News worth reading
Written on May 22, 2009
This cracks me up.
Reports that some of the suspects were enjoying their stay in Dutch prison cells and were considering eventually claiming asylum, were met with disdain by the country’s foreign minister who was quoted as saying he would prefer it if they were being tried in Kenya under UN auspices.
Maxime Verhagen was quoted as saying that in his opinion, penalties should “deter” pirates, and that he did not want them to end up living happily in the Netherlands.
Somali piracy is not a problem of piracy. It’s a problem of, “What do we do with these bored young men who are insanely poor?”
We tried ignoring them, which seemed to work like a charm, until they started plundering our shipping.
If you have a bored young men problem on the high seas, it looks like piracy. If you then take that bored young men problem off the high seas, without solving it, and throw it into a Dutch jail, the problem starts to look different. It now looks like, “Gee, it sure is nice in here. I’m not sure I want to leave.”
Because you haven’t solved the problem. You’ve just displaced it. Same problem.
Filed in: curios.
But sweeping things under the rug is so much easier!
I completely agree; for a lot of these people a jail in probably any developed nation would be better than where they’re coming from.
But I don’t blame “us” for acting how we do. It’s such a tremendously huge problem. Where do we start? What would it look like if we actually really took a step forward to tackle world poverty? Especially in a case like now where nations are in huge amounts of debt; when so many people are grasping at anything they can to make sure that they don’t end up in poverty? It’s just easier to ignore it. It’s easier to sweep it under the rug and not deal with it.
In all truth, I’m not sure it’s our problem to solve. Certainly if the piracy went away we would be happy, but we’re finding that it is not easy to make the piracy go away, because it is fueled by a bigger, thornier beast.
It’s the small end of a very long thread, which, if pulled, leads to the thought that we live in an unjust world, and that we have at the very least tolerated, if not perpetrated, this world.
Is the problem of an unjust world ours to solve? Clearly we’re not supposed to add to the injustice. Perhaps under God’s direction we can make some headway, because it’s inarguably a God sized problem.
Political leaders feel they can’t pull on this thread, because to ask the questions it leads to is political suicide, and so they are left chanting “Not in my backyard.” They never have a shot at the real problem.