(Absalon – pictured here, photocredit to Uncle Buddha on Flickr – was the “fighting archbishop” of the Danish Middle Ages, who did much to build up Copenhagen towards the city it was to become by building a fort there. His statue is there in the city’s center, mounted on a magnificent rearing horse, in Højbroplads – that’s the square right by the Folketing, Denmark’s one-chamber parliament. The main sort of enemy he fought in his day, it turns out, was in fact Baltic Sea pirates.)

It’s no surprise that the Absalon has already seen some action, and the Danish press is following along to report.

First there was an engagement last weekend with an Indian ship, a “cargo-dhow,” covered in the Jyllands-Posten by an article from Ritzau. There was a problem with that ship: it had already been taken over by a band of pirates for use as a “mother ship” supporting smaller pirate-skiffs, with its regular 12-man crew confined away somewhere on board. That meant that the Danes really didn’t want to actually attack it, and so risk the crew’s lives; the Absalon instead just shadowed the ship for three days, warning other ships away and so preventing it from committing any actual piracy. The dhow finally headed back to the Somali coast – slipping away from the Danes’ observation for a while, it must be said – before it was rediscovered on that coast with the pirates gone and the original crew unharmed and only needing some fuel and food supplies to continue their journey.

You could call that one a stand-off, then. Admiral Rune and his men did somewhat better on Thursday. Among others, Marianne Fajstrup of Berlingske Tidende reports that the Absalon then got a distress-call from a Slovenian-owned, Antigua and Barbuda-registered ship called the Ariella, 35 nautical miles away, that pirates were attacking. The Danish warship promptly set sail in that direction, and also sent out a helicopter, which saw absolutely no one on the ship’s bridge but did find a pirate-skiff moored alongside, with pirates on it, which were driven away by gunfire. When the Absalon itself arrived, Danish sailors boarded the Ariella and ultimately found the ship’s crew barricaded away in a “safe room,” wondering whether it was safe to come out again and take back control of the ship.

There is parallel coverage of this incident from Rikke Faurfelt of Politiken, who adds an interesting wrinkle. Yes, pirates were driven away from the Ariella in their skiff, but there’s no guarantee that that was all of them. Some might still be aboard – and, at 183 meters long and 32,000 tons, the Ariella has plenty of space that needs to be searched before the “All clear” can be given. Interestingly, there is also coverage of this very same incident in the press of the landlocked Czech Republic, from Mladá fronta dnes (Somali pirates strike again, commandos from warship liberate crew), which adds the detail that there was a second pirate-skiff involved in the attack on the Ariella which managed to leave before the Danes could get there but was apprehended by a Russian warhead operating in the area on the same anti-pirate mission, the Neustrashimy (the “Fearless”; note that Admiral Rune cannot tell this Russian warship what to do, since it is not NATO).

                          

The (eventual) metamorphosis of The Pirate Bay to legality is especially good news for the French government, which has been busy since the beginning of the year trying to come up with legal measures to pass to outlaw the sort of free downloading of copyrighted commercial material that The Pirate Bay did so much to facilitate. After modifying their legislation to meet the objections from France’s Constitutional Court, which had first thrown it out, the French Senate has recently passed it, so that it is close to becoming law. It would empower a state agency – called Hadopi – to detect this sort of activity and, if two warnings to desist are ignored, pass on to French judges information about the offense for them to assign penalties, including fines, jail, and disconnection from the Net.

Ah, but can anyone ever stop truly determined Internet “pirates”? Le Monde reporter Maël Inizan now reports on another site now arising like a phoenix from The Pirate Bay’s ashes to save the cause of free downloading (Illegal downloading: a new site takes up the torch of The Pirate Bay).

This site is called OpenBitTorrent. As you could imagine, the people in charge here have taken precautions against being as vulnerable, whether technically or legally, as The Pirate Bay turned out to be. There is little that is secret about their tactics to those ends, as Inizan point out; you can basically read it all off of the site’s very homepage. “We do not have any content. We are not a bittorrent site, we are just a tracker, we can not [sic] see what content is behind an info_hash.” In Inizan’s estimation, it’s this characteristic of serving as a decentralized index merely enabling people to find out where they need to go to download the bittorrents that they want that should keep it safe from legal challenge: “If it spreads, this system risks rendering the application of the ‘Hadopi Law’ in France even more difficult.”

Oh, and as you might also be able to imagine, there is some heavy circumstantial evidence that the people behind OpenBitTorrent are the same people who originally were behind The Pirate Bay.

The EU Is On the Case!

