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Jewish World Review Nov. 21, 2008 / 23 Mar-Cheshvan 5769 Civilization walks the plank By Caroline B. Glick
On Tuesday Somali pirates, sailing in little more than motorized bathtubs,
armed with automatic rifles and RPGs, and sustained by raw fish and
narcotics successfully hijacked the Sirius Star, a Saudi-owned oil tanker
the size of a US aircraft carrier. The tanker was carrying some $100 million
worth of crude oil. News of its capture caused global oil prices to rise by
a dollar a barrel.
The next day, Somali pirates attempted to hijack the Trafalgar, a British
frigate, but were forced to flee by a German naval helicopter dispatched to
the scene. They did manage to hijack a Chinese trawler and a cargo ship from
Hong Kong. They nearly got control of an Ethiopian ship, but it too was
saved by the German navy that heeded its call for help in time.
Piracy is fast emerging as the newest old threat to stage a comeback in
recent years. Over the past week and a half alone, 12 vessels have been
hijacked. And according to the International Maritime Bureau, in the three
months that ended on Sept. 30, Somali pirates attacked 26 vessels, capturing
576 crew members. Britain's Chatham house assesses the ransoms they netted
at between $18 million and $30 million.
And with financial strength comes increased military sophistication. The US
navy expressed shock at the pirates' successful hijacking of the Sirius
Star. The pirates staged the hijacking much farther from shore than they
had ever done previously.
Beyond the personal suffering incurred by thousands of crew members taken
hostage in recent years, piracy's potential impact on global economic
stability is enormous. In the Gulf of Aden, where the Somali pirates
operate, US shippers alone transport more than $1.5 trillion in cargo
annually.
One of the unique characteristics of pirates is that they appear to be equal
opportunity aggressors. They don't care who owns the ships they attack. On
August 21, Somali pirates hijacked the Iran Deyanat, a ship owned and
operated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards-linked Islamic Republic of Iran
Shipping Line (IRISL). In September the US treasury Department designated
IRISL as a company that assists Iran's nuclear weapons program and placed it
under stiff financial sanctions.
Iran Deyanat's manifest asserted that its cargo included minerals. Yet
shortly after the pirates went on board they began developing symptoms like
hair loss that experts claim are more in line with radiation exposure.
According to reports, some 16 pirates died shortly after being exposed to
the cargo. Just this week, a second Iranian ship — this one apparently
shipping wheat — was similarly captured.
Then too, in September pirates seized the Faina, a Ukrainian ship carrying
33 Russian-made T-72 tanks. The Ukrainians and Russians claimed that the
tanks were destined for Kenya, but it later emerged that they may have been
seized en route to Sudan. So ironically, in the case of both the Faina and
the Deyanat, pirates may have inadvertently saved thousands of lives.
The international community is at a loss for what to do about the emerging
danger of piracy. This is not due to lack of capacity to fight the pirate
ships. On Monday an Indian naval frigate, the INS Tabar, sank a pirate
"mother ship" whose fleet members were attacking the Tabar in the Gulf of
Aden. NATO has deployed a naval task force while the American, French,
German and other navies have aggressively worked to free merchant ships
under attack by pirates.
As David Rivkin and Lee Casey explained in the Wall Street Journal on
Wednesday, the problem with contending with piracy is not so much military,
as legal and political. Whereas customary international law defined piracy
as a threat against all nations and therefore a crime for which universal
jurisdiction must be applied to perpetrators, in today's world, states are
unwilling to apprehend pirates or contend with them because they are likely
to find themselves in a sticky legal mess.
In centuries past, in accordance with established international law, it was
standard practice for naval captains to hang pirates after capturing them.
Today, when Europe has outlawed capital punishment, when criminal defendants
throughout the West are given more civil rights than their victims, and when
irregular combatants picked off of battlefields or intercepted before they
attack are given — at a minimum — the same rights as those accorded to
legal prisoners of war, states lack the political will and moral clarity to
prosecute offenders. As Casey and Rivkin note, last April the British
Foreign Office instructed the British navy not to apprehend pirates lest
they claim that their human rights were harmed and request and receive
asylum in Britain.
The West's perverse interpretations of human rights and humanitarian law,
which bar it from handling one of the most acute emerging threats to the
international economy, is a consequence of the West's abdication of moral
and legal sanity in its dealings with international terror. In the 1960s and
1970s, when international terrorism first emerged as a threat to
international security, the West adopted international treaties and
conventions that tended to treat terrorism as a new form of piracy. Like
piracy, terrorism was to be treated as an attack on all nations.
