Word: somalia
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...Read a recent TIME magazine story on Somalia...
...seized by the pirates. U.S. Navy officers say the ship appears to be heading toward the Somali port of Eyl, a harbor where the pirates often park their plunder while negotiations proceed. Meanwhile, pirates are holding 14 other vessels and their crews hostage for ransom off the coast of Somalia...
...pirates are lured by the booty. Almost half of the world's crude is transported by sea, and much of it passes Somalia every day. Insurance rates for shipping in the region are rising, and some vessels are taking longer routes around Africa to avoid the area. Because shippers abhor uncertainty and the risk it entails, they have been paying the ransoms - up to $2 million - demanded by the pirates. (And insurance companies can take comfort in their actuarial charts: only 1 in 600 ships in the area gets attacked...
...Gulf of Aden and into the Indian Ocean into a toll road. But as the pirates are becoming more brazen, the international community's patience is running out. "Right now, it's just cheaper to pay the ransom," says Zinni, who led the pullout of U.N. troops from Somalia in 1995. "But just wait until a cruise ship gets taken down and there's some sort of miscalculation and a bunch of people get killed...
...Somalia's lack of government and extreme poverty make it an ideal breeding ground for piracy, and the Cold War's end helped make that possible. "I can remember driving down the roads in Somalia, and you'd see all these scrap heaps of MiGs and tanks" from the 1969-1991 reign of Siad Barre, the Somali dictator allied with the Soviet Union, Zinni says. "During the Cold War, one side or the other kept authoritarian regimes in power who controlled this sort of thing...