Berlin Wall defenses, stopping piracy, datelines 1/10/2009 11:23 PM
Associated Press More than 100 ships - including huge supertankers - have come under siege from pirates over the past year in the waters off East Africa. Since the problem doesn't seem to be going away, why don't the ships recruit mercenaries to defend their property?
That's one of the questions in this edition of "Ask AP," a weekly Q&A column where AP journalists respond to readers' questions about the news.
If you have your own news-related question that you'd like to see answered by an AP reporter or editor, send it to newsquestions@ap.org, with "Ask AP" in the subject line. Include your full name and hometown so they can be published with your question.
Q: During the years when it existed, I visited the Berlin Wall three times. Each time, after climbing the observation platform, our guide called our attention to the wide band of bare ground on the East Berlin side. Each guide said that land was heavily mined as a deterrent to would-be escapees.
When it was clear that the Berlin Wall was about to come down, I expected to hear about the hasty removal of the mines, but I don't recall hearing about this.
Is it possible this was well covered by the media but I wasn't listening? Were the mines removed under cover of darkness without being reported? Or was the existence of a mine field was just a rumor that turned out to be untrue? Ben Feld
A: There were really two borders between East and West Germany: the 856-mile strip between the two countries that stretched from the Baltic Sea to the border with Czechoslovakia, and the 96-mile line that surrounded West Berlin - an enclave inside the communist east.
The highly fortified main border between the two countries was widely mined and booby-trapped, but the Berlin border was not.
Defenses at the Berlin Wall centered on guard towers within sight of one another, searchlights and regular patrols. The so-called "death strip" on the East German side of the wall had barbed wire and alarm wires - which initially activated lights and a siren when tripped by a would-be escapee, but were in the 1980s changed to simply trigger a silent alarm in the nearby guard towers.
Gerhard Saelter, the Berlin Wall Foundation's main researcher, says there was no known discussion among East German officials of mining the Berlin death strip, and that while many people believed it was mined, he has not been able to pinpoint the source of the misinformation.
After the fall of the Wall in 1989, no mines were found, though World War II-era bombs have been discovered in the former death strip area during construction - still a relatively common occurrence all over Germany.
An estimated 136 people lost their lives at the Berlin Wall - including escapees shot by East German border guards, border guards themselves killed and people who died for other reasons near the wall - and a total of some 700 to 800 people are estimated to have died along the border between East and West Germany. David Rising, AP Correspondent, Berlin
Q: It seems that we hear every day about pirates taking another ship off Africa, and of the warships in the area. My question is: Why don't the owners of these ships protect their own property and bring mercenaries with them? Keith Bartlett, Lafayette, La.
A: Having armed mercenaries on ships is a dangerous, slippery slope.
Much of the problem lies with the cargo. In November, pirates seized their greatest prize yet, the supertanker MV Sirius Star, which is loaded with 2 million barrels of oil. The vapor from that cargo is highly flammable; a firefight on board the tanker could cause an explosion.
There is also the problem of keeping the pirates off the ships - once they're on board, they will very likely fight back and people will die. Pirates travel in open skiffs with outboard engines, working with larger ships that tow them far out to sea. They use satellite navigational and communications equipment and have an intimate knowledge of local waters, clambering aboard commercial vessels with ladders and grappling hooks.
Any blip on an unwary ship's radar screens, alerting the crew to nearby vessels, is likely to be mistaken for fishing trawlers or any number of smaller, non-threatening ships that take to the seas every day.
It helps that the pirates' prey are usually massive, slow-moving ships, such as the Saudi supertanker.
By the time anyone notices, pirates will have grappled their way onto the ship, brandishing AK-47s.
Beyond that, the bandits are typically armed with automatic weapons, anti-tank rocket launchers and grenades - weaponry that is readily available throughout Somalia, where a bustling arms market operates in the capital, Mogadishu. Elizabeth A. Kennedy, AP Acting Chief of Bureau, Nairobi, Kenya
Q: I'm curious about the criteria used to determine whether a city makes it onto AP's stand-alone dateline list. Are you allowed to share? Nicole La Rocque, Charlottesville, Va.
A: Criteria that influence selections of standalone cities - ones that are used in datelines without being followed by a state or country name - aren't secret. The "datelines" entry in the AP Stylebook explains that the population in and around the city, the frequency of the city in the news, the uniqueness of the name and the association of the name with its state or nation are considerations.
The stylebook lists 30 U.S. cities and 28 foreign cities that stand alone. But stay tuned; others are likely to be added this year. David Minthorn, AP Manager for News Administration, "Ask the Editor" columnist, APStylebook.com, New York
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