Government & Politics
Malta under future threat of pirates
By MaltaMedia News
Jun 12, 2006, 08:07

One of Britain’s most senior military strategists has warned that western civilisation faces a threat due to future migrations and North African "barbary" pirates could be attacking yachts and beaches in the next ten years making it unsafe to sail a yacht between Gibraltar and Malta, The UK Sunday Times reported.

While not claiming that all the threats will come to fruition, Rear Admiral Chris Parry, head of the development, concepts and doctrine centre at the Ministry of Defence (UK), is warning that such a situation is likely to happen if threatening factors such as agricultural decline, booming youth populations, water shortages, rising sea levels and radical Islam are not addressed by politicians with the consequences surpassing effective government control.

Parry was reported as saying that Europe could be undermined by large immigrant groups with little allegiance to their host countries. “These groups would stay connected to their homelands by the internet and cheap flights,” he said.

If a security breakdown occurred, he said, it was likely to be brought on by environmental destruction and a population boom, coupled with technology and radical Islam which results he compared to “the 5th century Roman empire facing the Goths and the Vandals".

The UK Sunday Times reported Parry as saying that the mass migration which would unleash disaster and Third World instability would bring about pirates, terrorism and organised crime.

Parry is predicting that as flood or starvation strikes, the most dangerous zones will be Africa, particularly the northern half; most of the Middle East and central Asia as far as northern China; a strip from Nepal to Indonesia; and perhaps eastern China.

Parry pinpoints 2012 to 2018 as the time when the current global power structure is likely to crumble. Rising nations such as China, India, Brazil and Iran will challenge America’s sole superpower status, The UK Sunday Times said.

Parry also believes that large groups that become established in Europe after mass migration may develop "communities of interest" with unstable or anti-western regions.

Source: The UK Sunday Times

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