A national legislature determined to cut people off from the Internet for their downloads; legal assaults against notorious pirate websites; it’s clear that the whole Internet-download question, in Europe at least, has the potential to provide some excitement in the public arena even as the continent otherwise goes off on vacation. This issue is being addressed at the EU level as well, as we learn from the Czech daily Lidové noviny: European Commission wants to enable downloading of songs and films. This word comes from the relevant European Commissioner, namely Viviane Reding of Luxembourg and of “Information Society and Media.” “The European Union needs new rules for the downloading of music, films, and other files from the Internet, without that being pirate,” is the article’s first sentence. In Ms. Reding’s judgment, the way the relevant laws are now, they pretty much force people (mainly the young, of course) to become “Internet pirates” and illegally download copyrighted material. So according to the piece her “key priority” is to set up a “framework that will bring digital content closer on the united European market and at the same time will ensure compensation for the creators.”

There are only a few objections to all of this that the LN article does not bother to go into:

1. “Closer” (i.e. more available) digital content for consumers, yet reward for creators: that’s certainly the desired Holy Grail here. But those objectives are to a great degree mutually antagonistic, so that it seems Ms. Reding will truly need the Wisdom of Solomon to ever come up with any legal solution that will work.
   
2. On the other hand, that’s probably really not her business anyway! Within the European Union it is still the national governments that have jurisdiction over media and Internet questions (as we see reflected, for example, in the widespread attention being devoted to the French legislature’s recent efforts in this regard).
   
3. Ms. Reding might well not be Commissioner for Information Society and Media for very much longer! This is by no means any reflection on her competence; rather, the five-year term-of-office for all European Commissioners comes to an end this fall. Sure, it’s possible that she might remain in the post, although that would require 1) That the Luxembourg government again name her, not somebody else, to be a Commissioner, and then 2) That whoever turns out to be the Commission President re-appoints her to that particular portfolio. It’s therefore very possible that she will not – so is she really willing to tackle this complicated question as her “key priority” with only the summer months (vacation time!) and a couple of months after that left to her?
   

                          

Now according to a further NRC article, it looks like NATO has actually taken notice of Clinton’s remarks and realized that it needs to come up with something to fix this situation. But that NRC report still does not paint what you could call a very reassuring picture. In fact, you could break down its news a follows:

• The Good: It’s no less than the NATO Secretary-General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who is reported by the NRC to be determined not only to give NATO’s anti-piracy involvement off the Somali coast a “more long-term character,” but also to make it “more robust,” meaning at the very least the scrapping of this “throw them back” practice. Through his NATO spokesman, De Hoop Scheffer admitted that, up to now, it had been assumed that participating NATO member-states could get by simply with their own national law and the international law of the high seas in their dealings with such pirates. But now that is clearly by the wayside, and efforts are starting to draw up common NATO rules of engagement.
  
• The Bad: But there is another problem coming up which might even slightly delay that writing of the new rules of engagement: most of the NATO ships now on anti-piracy watch off of Somalia are shortly due to leave for other missions, mostly official visits to various ports in Asia! So NATO representatives are now meeting to address that problem first and find some replacement ships (or cancel those port-calls) to ensure a continue naval presence there even as pirate attacks show no sign of abating even after the recent successful, and deadly, US hostage-saving action.
  
• The Indifferent: Even as those NATO officials meet in Brussels, another conference is now going on there, under the sponsorship of the United Nations. Yes, its purpose is to gather together monetary contributions, mainly towards the cause of getting Somalia back on its feet towards becoming a functioning government again which can finally take action against its own pirate-citizens. The sum of $31 million is supposed to go towards building up the Somali police, and a further $134 as a contribution to the work of the peace-keeping mission, sponsored by the African Union, that is currently in that country.

Long-time €S readers will recall that we’ve covered this whole pirates issue here a number of times before. Viewed from that background, to me the truly mysterious aspect of how NATO currently seems to be fumbling the ball in its approach to the Somali pirates is how inconsistent policy is even among the different NATO member states. Yes, we have fresh examples of the Dutch and the Canadians just throwing back the pirates they caught, but we have also noted here before how the Germans at least are willing to deliver the pirates they catch to the authorities at “a Kenyan port,” which probably should be interpreted as Mombasa. And the New York Times has a useful article up about how – somewhat surprisingly – those Kenyan authorities in Mombasa might very well be both willing and able to prosecute – well, as “able” as the government in a relatively poor African country can be. And there is also European Union money apparently already allocated for the Kenyans to bring their maritime judicial facilities a bit closer to the modern age. In any event, Mombasa is clearly a better option than “throwing them back”; why can’t the Dutch and Canadians avail themselves of it?

                          

The second-order discussion here, of course, is over what can be done to eradicate these dangerous maritime nuisances, who since the latter part of last year have become particularly audacious. If you have any ideas and are looking to get into a discussion, then you can of course e-mail me at this weblog, and/or you can resort to fora from the New York Times or the BBC. In the meantime, though, the Danish legislature (the Folketing) has an official solution that it would like brought up before the United Nations, as reported in Berlingske Tidende (Danish proposal should go to UN).

