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A New Wave of Crime at Sea
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10560 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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2 / 1986 |
2,421 Words |
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Gerhard Mueller and Freda Adler
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In the eastern Mediterranean a band of terrorists commandeer a large cruise liner and threaten to kill all aboard if rescue is attempted and if their demands are not met.
In a New Zealand port, French agents bomb and sink a vessel that was about to demonstrate against nuclear pollution of the South Pacific, killing a crew member.
In Portuguese waters, ships of a NATO fleet are attacked with grenades.
New Jersey's fishing fleet is idled because owners cannot afford a threefold increase in insurance, occasioned by large insurance losses elsewhere in the country, where trawlers are diverted into drug smuggling. Yet the Coast Guard budget faces a cut so severe that regular antidrug-smuggling patrols will have to cease.
The year 1985 has not been a good one on the oceans. It will be remembered as the year in which ocean crime shocked the conscience of the world and posed a series of questions to thoughtful Americans: what is going on at sea, the three-quarters of the earth's surface covered by water? Is there a crime wave out there? Are we at war on the high seas? With whom? What does it mean for people ashore? Are these disturbing events at sea isolated instances, or is there a grand scheme? Who is attacking whom? Is anybody doing anything about it?
Seajacked
The terrorist takeover of the Italian luxury liner Achille Lauro may have been the first such attack to awaken Americans from oceanic complacency - perhaps because one of ours was killed. But it was not an isolated instance. By our count, this was the 12th terrorist attack in a 22-year period since January 22, 1962. On that day, terrorists seized the Portuguese liner Santo Maria in the Caribbean. They held the passengers and crew hostage for eleven days, thereby writing a script which the Achille Lauro ship-jackers followed faithfully.
The terrorists involved in all the more recent incidents belong to a few fanatical organizations which are disillusioned over the world's incapacity or unwillingness to solve their real or imagined grievance. They understand the sea and are realizing that, in many respects, humankind is more vulnerable to attacks on water than on land. These organizations include the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Japanese Red Army, the Irish Republican Army, several of the Cuban groups, and Basque nationalists.
But their recruits come from many of the nearly one thousand terrorist and guerrilla organizations that have found themselves listed in Peter Junco's veritable who's who of terrorist organizations. They range from extreme right to extreme left, with the most dangerous being neutral, offering their services to anybody willing to pay the price.
Alliances among maritime terrorist groups are well documented, and include collaborations between organized crime and political groups, between the left and the right, between Far Eastern and Mediterranean groups, between Western European and Latin American groups, and between political terrorists and the narcotics smugglers. This new networking of ocean pirates spans the globe. The danger they
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