From: Thomas mountain (thomascmountain@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat Apr 11 2009 - 10:03:30 EDT
The Ethiopia/USA Somali Pirates Connection
by Thomas C. Mountain
Asmara, Eritrea
April 10, 2009
With the saga of the Somali pirates once again grabbing international headlines, readers might be interested to learn of the role the Ethiopian regime and its big brother, the USA, are playing in this drama.
The Somali pirates are based in the warlord controlled enclaves in Somalia calling themselves Somaliland and Puntland. These warlords, gangsters really, are allies of the Ethiopian regime of Meles Zenawi, and have recently seen the relocation of large numbers of Ethiopian troops from southern Somalia to the territories they control.
The Ethiopian regime is a client state of the western countries, particularly the USA, and being the largest recipient of western aid in sub Saharan Africa, has a history of being the USA cop on the beat in East Africa. The December 2006 invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia, done with the open blessing, instigation, really, of the USA being a prime example of such. The fact that this invasion has prooven disastrous for the Ethiopian regime, which has claimed victory and cut and run from much of Somalia is another story.
For a brief period the western military forces patrolling the waters of the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean coast of Somalia were starting to pursue the Somali pirates after they had secured their ransoms and had returned to their shore bases. This stopped as soon as the Somali pirates began to take refuge in the Ethiopian bases in their respective enclaves.
Of course, Meles Zenawi and company are taking a good chunk of the cash the Somali pirates collect from the shipping owners whose ships they have hijacked, such cash being quickly transferred to the foreign, mainly British, bank accounts maintained by the top leaders of the Ethiopian regime.
In the Horn of Africa this information is common knowledge, and has been published in the Arab press. Hopefully readers will be able to start understanding how such powerful naval forces such as the USA, France, Spain and even Japan have been completely unable to put a stop to the activities of a small, lightly armed gang of Somali pirates.
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