It should be no surprise that the Danes already have a solution to propose, for at least two reasons: 1) The Danes come out of an activist, Protestant, we-can-change-the-world-if-we-try culture that finds it impossible to encounter a problem like this and just shrug its shoulders and move on, and 2) They are heavily involved in international shipping. Indeed, that container ship at the center of the current stand-off, the Maersk Alabama, is owned by a Danish conglomerate, the A.P. Møller-Mærsk Group. The Folketing’s plan was drawn up by the Danish Institute for Military Studies, and it’s a fairly simple one, that starts with the establishment of a regional coast guard for the Somali coast, with start-up costs paid for by the UN, that can serve to warn passing shipping about the specific presence of pirates. But the second essential element is the establishment of some sort of court, with a firm basis in international law to be able to try pirates for their crimes. For one glaring problem is that, too often, Western naval personnel who have actually captured pirates have basically had to throw them right back, like fish that local gaming regulations won’t allow you to keep. We’ve covered this particular problem before here, and this does raise the question about – even if some sort of international court is established to try the pirates – who will be responsible for ensuring that whatever punishment that court prescribes is actually carried out? That point still seems to be a hole in the Danish proposal.

Anyway, though, a parliamentary majority is in place in the Folketing to send it on its way to the UN, although some doubts were expressed by the defense spokesman for the Danish People’s Party, who worried that sending such a proposal to the UN was the quickest way to make sure it got stuck in bureaucracy and went nowhere.

                          

Spokesman Wilhelm Möllers further asserted that within Kenya “minimum standards for the carrying-out of a punitive process” are assured, so it looks like the German military authorities will simply sail into a Kenyan port and turn over the prisoners to authorities there.

The German Defense Ministry – surely one of the four ministries cited above which was consulted in this decision? – is keeping a stiff upper lip for now, saying “nothing at all” has changed in their naval operations off the Somali coast as a result of this ruling, so the German frigate Rheinland-Pfalz will remain there (and in fact is due shortly to escort a ship from the World Food Program). Still, you have to wonder what sort of “justice” those captured pirates can expect in Kenya – keep in mind that their organizations are already in possession of millions of dollars in ship-ransom money, and I’m not necessarily suggesting they’ll use some of that on lawyers – and, therefore, what the ultimate point is of that Western naval presence off of Somalia if this is all they can look forward to achieving.

                          

(By the way, go ahead and click that link; it leads you to an English-language article from Voice of America where you can read about, among other things, how most of the African heads-of-state assembled there in Addis Ababa found that they had pressing business to attend to back home that kept them from being present for Kadhafi’s inaugural speech on the summit’s last day.)

Unfortunately, that VOA account does not report the remarks Kadhafi offered later as he went to inspect AU headquarters there in the Ethiopian capital. But our old friend the Flemish newspaper De Standaard has an account of them, which I just happened to trip across while preparing my previous blog-post, below. (SerenDIPity-doo-dah, serenDIPity-ay!) You know those Somali pirates (we’ve followed their exploits here on €S before) who recently got that $3.2 million in cash dropped by parachute that they had been demanding and finally released that Ukrainian-registered freighter filled with some heavy arms and ammunition (including 31 tanks)? Well, it looks like you can forget for a while about asking the AU to do anything about them – Kadhafi is taking them under his wing. While still in Addis Ababa he publicly labeled their hijack hijinks as mere self-defense against “the stingy lands of the West” and then added “it is the defense of food for Somali children.”

                          

“Everybody loves the skull-and-crossbones,” he begins – hey, think of Errol Flynn, think of Johnny Depp! But we need to realize, he continues, that these pirates operating off of the Somali coast are not “desperate fisherman” (verzweifelte Fischer) but rather “a professionally-run business, run by gangsters and financed by serious businessmen.”

(Actually, that BBC article on these pirates that I cited in the previous blogpost does list “ex-fishermen” as an important component of these pirate gangs. There’s no mention there about how “desperate” they might be, but they are termed “the brains of the operation because they know the sea.” Oh, and from everything I’ve read the Somali pirates also do not display the “skull-and-crossbones” flag, or any flag for that matter. That’s either because they rely on sneaking up on ships and taking them by surprise to capture them, or because they have yet to hire a proper media advisor – or perhaps both.)

(UPDATE: And then again, if they are so objectionable, why is it that venture capitalists [are investing] in Somali pirates? H/t LOLFed.com.)

