PIRATES, POMPEY & PRAGMATISM - Or HOSTIS HUMANI GENERIS

Leonard Colquhoun

Not quite as simple as that. Simply thumping the Somali pirates will give only a short-term respite, as the history of numerous similar punitive expeditions in the Caribbean and against the Barbary pirates4 clearly shows, as did such shows of force in the Mediterranean in 102 BCE, 78-76, 74-72 and 69-68. And a Pompeian restoration of their fishing industry, the traditional livelihood of many of these pirates, is not so straight-forward, either: that foreigners have taken their fishing grounds is one of the main reasons for their turning to piracy, and reclaiming those waters will not be easy for people who do not have a functioning state to back them up.

PIRATES, POMPEY & PRAGMATISM – Or HOSTIS HUMANI GENERIS

Piracy is described by Wiktionary as “robbery at sea, a violation of international law; taking a ship away from the control of those who are legally entitled to it”, expanding on the RD Oxford Complete Wordfinder’s “the practice or an act of robbery of ships as sea”; both give such extended usages as hijacking and copyright breaches. In the last couple of decades we’ve had to re-familiarise ourselves with this activity, as an era of world-wide control of the seas by imperial navies has passed. And in popular entertainment, Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow character has arrived to occupy the place once held by Errol Flynn’s swashbucklers.

The West has had two major periods of organised piracy: the Barbary Coast pirates from the coasts of north and north-east Africa (modern Libya and Tunisia, and Morocco and Algeria) from the 1580s to 1830; and the Caribbean pirates in the fabled Spanish Main, including famous names such as Henry Morgan, Blackbeard and Anne Bonny, from about 1640 to 1720.

Several factors are common to both these periods, including lack of effective state naval power, national rivalries which saw pirates in alliance with various nations; ineffective control of land bases, which we now refer to as ‘failed states’, and lack of other employment opportunities or livelihoods. Other factors included ransoms being paid either ad hoc, or as pre-payments between pirates and governments, and governments putting off dealing with problem until the politicians and/or the voters or citizens were seriously affected. More effective national government in Spain, France and Great Britain, and combined offensives by their navies in the Caribbean, ended the reigns of the likes of Blackbeard quite abruptly in 1720; similarly decisive action after the 1815 Congress of Vienna put an end to the depredations of the Barbary pirates, culminating in the French conquest of littoral Algeria in 1830.

The time for equally decisive action against Somali piracy looks to be near, now that shipping detours to avoid Somali pirates, according to a recent news item, could cost world trade a fortune, which entails costs for ordinary people almost everywhere. There’s also the matter of ships and their crews and captains held for ransom, a practice not amenable to sweet reason. But an anti-piracy war, like those concluded in 1720 and in 1830, is no solution, and even a combined naval assault on the pirate havens on the Horn of Africa will not remove the problem. Nor is continuing to pay ransom for ships and crews, no more than it was in dealing with the Barbary corsairs or the Caribbean pirates.

History, however, has another template for action. About 2050 years ago, in the first century BCE, rampant piracy in the Mediterranean began to affect both politicians and voters in the Roman republic, the superpower of the era.

For example, in 75 BCE they held one aspiring young politico to ransom for 50 talents of gold (according one very rough guesstimate, equivalent to about USD40,000,000). Everyone, even in these days of content-free education, has heard of this Roman, son of a minor office-holder (who, says the quirky Lemprières Classical Dictionary [1788], died suddenly while putting on his shoes) and member of the undistinguished yet aristo family of the Julii Caesares; nor was he the only prominent figure so captured. Other attacks included raids on coastal towns and villages in the Italian peninsula, right under the noses of the Senate, whose members lost not just political credibility but valuable property as well.

But top Romans in the Republic had a very definite We’re-all-equals attitude to each other – no Kings here, as shown in how the top position which you could aspire to in the Republic was to be one of the two annual Consuls. They were paranoid about giving one man too much individual power, and even rampart piracy seemed insufficient cause. The constitution provided for elected Tribunes of the People who could veto1 proposed laws, and getting round them was no easier than getting round a UN Security Council veto from China, Russia or the US.

However, ordinary Romans, in the persons of voters in the Republic’s annual elections, were being affected – you might even say “impacted”. Cilician piracy had become so rife all over the Mediterranean that it began to threaten maritime trade, which included the City’s imported food supply. Rome’s citizens were feisty blokes, and starving, rioting voters aren’t easily fobbed off with spin, particularly when one of the most brazen attacks was on Ostia, Rome’s port at Tiber mouth.

So, eight years after the ransom incident mentioned above, the Gabinian Law2 of 67 BCE gave the proconsul Cn Pompeius Magnus3 (‘Pompey’ to his English-speaking friends) wide-ranging and long-term authority to deal with the pirates.

