqiuvalent of BNP, who asked him for support in kicking these foreignours out !

We couldn't recruit French people for any money ( and it was quite good ) as they know how to live, it seems we Brits only know how to fight.

I did get a wonderful long balloon flight out of it which raised severe American racist worries ( I thought it was a nice day out in glorious countyside ), but that's a whole different story in itself.


DZ

I thought we were discussing pirates.

Where did the Japanese machine gun 400 nurses on a beach? Not downplaying the horror of the incident in any way, but the atrocity you refer to sounds like Banka Island where 20 Australian nurses were machine gunned in early 1942 (and one, Sr Vivian Bulwinkel, survived).

NLA Australian Newspapers - article display

You do your argument no favours overstating the scale of the massacre.

As for Somali pirates... they should take a page from history and do a no hold barred carbon copy of what was done to the Barbary pirates quite some years ago now.

The nagging thing here though is the USS Ward actually sank a Japanese Submarine just outside the harbour zone before war was declared and before the attack... Never sat comfortable with that fact, but totally off topic anyway.

The Pearl Harbor Attack, 7 December 1941

There was also an interesting article in The Independent last year.

Fubaar,

I am reporting what a chap covered in medals said to me as he broke down, on the train after a 'do'.

I'm pretty sure I have heard of the atrocity mentioned, elsewhere.

Back to Somali pirates, people are going to get seriously P'd off with their antics, if I were an insurance broker I don't think I'd take their future's on, if a 'security expert' I might be tooling up & spending more on advertising !

Even these dim gits must realise the next ship they go for may be flying a small yellow flag - ' Q '-...

mra4eng

Perhaps it was the "former Para" with the dodgy VC and 60 years worth of other medals who keeps appearing on Remembrance Day Parades?

BANGKA ISLAND MASSACRE (St. Valentine's Day, February 14, 1942)
On board the liner SS Vyner Brooke (Captain R. E. Borton, OBE) named after its onetime owner Sir Charles Vyner Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, and in peacetime had sailed between Singapore and Kuching, were 65 Australian Army nurses of the 2/10 and the 2/13th Australian General Hospitals in Singapore who, together with other civilian women and children, made up the 330 persons being evacuated from the city. In the Banka Strait, a narrow strip of water between the islands of Bangka and Sumatra, the Vyner Brooke was bombed and sunk by Japanese planes. A few lifeboats managed to reach the mangrove lined shore of Bangka Island. On advice from some islanders they were advised to give themselves up to the Japanese as there was no hope of escaping. That night another lifeboat arrived on the shore containing between 30 and 40 British servicemen from another ship sunk earlier. The civilian women, some nurses and children, then set out to walk to the nearest Japanese compound to give themselves up. When the Japanese arrived at the beach the men and women were separated, the men were marched into the jungle, never to be heard of again. The soldiers returned and forced the remaining 22 nurses to wade out into the sea. There, in waist deep water, they were machined-gunned to death, leaving only one survivor, Sister Vivian Bullwinkle, who later managed to reach the island's Japanese Naval Headquarters where she was put to work in the hospital. For over three years she kept the secret of the massacre to herself and a few friends. To speak openly about it would have been a certain recipe for execution. Of the 65 nurses from the Vyner Brooke, 12 had drowned, 21 shot in the water at Radji Beach and 32 had gone into prison in Muntok before being shipped to Palembang in southern Sumatra to serve three-and-a-half years of privation and punishment as prisoners of war. Sadly, only 24 survived the war. (Sister Bullwinkle died in Perth, Western Australia, in 2000, aged 84).

Thanks for that, though the numbers are significantly different; note the men marched away who were never heard of again.

I read & write History, unlike the people having a go at me.

Let me put it in simple terms; would you rather stay in my figurative prison camp, or a Japanese one ?!

I say again, I've heard mention of this atrocity before, and the chap I was talking to was no Walt, you and I aren't worthy to lick his boots even if he did get figures wrong ( my fault entirely if that proves to be the case ).

DZ

Without wanting to add to the personal abuse on this thread, I think some of the comments here are frankly ridiculous.

Double Zero

You cannot tar all Kenyans, or all Africans, with the same brush. Many years ago one of my Engineering lectuers commented that he had worked in Kenya, and was demoralised when her returned to teach in the UK - due to the lack of willingness to work/learn. Whether you intended it or not, your comments sound quite racist...

As to the Japanese and Germans, everyone knows of the appalling acts carried out in WWII by both nations, and Japan has never acknowledged responsibility. Not sure why this is being discussed here....

yamagata ken

Are you having a laugh? People in the Horn of Africa have the same opportunities are us in the developed world? Is that what you think? And you say the Somalis have opted for piracy - what, all of them? No Somalis suffer because of pirate attacks against World Food Programme or other ships then?

Isn't Somalia a failed state, and the current piracy is a symptom of the anarchy and chaos there? Certainly the senior naval figures at the recent IONS meeting think so:

ABU DHABI, May 13, 2010 (AFP) - Navies can intercept Somali pirate skiffs and foil hijackings but fighting waves of attacks at sea will not solve the problem, which is rooted in instability on land in Somalia, naval leaders say.

Anti-piracy efforts "will not actually resolve the base problem of why piracy is occurring ... That solution lies in the stabilisation" of Somalia, Commodore Bob Tarrant, director of Britain's Royal Navy staff, told AFP at the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS) in Abu Dhabi.

