Bartamaha (Nairobi):- At least 30 foreign vessels plus one barge are kept in Somali hands against the will of their owners, while at least 541 hostages or captives – including an elderly British as well as a younger South-African couple from two different yachts and still the 5 hostages from Somaliland suffer to be released.

The world and the navies don’t get it: Do they not realize that long after Somalia was neglected and only after the navies appeared and interfered at the Horn of Africa the real piracy developed and surged ? Now the situation has reached a new all-time high: Over 500 people held captive. The world holds Somalia hostage and the Somali pirates the world. This vicious circle of aggressive action and the senseless spiral of violence must be broken by peaceful means.
One of the most dangerous ideas (excerpt by Zoltán Grossman)
One of the most dangerous ideas of the 20th century was that “people like us” could not commit atrocities against civilians.

German and Japanese citizens believed it, but their militaries slaughtered millions of people.

British and French citizens believed it, but their militaries fought brutal colonial wars in Africa and Asia.

Russian citizens believed it, but their armies murdered civilians in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and elsewhere.

Israeli citizens believed it, but their army mowed down Palestinians and Lebanese.

Arabs believed it, but suicide bombers and hijackers targeted U.S. and Israeli civilians.

U.S. citizens believed it, but their military killed hundreds of thousands in Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere.

Every country, every ethnicity, every religion, contains within it the capability for extreme violence. Every group contains a faction that is intolerant of other groups, and actively seeks to exclude or even kill them. War fever tends to encourage the intolerant faction, but the faction only succeeds in its goals if the rest of the group acquiesces or remains silent. The attacks of September 11 were not only a test for U.S. citizens attitudes’ toward minority ethnic/racial groups in their own country, but a test for our relationship with the rest of the world. We must begin not by lashing out at civilians in Muslim countries, but by taking responsibility for our own history and our own actions, and how they have fed the cycle of violence.

===========================

Source:-Australia Times.

Comments

comments