An Alternate Witness

It was a cold, dark, wet and miserable Sunday afternoon. I was in my car, driving my 12-year-old daughter and her friend back from a birthday party. I was tired and fed up from being in the car.
"Mummy, mummy," trilled a voice from the back. "I want to phone the pirates."
My daughter had heard me repeatedly trying to get through to the Somali pirates on board the Sirius Star.
They usually picked up the phone but put it down again when I said I was from the BBC. My obsession with getting through to them had reached the point that I had even saved their number on my mobile phone.
"Mummy, mummy, please can I phone the pirates for you?"
"No."
"Pleeeeez."
By this time, with rain battering my windscreen and cars jamming the road, I was at the end of my tether.
"OK", I said, tossing the phone into the back of the car.
"They are under P for pirates."
"Hello. Please can I talk to the pirates," said my daughter in her obviously childish voice.
I could hear someone replying and a bizarre conversation ensued which eventually ended when my daughter collapsed in giggles.
This was a breakthrough. Dialogue had been established.

I guess it's hard to establish contact when you represent the Power Couple of the US and Britain that intervenes half-heartedly in Africa only when intervention sends the right message.
Don't get me wrong. I applaud this reporter for her tenacity, for her determination to get the point of view of the pirates themselves. This is reporting at its most responsible, the kind of reporting I was calling for recently. But it's exactly what she was able to report in doing so that makes my point:

A pirate, who called himself Daybad, spoke in Somali, calmly and confidently. He said Somalis were left with no choice but to take to the high seas.

"We've had no government for 18 years. We have no life. Our last resource is the sea, and foreign trawlers are plundering our fish."

Once upon a time, the United States of America and Great Britain declared that they were not going to stand idly by and watch Somalia fall into ruin. And they continue to warn that the situation in Somalia is fostering anger and radical Islamism and that it is a serious threat in the "War On Terror." Yadda yadda yadda. It sounds great on the airwaves and on the campaign trail. When it comes down to it, though, the US and the UK are completely unwilling to put their resources where their mouths are.

I understand that resources are limited, and now more limited than ever with their Iraqi follies and the repurcussions of Americans' and Britains' unwillingness to live within their means. I also know all too well that, even when we are willing to put our resources where our mouths are, we are not always effective. (Just ask me about a bus station in the southern Madaba governorate of Jordan.) It's just frustrating, when you're on this side of the pond or the Channel, to listen to the talk and know that, not only is nothing going to be done, but that the world's most powerful forces are going to continue doing the selfish, damaging, infuriating things that they have always done, the things that have contributed to the problems that they claim to want to fix.