"The symptoms (piracy) we're seeing now off Somalia, in the Gulf of Aden, are clearly an outcome of what's going on on the ground" there, said Australia's navy chief, Vice Admiral Russell Crane.

"As sailors, we're really just treating the symptoms," not the root of the problem.

Razor61

So the French, Dutch, USA and Russians all assault the ships with pirates holding their nationals hostage, what do we do? Shadow the ships (and yacht) and let it go with the hostages onboard... or just circle around doing nothing.

Well, sometimes, that does work. See: HMS Chatham Forces Release of Pirated Dhow

So you say the French used special forces to assault a pirate held yacht. The USS Bainbridge towed a liftraft 25 yards astern, then when the hostage jumped clear the pirates were engaged, by Special Forces snipers (SEALs) who had spent hours setting up. The Russian and Dutch Navies used Marines to recapture ships were the crew were locked in safe compartments, in other words, no hostages were involved. I think you are talking about this incident.

Can anyone see any difference here? Perhaps the difference between a warship and a RFA? No special forces? Two vessels on two different courses? Hostages held, on a tiny boat full of fuel and other stuff that burns? Was Wave Knight right, or should they have attempted to take out the pirates with GPMG, Mingun, and maybe even 30mm fire? Perhaps the person who responded on the Times website and advocated that the pirates could be engaged by riflemen (sic) and the hostages rescued by swimmers (sic) was right? Or perhaps not.

This incident was discussed at length on ARRSE, and as noted there, it was the media making a story out of nothing. Sadly, most of the public seem to be unable to use their brains and think everything is as simple a clear cut as the media likes to pretend. Much of the media coverage is politically driven crap by tenth rate hacks like Max Hastings who don't even bother to check basics.

Well put.

There are three stages needed to deal with the problem.

The first is to impose an IMO-backed ban on the payment of ransoms. The insurance companies are lucratively stoking the problem by handing out millions in ransom payments. Of course this is highly profitable for them as they claw back every penny, and a lot more, in elevated premiums.

The second is for the world maritime community to provide a fisheries protection patrol service for the whole of Somalia's EEZ. Interdict foreign 'pirate' trawlers. Arrest the crews and hand them over to the Somali Courts for trial and sentencing. Interdict the dumpers of toxic waste. Arrest them too.

Thirdly, and only when the other two conditions have been met, adopt a Russian style kick-arse military posture to deal with *every* case of ship hijacking.

I'm with your third stage LF. The first two are optional.

You gotta be kidding us, right?? WHAT Somali courts?? They don't even have a workable Govt, the place is just borderline anarchy. The country is just permanently racked with civil war, split into 3 warring quasi-independent states, and any courts that might still be working, are administering Sharia Law. If a Sharia Law court views piracy as an Islamic-inspired act against infidels, do you really imagine there will be any punishment handed out??? :ugh:
The Somali pirates families had better get down on their knees and pray to their God that the Russians were very reserved in their treatment of the last bunch of pirates, because the world was watching.
If the Russians really had their way... they would not only blast every single pirate boat out of the water... they would set to, and plaster most of Somalia with a naval barrage, that wouldn't leave a single thing standing.

From the little I know of the pirates, I think we may be missing part of the story here.

Yes, the pirates ARE criminals, and yes they do this for a living.

They hijack many more ships/vessels than they need to per head of pirate, in terms of earning enough money to live,or even live well. So, this can discount the theory they hijack, as there primary living of fishing has been destroyed by oil slicks from Western companies (the pirates like to tell us it's OUR fault they do it).

The cost of living in the region is very cheap compared to ours, yet many pirates pull in more cash per annum than a UK GP would, so it is not just to get out of poverty.

Another point often glossed over or missed, is that many of the hijacked crew do not put up any resistance. Why could this be?

If we discount many crews from western/Russian or USA ships (as these fight back), why would the crew not resist khat chewing ruthless pirates?

It is also true that vessels in the area could sail further out to see, or for virtually no expense fit anti piracy measures (such as steel plate running boards). This would make sense, as the pirates know where the vessels are at any given time (or where they are going) by using 'free' internet software to track movements.

We often talk of huge ransoms being given to pirates (and are rightly disgusted), but there is little press coverage of the insurance payouts for lost/hijacked vessels!

I think that if the major insurers could add a clause that hijacked vessels would not receive a payout for ANY losses, UNLESS they had taken all measure to prevent this happening (some of the above, plus say, no more than four hours extra sailing to avoid the coastal areas), then the hijackings would go down dramatically in number.

I am possibly being very coy here, but there are several rusty old buckets hijacked while sailing very slowly, and also quite close to the coast, and with no anti pirate defences. Oddly the crews of these vessels (of whom some may be locals) do not put up any resistance.


So, do some of these pirates have a good and legal way to better their lives, as per above?

Yes, it is simply a case of not trying to hijack a Russian vessel, but rather to have a half hearted attack on anything, and be caught in the act by the British:}

If I were a pirate, I would be doing that right now, and then asking for residence in the UK, with all the benefits that can bring. The Brits would take one look at me: A drug eating AK47 holding criminal and possible murderer, and have to let me in (on the grounds there are folks exactly like ME in my own country, who kill people):}:}.

Take a look at the video in post#50.