Jurisdiction over terrorists was to be universal. Such early views were
codified in early documents like the Convention for the Suppression of
Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft from 1970 which established a principle of
universal jurisdiction over aircraft hijackers.
Similarly, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks on the US, the UN Security
Council passed binding Resolution 1373 that also compelled member states not
only to treat terrorists as illegal combatants who must be universally
denied any support of any kind, but to take action against anyone involved
with or supporting terrorists in any way. That is, as in piracy, the
tendency of states contending with terrorism has been view it as an act
requiring universal jurisdiction, compelling all UN member states to
prosecute offenders.
And yet, over the years, states have managed to ignore or invert
international laws on terrorism to the point where today terrorists are
among the most protected groups of individuals in the world. Due to
political sympathy for terrorists, hostility towards their victims, or fear
of terrorist reprisals against a state that dares to prosecute terrorists
found on its territory, states have managed to avoid not only applying
existing laws against terrorists. They have also refrained from updating
laws to meet the growing challenges of terrorism. Instead, international
institutions and "enlightened" Western states have devoted their time to
condemning and threatening to prosecute the few states that have taken
action against terrorists.
The inversion of international law from an institution geared towards
protecting states and civilians from international law breakers to one
devoted to protecting international menaces from states and their citizens
is nowhere more evident than in the international community's treatment of
Hamas-controlled Gaza.
One of the reasons the international community has failed so abjectly to
take reasonable measures to combat terrorism is because international
terrorism as presently constituted is the creation of Palestinian Arabs and
their Arab brethren. Since the 1960s, and particularly since the mid-1970s,
Europe, and to varying degrees the US, has been averse to contending with
terrorism because their hostility towards Israel leads them to condone
Palestinian Arab terrorism against Israel.
The international community's treatment of Hamas-controlled Gaza epitomizes
this victory of politics over law. Both the US and the EU have labeled Hamas
a terror group. That designation places Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas
under the regime of UN Security Council Resolution 1373.
Among other things, Resolution 1373 requires states to "freeze without delay
funds and other financial assets or economic resources of…entities owned or
controlled directly or indirectly by [terrorists]." That is, the resolution
requires UN member states to end all financial and other support for
Hamas-controlled Gaza.
The resolution also requires UN member states to "cooperate [with other
states] to prevent and suppress terrorist attacks and take action against
perpetrators of such acts." This means that states are required to assist
one another — and in the case of Hamas, to assist Israel — in combating
Hamas and punishing its members and supporters.
While it can be argued that given the absence of a binding legal definition
of terrorism, states that do not designate Hamas as a terrorist organization
are not required to abide by the terms of 1373 in dealing with Hamas, it is
quite clear that for states that do recognize Hamas as a terror group,
1373's provisions must be upheld. And yet, the EU and the US have willfully
ignored its provisions. They have steadily increased their budgetary support
for the Palestinian Authority while knowing full well that the Fatah-led PA
in Judea and Samaria is transferring money to Hamas-controlled Gaza to pay
the salaries of Hamas employees.
More disturbingly, the US and the EU as well as the UN demand that Israel
itself sustain Hamas-controlled Gaza economically. The UN, EU and the US
have consistently demanded that Israel provide Gaza with fuel, food, water,
medicine, electricity, telephone service, port services, and access to
Israeli markets in spite of the fact that international law actually
prohibits Israel from providing such assistance, and in fact arguably
requires Israel to deny it.
Recently, supported by the UN, and in connivance with Hamas, European
leaders began supporting illegal moves to end Israel's maritime blockade of
Gaza which was established to block weapons and terror personnel from
entering and exiting the area. Expanding this trend, this week Navanathem
Pillay, the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights called for Israel to end
its blockade of the Gaza Strip, perversely calling Israel's blockade a
breach of international and humanitarian law.
This inversion of the aims of international law — from protecting states and
innocent civilians from attack to protecting aggressors from retaliation —
has brought about the absurd situation where terrorist ideologues and
commanders like Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi are feted in Britain while retired
Israeli and American generals are threatened with arrest. Germany welcomed
Iranian President and genocide proponent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to visit and
indicted former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld for crimes against
humanity. Belgium allows Hamas and Hizbullah supporters like Dyab Abu
Jahjah, who calls for attacks against Jews to operate freely, but indicted
former prime minister Ariel Sharon for crimes against humanity.
The consequence of this absurd state of affairs is obvious. The
international law champions who argue that international humanitarian law
provides a non-violent means for nations to defend themselves against
aggressors have perverted the purpose and meaning of international
humanitarian law to such a degree that the only way for nations to protect
themselves against pirates, terrorists and other international rogues is to
ignore international law aficionados and secure their interests by force.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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