(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).

                          

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.

                          

The current “Somali government” is called the Transitional Federal Government (“TFG” for short). It was established in 2004, with backing from the UN, the US, and Ethiopia, but basically had to stay in Kenya for a while until the 2006 invasion of Somalia by Ethiopian forces drove back various Islamist insurgent groups and so enabled the TFG to set up shop in Mogadishu, the Somali capital. You can even see a picture of the current TFG prime minister, Nur Hassan Hussein, accompanying that Reformatorisch Dagblad article – so are you satisfied, doubting Thomases? He’s of course the guy on the right.

But Hussein and his government aren’t doing too well these days. Yes, we already knew that they were essentially powerless to hinder in any way the many pirates operating from their shores, but it’s even worse than that. Not that anyone from that government itself would bother to let us know, mind you: the alarming tidings come instead from Dumisani Kumalo, the South African head of the MGS, or “Monitoring Group on Somalia” which reports to the UN Security Council. Probably the most alarming bit of Kumalo’s report is that the TFG has lost more than 80% of its soldiers and policemen and of course their weapons as well, most of which it would seem have been sold on to various armed bands. Anyone thinking about simply contributing more funds to buy new weapons for the TFG should also be aware, Dumisani’s report adds, that most of that government’s defense budget (which of course takes up the lion’s share of its over-all spending) seems to be regularly lost to corruption.

More bad news: Ethiopia has had troop contingents remaining within Somalia ever since it invaded in 2006, but has announced that it will withdraw them with the new year. That leaves only 3,000 outside peace-keeping troops there, under the flag of the African Union (AU) but originating mainly from Uganda and Burundi. Unfortunately, according to current AU head Jean (“Ping me!”) Ping, those countries are also currently reconsidering their participation. Both are themselves uncomfortably close to the current armed hostilities raging in Eastern Congo.

                          

“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.