Update: a tale of three ships

Article published: Friday, February 20th 2009

So it appears that no government felt able to stop or recall the Wehr Elbe, carrying white phosphorus munitions to Israel just as Israeli armed forces were committing war crimes with such munitions, if Amnesty International monitors are to be believed. Not the German government, whose citizens owned and operated the ship; nor the Marshall Islands government under whose flag the ship was sailing.

No such free trade scruples for plucky Cyprus, whose navy forced a Cypriot-flagged, Russian-operated cargo ship, the Monchegorsk, to dock at Limassol after it was intercepted by US military forces in the Red Sea around the 26th January. The ship was coming from Bandar Abbas in Iran; the US navy claimed to have found artillery shells and other arms aboard the ship, and that they were destined for Hamas in Gaza (incidentally, there’s no evidence that Hamas has any conventional artillery guns, so it isn’t exactly clear why they’d want artillery shells).

In fact, Cyprus’ defence ministry has subsequently confirmed that the ship wasn’t carrying artillery shells or finished arms at all, but “raw material that can be used to manufacture munitions”. This might still be in breach of UN Security Council Resolution 1747, which forbids any state from procuring “arms or related materiel” from Iran. And the ship may well have been headed somewhere nefarious. But unless it was carrying explosives suitable for filling improvised Hamas rockets (again, possible), Hamas doesn’t have any conventional arms factories that could use “raw material”…

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