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Originally Posted by headquarters
Anyways - this problem has some similarities to the pirates of the barbay coast and all that ? I will let some the Yanks educate me on that if any are willing.
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Nah, not really; I was just reading on that. The Barbary Pirates were sailing under the flags of various Barbary princes (the Sultan of Morocco, Bey/Dey of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli). These princes would demand tribute payments (money and sometimes ships) from other countries, or else they would declare war. Interestingly, the accepted form for declaring war would be to chop down the nation's flagpole at its consulate. Then his ships (naval and privateers) would seize all the merchant ships they could, imprisoning the crews until a new tributary treaty was made.
Normally, a country would pay up as a cost of doing business in the Mediterranean. Sending a squadron of warships along with the negotiators would be a useful way to decrease the payment demanded.
The Barbary Wars, as sometimes known here, took place when Tripoli started one of these wars, and the USA didn't want to pay. We did end up paying some money, but not for tribute, just to get back the crew of the USS
Philadelphia. In the meantime, the Navy bombarded the city a few times, captured some of the privateers and instigated a revolt that captured the city of Derna.
So, that meant that there was a legally recognized power behind the "pirates"-- really privateers-- and that there was someone to negotiate with, who could stop the raiders. I don't see that in Somalia. As I understand it, there are pirate bosses with their own militias, but there are so many that a country (or group of countries) can't shut off the pirates by talking to any one of them. They are more like crime bosses than princes. You would need to take control of all of their ports, and then find real jobs for all of the ex-fishermen who turned pirate when their fishing grounds were wiped out.