Like Bedlam, the dungeon of the Bey of Algiers lay at the frontiers between human imagination and insanity. “The greatest inconvenience in this prison,” wrote the American sailor turned slave James Cathcart in the late 18th century, “is in consequence of the lions and tigers being kept there”. “I have known twenty-seven animals of this description to have been kept at once in this prison which are maintained at the expense of the Christian tavern keepers. They frequently break loose and have killed several of the slaves.”
The historian Paul Baepler records that many slaves were maimed, bastinadoed and even skewered alive. The slave John Rawlins wrote that young English sailors were picked by the Sultan of Morocco for his pleasure, “compelled to turne Turke or made subject to more viler prostitution [sic.].”
Last week—with Yemen’s Houthi insurgents firing missiles and drones at global shipping transiting through the Red Sea and a multinational fleet moving into the region—some experts have been contemplating how the Barbary pirates, the greatest maritime threat of their time, were crushed in the 1800s.
For centuries, the coastal states of the Maghreb—either independent kingdoms like Morocco or Algiers, loosely allied to the Ottoman throne in Istanbul—unleashed state-sponsored piracy against weak powers in the Atlantic to finance their regimes.
The United States of America, economist G Thomas Woodward estimated, paid $10-20 billion from 1785 to 1815 to ransom sailors, pay tributes to rulers, and operate anti-piracy naval missions. Insurance for American ships entering the Mediterranean had a premium of 30 per cent over other countries. The historian Robert Davies notes that some European countries, like Denmark and Italy, had to operate funds to underwrite the costs.
Fed up by failed efforts to make peace, the US and the UK turned to force against the pirates. Following a successful naval blockade in 1804, American troops captured the Libyan city of Derna and threatened the local rulers with what we would now call regime change.
The British followed up in 1816, subjecting Algiers to a nine-hour bombardment, which historian Oded Löwenheim has described as “ the largest cannonade dealt upon a littoral target by a naval force during the Age of Sail.”
Algiers crumbled—a role model, it would seem, for what can be done again. But the story isn’t quite as simple as it seems.
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Yemen’s Houthi insurgency
Even though Houthi attacks on shipping drew little media attention until the Gaza conflict, the insurgents have sustained a tactical anti-shipping campaign for years. In 2016, Houthis used a dhow to shadow a United Arab Emirates navy high-speed logistics support ship before hitting it with a land-fired missile—causing severe damage. The crew of the US guided-missile destroyer, DDG87, was forced to fire interceptors to defend itself and another ship.
The next year, a Saudi frigate was targeted by missiles fired from three Houthi insurgent boats, killing several crew members. Another attack in 2018 caused damage to a Saudi oil tanker. In 2011, an Emirati civilian crew of 11 was taken hostage when their ship was hijacked.
Israel and Palestine did not figure in footnotes of these incidents, but their military logic and message was clear.
Following 9/11, the US handed out unconditional support to Yemen’s notoriously corrupt president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, in return for his cooperation against al-Qaeda. This set off a small-scale rebellion by the Shia Houthi tribes in north Yemen. The rebels, though, proved unable even to defend their mountain caves, and their charismatic leader Hussein Badr el-Din was publicly executed, political scientist Michael Knight has explained.
The martyrdom of Hussein Badr el-Din, though, swelled the Houthi ranks. Thousands of young men joined training camps run by his sons. In response to the insurgents’ hit-and-run sniping attacks, the Yemeni government responded with ferocity, using conventional artillery and armour. This alienated many northern tribes otherwise not linked to the Houthis.
In 2009-2010, when 6th phase of war erupted between the State and the insurgents, the Houthis were confident enough to force the surrender of an entire Yemeni brigade, and strike deep into Saudi Arabia. Even though the insurgents found themselves confronted by vastly superior Saudi and UAE forces, Knight notes that the Houthi used low force, high space formations to deny their enemies targets.
Later in 2019, the insurgents showed the ability to bring the war to Saudi’s heart, using Iran-supplied drones and missiles to blow up the Abqaiq and Khurais oil facilities. Though Abqaiq was supplied with at least one MIM-104 Patriot missile defence system, it simply could not cope with the swarms of incoming low-cost, expendable warheads.
The Red Sea sharks
The anti-Israel posturing demonstrated by the Houthis needs to be read against this context. Targeting Saudi Arabia has won them peace negotiations, which, however fraught, give the Houthis some semblance of State authority. The Southern Separatists, who control key parts of Yemen, share space with Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has staged vicious attacks on the Houthis’ Shia religious resources. Eliminating this resistance is obviously one of the Houthis’ major objectives.
For months now, analyst Ahmed Nagi writes, Saudi Arabia has been locked in diplomatic negotiations with the Houthis. Its aims are to limit Iranian influence in its backyard and prevent the resurgence of attacks, which could hurt the kingdom. The Houthis, in turn, seek to emerge as the principal—if not sole—force in a unified Yemen.
More likely than not, the attacks on Red Sea shipping are intended as a rent-seeking gesture, not as an ideological war cry. The attempted hijacking of the MV Central Park, for example, was later attributed by the US authorities to a Somali pirate cartel. Ever since President Saleh’s term in office, the Somali cartels and Yemen’s competing warlords had an intimate relationship, with Aden serving as hub for money laundering, hostage negotiations, and trafficking weapons.
Large numbers of heavily-militarised islands off Yemen’s coast can easily become a means to carry shipping, should the Houthis judge it to be in their interests.
Even though the high tide of Somali piracy came to an end around 2013—the result of multinational military presence and private armed guards on ships—it’s not clear if the conditions which ended it remain, scholar Petter Vikko Jacobsen notes. At the time, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council stood on the same side, and Somalia itself was induced to cooperate with generous funding.
Interestingly, piracy continues to flourish off the Gulf of Guinea and the East China Seas where the same conditions don’t apply. Without careful handling, piracy—or other forms of blackmail against Red Sea shipping—could easily resume.
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The bad options
For the moment, Israel’s war in Gaza gives enough legitimacy to sail dense numbers of peacekeeping forces through the Red Sea—but the model is unsustainable. The multi-billion-dollar investments needed to protect shipping pale in comparison with the threats from low-grade missiles occasionally targeted at passing shipping. Indeed, at least some giants have calculated the odds and are already resuming shipping through the Red Sea.
This isn’t a solution but the lessons the world learned from the Barbary Wars weren’t great either. The problem ended when France occupied the Maghreb in 1830 but faced savage rebellions in the Rif mountains, from the Zaian confederation of tribes and from native troops in the city of Fez. French colonial arms won but at no significant cost, setting off events. The French were also able to colonise Algeria but in a campaign that many historians consider to be a genocide.
Even the mass killing did not enable France to remain in the Maghreb, and set the stage for its still-fraught relationships in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Like diamonds, some wars are forever.
The real solution, if there is one, is to enable degraded states like Yemen and Somalia—the gatekeepers of the Red Sea—to arrive at genuinely national settlements about their future, which are free of foreign proxy investments. They need aid to guard against actors turning to piracy and extortion-by-ballistic-missiles.
The American fleet sailing through the Bab-el-Mandeb—the gate of tears, as locals call it because of the perils of navigating the narrow waters—will one day return home. Somalia and Yemen will remain incubating the next brutal crisis.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)