The Norwegian-owned, Maltese-flagged, South Korean-operated chemical tanker, Sahmo Jewelry, was seized by Somali pirates last Saturday, on its way from the UAE to Sri Lanka.
South Korean naval special forces stormed the hijacked ship early Friday, rescued 21 sailors, captured five pirates, and killed some more:
Military officials in Seoul say a South Korean naval destroyer, the Choi Young, with 300 special forces aboard, tailed the hijacked ship for days before moving in early Friday.
Army Lieutenant General Lee Seong-ho, at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says at least eight of the kidnappers died while the skipper of the seized ship was shot in the stomach by the pirates. His injuries are not considered life-threatening.
General Lee says three of the rescuers suffered minor injuries as they came under fire from the kidnappers.
The general says the operation demonstrates South Korea’s strong will to never negotiate with pirates.
This strong will is a fairly new development:
The government had vowed not endure a repeat of last year’s hijacking of an oil tanker also operated by Samho Shipping.
The Samho Dream and its crew were freed after 217 days, reportedly following a ransom payment of more than $9 million.
That prompted criticism here that the payment would encourage pirates to more aggressively target South Korean vessels.
So, why don’t the Americans, or other Westerners, do more of this? Well, some are trying to:
Erik Prince, the founder of the international security giant Blackwater Worldwide, is backing an effort by a controversial South African mercenary firm [Saracen International] to insert itself into Somalia’s bloody civil war by protecting government leaders, training Somali troops, and battling pirates and Islamic militants there, according to American and Western officials.
[...]
For years, Mr. Prince, a multimillionaire former Navy SEAL, has tried to spot new business opportunities in the security world. In 2008, he sought to capitalize on the growing rash of piracy off the Horn of Africa to win Blackwater contracts from companies that frequent the shipping lanes there. He even reconfigured a 183-foot oceanographic research vessel into a pirate-hunting ship for hire, complete with drone aircraft and .50-caliber machine guns.
Richard “Wretchard” Fernandez notes that when Malaysian naval commandos boarded a ship captured by Somali pirates and rescued 23 hostages in the Gulf of Aden they used the same secret weapon as the South Korean naval special forces: they were neither European nor American:
What you can do depends on what papers you carry. In 2008 the Times Online reported that “the Royal Navy, once the scourge of brigands on the high seas, has been told by the Foreign Office not to detain pirates because doing so may breach their human rights. Warships patrolling pirate-infested waters, such as those off Somalia, have been warned that there is also a risk that captured pirates could claim asylum in Britain.” Their chances of doing the same in Korea are probably vanishingly small.
The are real advantages to having the “right” nationality. The Independent darkly warned that “Erik Prince, the American founder of the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, has cropped up at the centre of a controversial scheme to establish a new mercenary force to crack down on piracy and terrorism in the war-torn East African country of Somalia.” The crime isn’t being mercenary. They are a dime a dozen the world over. The crime is being American. But the Independent shouldn’t worry. Once Mr. Prince has trained the locals no further offense is possible.
Cecil Rhodes, who once admonished people to “remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life” would have been surprised to learn there are all kinds of advantages to being non-Western in the modern world. For one thing you are far less likely to be accused of racism, colonialism or human rights violations. This is probably why Prince is training locals, so the field of action is devolved to where blame may not attach.
[...]
If you want to win an counter-insurgency then indigenize it. Hide the white man and you are in the Left’s blind spot. Get the natives to kill the natives and nobody will notice. Don’t believe it? Try asking yourself this: which conflict, apart from the World Wars, has been the most destructive in 20th and 21st century history? Was it the America’s ‘criminal invasion of Iraq’? Afghanistan? Israel’s wars against the Arab? The Iraq-Iran War? Korea 1950 maybe? Then Vietnam surely. It is none of these. It’s the Second Congo War and it is all about minerals. What? Never heard of it?The largest war in modern African history, it directly involved eight African nations, as well as about 25 armed groups. By 2008 the war and its aftermath had killed 5.4 million people, mostly from disease and starvation, making the Second Congo War the deadliest conflict worldwide since World War II. Millions more were displaced from their homes or sought asylum in neighboring countries.
Despite a formal end to the war in July 2003 and an agreement by the former belligerents to create a government
of national unity, 1,000 people died daily in 2004 from easily preventable cases of malnutrition and disease. The war and the conflicts afterwards are, among other things, driven by the trade of conflict minerals. …
Even though the war may have officially ended years ago, people in the Congo are still dying at a rate of an estimated 45,000 per month; 2,700,000 people have died since 2004.
When was the last time anybody demonstrated against the Second Congo War? You mean there was a First one? In 1952 Ralph Ellison wrote a novel called the Invisible Man, which argued that black people were socially invisible. The news is they’re still invisible, especially to the ideologues who claim to think of nothing but their welfare. Asians used to be in the same case. When was the last time the anti-war movement demonstrated against the Khmer Rouge? When the first reports of the genocide in Cambodia filtered out, Noam Chomsky explained it as the natural consequence of “the US war”.
[...]
Of the many explanations given for the rise of China and the North Asian countries, one may have been omitted: the freedom they enjoy from the artificialities of modern politically correct culture. They don’t have to listen to Chomsky or read the Guardian. They can light up a smoke, go to the moon, build nuclear reactors, construct a highway in months instead of years — even rescue hostages from pirates, without getting a single letter from some hokey European tribunal. To be born Chinese, Korean or Japanese today may be to win first prize in the lottery of life. They can deploy all the resources of a modern, technological world without being hindered by any of the fundamentally racist and obscurantist mumbo-jumbo of the Chomskys and the Eric Hobsbawms of the world. But the situation for Americans is tragically different. They have to listen to lectures and teaching moments from people who couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag.
That is the saddest thing that I’ve read in a long time.
And it strongly makes me want to move to Asia. Even more than before.
So, South Korea passes the piracy test.
I’ll add the name to Russia. It seems very significant that the Russians; actions were filmed and posted on the web. Clearly this was intended as a deterrent.
I suppose everyone outside of the West passes the piracy test. And by West we mean the so-called élite. Most of America — Texas, the South, the Mid-West — would love to see what a few US Navy ships could do to pirates.
Russia’s an interesting case of a country supposedly in the process of demographic suicide, but willing to fight, balancing between deterring its enemies and egging them on.
I don’t think South Korea is looking to take on western immigrants.