Which he did brilliantly by co-ordinated and overwhelming military and naval force, clearing the western seas in 40 days, and in three months finished a Mediterranean-wide campaign which had been expected to take three years. (Our State premiers can only drool at the thought of such efficiency !!) In the words of M Cary and HH Scullard’s A History of Rome [1975], “Pompey crowned his success by the leniency with which treated his captives, [the greater number being] set up by him as honest peasants or traders in Cilicia, or on other coastlands which they had previously depopulated”. With this combined re-settlement and re-training, and with Rome now maintaining a permanent naval force (Rome’s previous practice had been to dismiss the fleet when it was not needed), the scourge was removed.

Job-creation and clobbering – there are lessons for us here

Then there’s a possible deal-with-the-devil to cope with: the only force likely to form a functioning government in southern and central Somalia5 is the Islamic Courts Movement, which, as far as one can tell, seems to want an Islamist state, with all the problems that will bring to its non-Muslim neighbours, Kenya and Ethiopia, who may need lots of persuasion to accept that outcome. Then there’s the ethical question of handing over millions more women and girls to a fundamentalism so inimical to and destruction of women’s rights. Still, Ms Greer, Australia’s non-resident pontificator on all things feminist, doesn’t seem to think that’s at all a worry.

Anyway, to make things even more complex, some Islamists are reported as denouncing the pirates as unIslamic, while others seem to want to give piracy jihad status.

Clearly, American philosopher George Santayana’s famous dictum about the perils of ignoring history’s lessons applies here: Somali piracy needs the big stick of co-ordinated military and naval power, as well the carrot of making it unnecessary for Somalis in the daily business of making a living. Talking softly and carrying big sticks, i.e., weak UN resolutions and sail-pasts by big navies, will not work.

As for HOSTIS HUMANI GENERIS, read the observations and recommendations of Douglas R. Burgess Jnr, author of “The Pirates’ Pact: The Secret Alliances Between History’s Most Notorious Buccaneers and Colonial America”, in this early December NY Times article –

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/opinion/05burgess.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

1. That word veto is a Latin verb meaning “I forbid”.

2. The Romans. like the modern US, named laws after those who proposed them; thus the Lex Gabinia was named after its proposer, the tribune Aulus Gabinius.

3. As with so many other features of modern life, such as road rules and high-rises, dunnies and sewerage, and a clean water supply and take-away food, the Romans had a naming system of personal and family names something like ours. Weirdly, we know the young upstart captured by pirates in 75 BCE as Julius Caesar, his personal name having dropped from our usage; it is as if the WWI British PM was now known simply as Lloyd George, sans David, and the early 20th C English composer as Vaughan Williams, minus the Ralph. Just as weirdly, the standard abbreviations for Caesar’s first name, Gaius, and Pompey’s first name, Gnaeus, are C and Cn respectively. Google or Wiki if curious.

4. These pirates are named after a mediaeval spelling of ‘Berber’, the indigenous peoples of NE Africa; also, the “shores of Tripoli” reference in the US Marines hymn is to the now Libyan port of that name in north Africa.

5. Somalia is, like Caesar’s Gaul, divided into three parts: in the north, on the coast leading into the Red Sea, is the moderate and (so far) functioning self-proclaimed independent state of Somaliland (the former British colony of the same name); on each side of the Horn of Africa (the pointy bit), is ‘Puntland’, which has seen itself since 1998 as an autonomous self-governing area within a federal Somalia; and thirdly, there’s the long southern stretch beyond ‘Puntland’ which has been without a functioning government since 1991; these last two parts formed Italian Somaliland. Perhaps more important than these divisions are the numerous clans and sub-clans which are the primary foci of loyalty for almost all Somalis. As for the Gauls who resisted Caesar, and the Gaelic Irish who opposed British rule in Ireland, clan rivalries and suspicions could be reckoned as Somalia’s biggest problem.

6. Muslim, Islamic and Islamist are used as follows, which seems to be standard practice: ‘Muslim’ for places like Turkey and Indonesia, where most of the people follow Islam, but the state is secular, and as a general term for followers of the religion of Islam; ‘Islamic’, for many Muslim nations where Islam is a state religion, and but where it is not compulsory (although apostasising from it may be illegal), and where other religions have, to a greater or lesser extent, legal status and rights; and ‘Islamist’, where every aspect of life is legally in accordance with the sharia, and where other religions (or in some cases, sects of Islam seen as heretical) can neither be practised nor have any rights, such states as, in their own ways, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

PS: the writer acknowledges the prompting of partner Margaret, who while watching an evening news, asked “Where’s Pompey when we need him ?”

Leonard Colquhoun