By Cho Sung-joon
Following the Navy's dramatic success in rescuing Capt. Richard Phillips from Somali pirates on Easter Sunday, the U.S. government has beefed up its effort to fight piracy.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has even vowed to ``explore ways to track and freeze pirate assets.'' Yet military prowess and law enforcement alone cannot stop these piracies from proliferating. Unless we somehow persuade them into thinking that there are better things in life than piracy, pirates will keep being recruited in poor and failed states.
Many of the world's poorest nations have not basked in the glory of globalization. In 2002, both the World Bank and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) concluded that a global income gap had widened among nations.
According to World Bank, nearly half the world population (over three billion people) still lives on less than $2.50 a day. Now, the global financial crisis has only exacerbated this already dire situation, as was echoed by luminaries such as the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and the World Bank President Robert Zoellick.
As the Constitution of the International Labor Organization (ILO) provides, ``poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere.'' According to the disturbing statistics, which the ILO has recently released, the number of the young and unemployed is rising in poor countries. Many of them may end up turning to illicit activities, such as drug trafficking, piracy or even terrorism. You are never safe when your neighbors' houses are burning. Globalization has increased this deadly proximity.
We are now witnessing that those desperate and hopeless from burning houses affect our everyday lives.
We should identify chronic problems of development deficit and poverty in the recent surge of pirate activities, in particular in the northern Somali coast in the Gulf of Aden. Those who are in incurable despair and thus nothing to lose are easily tempted to become new pirates every day. To break this recruitment channel calls for generation of hopes: hopes for decent foods and jobs, hopes for families to care about and hopes for tomorrow to plan on.
Of course, this is not an easy task, in particular in this time of economic woes. So many times in the past, rich countries pledged themselves to help the poor nations yet largely failed to deliver such noble promises. Perhaps those Somali pirates are Exhibit 1 of their collective failure. Global warming would not be the only threat to destroy the human civilization; global slums would also jeopardize our collective future.
Rich countries should initiate meaningful changes to remedy this global dilemma. They should seriously consider the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, one of which is to ``halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than one dollar a day.'' To seal a deal at the currently comatose Doha Development Round will also send a propitious pro-development signal to the world community.
Military operation and law enforcement certainly provides necessary means to combat piracies. Nonetheless, it may be insufficient to prevent the current propagation. A more fundamental solution is to give those in despair reasons for hope and thus encourage them to live better lives than as pirates.
Until then, we will continue to see them ``extort, pilfer, filch, sack, maraud, embezzle and even hijack.''
The writer is an associate professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology. He can be reached at scho1@kentlaw.edu.