But Die Tageszeitung is a distinctly left-wing newspaper, in a left-wing country (by American standards), and even operating out of headquarters located in a distinctly left-wing quarter (Kreuzberg) of that country’s capital (I mean Berlin, of course), so Semler’s rhetorical fire does not stay on the pirates for long. The “Great Powers” get a swipe for their supposed responsibility for letting Somalia deteriorate into the sort of mess that allows such pirates to operate with impunity, for sure, but the ship-owners themselves hardly come away from his scrutiny unscathed. “They often sail under flags-of-convenience [Billigflaggen], pay starvation-wages when they pay at all, have contempt for environtmental rules and/or transport war-materiel into crisis-areas.” Wait: aren’t they among the victims here? Or, if they are really so evil as Semler seems to believe, can we at least start to sympathize with the Somali pirates’ own claims that they are merely a “coast guard” operating to repel these rapacious capitalists from their country’s waters?

Pirate Jurisprudence

Finally, Semler devotes some considerable attention to the issue of the basis upon which these pirates can be prosecuted by the German warships that have been sent – authorized by a UN Security Council resolution – to deal with them. And there he also sees a problem, since formally-speaking these pirates are not enemy soldiers but rather simply criminals – and it is the German police and justice systems that are authorized to deal with criminals, not the German armed forces. “Under no circumstances may police powers be granted to the [German] Federal Navy,” he writes. If you think about it a bit, you can easily understand his concern: that vital dividing line between the armed forces and police has not only been of considerable concern in Germany’s own notorious past, but is also a contemporary issue for many critics of the Bush administration, alarmed at the recent establishment of a “Northern Command” administrative structure enabling operations for the US armed forces within the US itself.

As Semler himself reports, the German Defense Ministry has taken steps to address this concern, namely including on those ships it is sending towards Somalia actual police officers to take custody of any pirate-prisoners, who then would be tried by the Hamburg criminal court (and presumably jailed in Germany if convicted). But this strikes him as an absurd set-up. Why not just start a convoy-system for merchant ships instead? he suggests.

Well, that did (ultimately) succeed against the German U-boat threat in both World Wars I and II. Tell you what, though, Herr Semler: what if we also change the Kreuzberg traffic rules so that you are only allowed to drive to and from work every day in convoy?

                          

“They have the most beautiful women, the fastest autos and the best weapons.” Now, doesn’t that sound like the sort of challenge to Bond and his equipment supremo, the enigmatic Q, that just cannot be allowed to pass unchallenged? That quote starts off coverage of this Somali pirate phenomenon in an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel (“The pirates have hit the jackpot!”).

Well, blow me down, me hearties, ’cause I been keel-hauled – by no less than the BBC, which features that same “most beautiful women” quote (more-or-less) in its own web-article Somali pirates living the high life, together with lots of other interesting description of these pirates as well, all of course written in the BBC’s customary excellent (non-pirate-talk) English.

Sigh . . . that’s always the risk you take, here in the €S biz, namely that some great piece you find in a Danish, or Czech, or whatever-flavored article someplace on-line turns out to have some or all of its juicy information replicated elsewhere on the Net, in English, for all the faithful €S fans and RSS-subscribers to access directly themselves. What’s the point then of having your friendly neighborhood EuroSavant around, huh? I might as well go back to selling shoes.

Actually, though . . . the Spiegel article does mention a number of interesting points that you won’t find in the BBC treatment. Here are the ones I found:

• First of all, and what is obvious to all if you click through the link and scroll down a little bit, are the maps showing where actual pirate-hijackings and attempted hijackings have occurred year-by-year since the year 2000. Very handy that (me hearties!), and the article also states elsewhere that the total of attacks that have occurred off the Somali coast just so far in 2008 numbers more than 60.
  
• On the other hand, the recent, eye-catching capture of that supertanker, the “Sirius Star,” actually occurred far outside the usual pirate danger area – it was much more to the southwest, really off the Kenyan rather than the Somali coast. Not only does that fact signify that shipping-owners now have a bigger danger-zone to worry about than before, but that is an area that NATO has taken no responsibility for patrolling – meaning that, as a NATO spokesman made clear, that military alliance has no plans – and, seemingly, no intention – to do anything to free the ship or its crew. (Let me also add here: that “Sirius Star” supertanker is fairly brand-spankin’ new, having been commissioned only last March. And it is as big as one American aircraft carrier – not three, something I distinctly remember hearing from radio coverage on the BBC World Service.)
  
• The government of that part of Somalia where the pirates are operating, known in German as Puntland (or, perhaps better put, the “government”), has actually decreed the death penalty for such piracy. Unfortunately, no such sentence has yet been carried out. In fact, the article cites Puntland government officials as confessing that the pirates have undoubtedly infiltrated their ranks with their own informants to gain assistance and information.