Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteThe old feudal systems isolated themselves: hilltop, castle, moat, greenbelt, forest.
The contemporary ones seem to have found themselves so by fate: mountains, deserts, and oceans serve for boundaries.
The old lords, their families, and servants gauged their power locally and regionally and earned or lost it through courage and sword; the latest in warlords feature the same, but in place of swords, small arms that are no longer so small: assault weapons, mounted machine guns, rocket propelled grenades, armor-piercing mines, mortar.
For the most part, western politicians and news media have, in a sense, taught the Islamic Small Wars as revolving around religious fundamentalism in Islam, but this other facet, the overarching feudal structure of the fighting, seems to me both inescapable and equally overlooked.
Perhaps for the reader who needs a clear bogeyman, the "Islamists" will do even as it becomes a catch-all.
For the rest of the world, curiosity asks, "who" as the last isolating guards--rugged geography and paper-based communications--lose relevance.
"The government denies arming militias and tribal factions in Darfur, although it has raided camps in the past in search of rebel strongholds." [1]
"Who?" has been the question for years in Sudan: who commands the government's troops? Who are the rebels? What tribes are involved and who from them is fighting (by affiliation x family relationship x social position defined otherwise).
In Somalia, similarly, the pirates are well armed: speedboats, machine guns, cell phones, GPS. On the fate of a missing cargo ship, the Al Marjon, the head of the East African Seafarer's Assistance program noted, "We are trying to find its position and who are the gunmen." [2]
Who are the gunmen?
Piracy, which in Somalia generally refers as well to kidnapping by sea, is criminal, and, of course, the criminals wish never to be known. However, the proceeds, climbing into the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per ship, must makes its way into the economy (and if those getting their share of the business know what's good for them, they'll keep their mouths shut).
Somalia has probably never been by nature a "proto-democratic", socialist, or colonial society: it has been clan-based and feudal. Where the Vikings familiar to "the west" happily plundered the French and English coasts, among others, the Somali pirates seem to be doing much the same with international shipping that happens by its maw.
What makes so much acquiesence to criminal behavior possible?
A little nerve and a lot of isolation.
What organizes the violence?
Family.
2. "Missing ships feared seized by pirates off Somalia." Reuters Alert Net, October 22, 2007.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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