Paying Ransoms: What the Barbary Pirates Teach Us about ISIS

Paying Ransoms: What the Barbary Pirates Teach Us about ISIS

08/29/14

Lionel Beehner

History, Terrorism, Foreign Policy, Iraq, United States, Europe

When it comes to giving in to terrorists' demands, a look back at history might shed some light on this controversial issue.

There is a debate raging between the United States and Europe over the wisdom of paying ransoms to terrorists who kidnap people. The United States refuses to pay. The Europeans say they do not pay, yet end up paying through intermediaries (often the hostages’ employers, in the case of kidnapped journalists). A recent report by the New York Times found that Al Qaeda-affiliated groups have pocketed over $125 million from such ransoms over the past five years. The result is that Europeans are targeted more than Americans or Brits—they pay more—and hostage taking by groups like ISIS is on the rise.

A similar dilemma vexed European and American statesmen in the late eighteenth century. Instead of Islamist terrorist groups like ISIS, it was Barbary corsair pirates roaming the Mediterranean Sea. The pirates were not all Muslims or North Africans—two-thirds of their captains were in fact Europeans who had “taken the turban”—and were motivated mostly by profit, but also partly by religion. They sought to disrupt European and American maritime trade by raiding ships, stealing cargos, and holding crews for ransom. Despite the various peace treaties signed, these North African pirates saw themselves in a “permanent state of war” with their Christian adversaries, writes Paul Silverstein, an anthropologist at Reed College. Likewise, Europeans treated the pirates as “pathological parasites,” but refused to use force against the nonstate actors.

In 1785, Thomas Jefferson sought to get the Europeans to break the cycle of paying yearly “tributes” to North Africans—namely the sultan of Morocco and governors of Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli—in exchange for safe passage for their merchant vessels. Europe was still primarily mercantilist at the time, and its armies were a collection of mercenaries and privateers, not the professionalized militaries of today. Britain and France refused the Americans’ offer out of commercial self-interest. It was the onerousness of the tributes that eventually persuaded the United States to resort to using force against the Barbary corsairs—thereafter immortalizing the “shores of Tripoli” phrase in the U.S. Marine Corps hymn.

Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/feature/paying-ransoms-what-the-barbary-pirates-teach-us-about-isis-11164