You won’t often find me siding with the government, but this time, I do.
A company that claimed to have had a deal for the release of Paul and Rachel Chandler scuppered by the British Government’s refusal to negotiate with hostage-takers today demanded to be allowed to arrange their release.
Mr Davis goes on to say:
Two months ago Mr Davis claimed to have arranged a £100,000 payment for the safe release of the Chandlers, who were seized by pirates in October last year while sailing their yacht, Lynn Rival, from the Seychelles to Tanzania. In an interview at the time Mr Davis accused the Foreign Office of playing “stupid games” and blocking the deal.
“People are forgetting the key issue: Paul and Rachel have not got a clue what’s going on. They are sat there in a hell-hole wondering why people aren’t helping them,” Mr Davis said today.
“For the amounts involved I don’t think it’s worth trying to bring anyone to justice. We just need to get Paul and Rachel home.”
However:
David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, refused to budge…
And he is right. While I have sympathy for the Chandlers’ plight, they sailed into pirate infested waters. In so doing, they placed themselves at risk and left others to pick up the pieces. Any deal with hostage takers encourages more hostage taking. The Chandlers are naturally thinking about their own plight and I can understand that. Mr Davis is trying to get them back – but the minute he makes a payment, he has given the green light for the pirates to take more British hostages. There is only one way to deal with hostage takers and this is; no deal. Never.
Frankly, the way to deal with the piracy here is to change the rules of engagement. Arm merchant ships and give the Navy orders to sink pirate ships. Unfortunately, governments have lost their balls.
This Government are too scared to give the armed forces robust rules of engagement.
http://niklowe.blogspot.com/2009/11/lynn-rival-and-royal-fleet-auxiliary.html
The engineer is right. The alternative to paying a ransom is to send in the SAS, that’s definitely my preferred option. The Chandlers may be killed yes, but as you say _they_ chose to sail off into pirate infested waters.
Paying the ransom would encourage the pirates. Sending in the SAS would encourage them to start fishing again.
Milipede has to pick one or the other but I expect he will pick neither. These are after all just mere people, they don’t really matter to the state…
The best way is to engage the pirates with military force, sink their boats, destroy their weapons and put a 70 year embargo on reporting it, so that the liberal media have no comment. After all the government have no qualms in using Carter Ruck et.al. for their own benefit.
i have a friend who is a Royal Naval officer, and asked him, in my unassailable capacity as armchair general (see comments above) why we don’t just shoot the pirates, sink their ships, or send in the SBS. (at least i know the difference, A is for “Air” and B is for “Boat”)
his reply was surprising.
first of all, the pirates are ex-fishermen whose livelihood has been destroyed by EU fishing fleets. they were forced to the conclusion that the only means of feeding their families was by attempting to extract money from the regime which they rightly blame for stealing all their fish.
secondly, and surprisingly, apart from a hostage or two who have drowned after attempting to swim to safety, they haven’t actually killed anyone. they have behaved, according to my friend in the Navy, with a fair amount of consideration to their hostages.
“give a man a fish and he’ll feed his family for a day. utterly deplete his fish stocks before sailing past his house loaded with cash and cargo… then see what happens! “
Not sure I accept that. Hostage taking is never acceptable and every time we give in, we enable it, no matter what wrongs may have occurred in the past. I’m not sure that I accept being held captive as being treated with consideration, either.
That said, I do recognise the problems associated with over fishing – it isn’t just Somalia that is suffering that.
Longrider, you are right about HMG not paying a ransom on basic principles. i would, however, allow that friends and family have the right to scrape one together and insist that their public servants (ie the Government, allegedly) would facilitate the transfer of said privately-raised funds.
However, when you think about it……….
what the pirates are doing is only a few steps removed in method (but NOT in effect!) from what our government do to us – payment to travel under threat of imprisonment is exactly that, whether it’s a black guy with a rifle or a British constable (nowadays, often the same thing but that’s beside the point.)
the only difference between the Somali “sail-without-getting boarded-and-robbed” certificate and the round thing you stick on your windscreen, is that we only see men with guns after declining a few invitations to attend court. the Somalis cut out the middlemen and let you see the power behing the “request” for cash at the outset of the transaction.
NB hope you’re still enjoying France, it’s a wonderful country for wildlife, a hobby of mine, especially lizards, and i found the French to be generous and courteous. i wanted to move there but the wife wouldn’t go, the daft old bat)
The most disgusting aspect of this sad story is that a British naval vessel observed the pirates boarding the Chandlers’ yacht, but didn’t intervene in case someone got hurt!
Not quite the Nelson Touch.
no RM snipers on board; group of men with automatic rifles close to the hostages; what do our sailors do? try and shoot a bunch of pirates and hope they all drop dead at the same time without the pirates wildly opening fire and killing the elderly couple?
could it be done? really? could the couple have been recaptured without plastering hostages and pirates alike in a firefight?
i respectfully suggest that the commander on the spot is the chap to decide what to do, not civilians at some distance from the action, and that the fighting spirit of the RN is not in question.
Possibly. However, given the current rules of engagement, we will never know…
Indeed so.
Unfortunately alot of this is EU inspired. Dodgy foreign governments have sold fishing rights to the French and Spanish who have gone in and hoovered up.
That is not to pardon these two idiots – they brought this on themselves. But as usual Brussels is responsible.
Me thinks this is a spin job.
According to various ‘experts’ on the radio, the USA, who have a similar policy of not paying ransom, do the same thing.
They arrange for third parties to offer to pay ransom, pretend to block it to guage public opinion, then wait.
If public opinion says ‘feck it, let them rot, their own fault’ they drop it. If public opinion says ‘blimey, wot a lot of uncaring chaps our leaders are’ they make the story go away by allowing it whilst saying it was nowt to do with them so original policy still stands.
Harry, that’s all too plausible.