Blocking pirate ports: “We have already tried; it did not work !"
(BRUSSELS2) The proposal of the Spanish Defense Minister, Carmen Chacon, to blockade pirate ports (to be more exact, let's talk about surveillance and hunting pirates in their ports) is not really serious. Ihe French Minister of Defence, Hervé Morin, confirmed it today, even explaining: we have already tried and it did not work.
In a very diplomatic way, the Minister began, mezzo vocce: I listened with interest to Carmen Chacon's proposals. Everything she says, I listen to with great interest. You know that Atalanta is a French-Spanish initiative. We have the same positions on all interests. »... In short: I do not agree with Carme Chacon but I remain polite. Then he couldn't help but say: You know, I didn't have the opportunity to tell Carme Chacon. But we have already tested the principle of taking the pirates to the source, of finding the mother ships. The French directly and Atalanta did it for several weeks (1). And… it didn't yield the results we were hoping for. We realized what we feared, the pirates are on the move. Because a base of pirates is very little. It's quite easy to move a pirate nautical base. That closes the debate...
A common political tactic. We can say to ourselves: but are the Spaniards so uninformed or unprofessional? I will not insult Carme Chacon who is sufficiently intelligent and well surrounded. In fact, it's a good old European political negotiation tactic that has everyone running and working almost every time. When a minister or a government is put under pressure at the national level on a subject, it generally sends the hot potato to the European level, by stalling its request either on a point which has already been endorsed, or an unachievable objective. In the first version, this makes it possible to say: "we asked for it, it was hard but we got it; in the second version it will be: "we asked for it, we were ready to do it, but they don't want to". The result is generally guaranteed: either everyone has forgotten the request and the subject is forgotten, or the minister concerned comes out white as snow, victorious in both cases. In case of failure, it is unstoppable: it is the fault of Brussels. In short, success rate guaranteed.
(1) According to the information gathered, the French frigate La Fayette and the Belgian frigate Louis-Marie were assigned to "surveillance and intelligence gathering mission", along the Somali coast.
