Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Somali pirates more dangerous than ever

It’s been another lucrative week for the barefoot buccaneers of Somalia. First they collected a $5.5-million ransom payment for a German-owned chemical tanker. Then, a day later, they hijacked another European cargo vessel, adding its eight crew members to their growing hoard of hostages.

This latest haul of ocean booty is fresh evidence that the world’s navies are facing failure in their massive campaign to defeat the Somali pirates. Despite years of efforts by the naval forces of Canada and dozens of other countries, the pirates are more dangerous than ever.

A growing number of security experts are concluding that the naval campaign just isn’t working. At last count, the increasingly brazen pirates were holding 26 vessels and 609 hostages off the coast of Somalia, according to a European Union anti-piracy force.

The hugely expensive effort against the pirates, including six naval ships from Canada alone in the past few years, has failed to slow down the rate of piracy. The number of hijackings by Somali pirates has steadily increased in recent years, with the Somalis accounting for 35 of the world’s 39 ships hijacked in the first nine months of this year.

Moreover, the Somali buccaneers are roaming over a much bigger territory and causing greater damage. The average ransom payment to the Somalis has doubled to $5-million. They are holding their hostages for up to 120 days – twice as long as in the past. They even used a hijacked freighter to attack a naval warship that was escorting supplies for African peacekeepers.

In an effort to crush the pirates, a fleet of 40 warships from 30 countries is patrolling the waters near Somalia. The anti-piracy flotilla is “the largest naval armada the world has seen in recent times,” says Deborah Akoth Osiro, a researcher at the Nairobi office of the Institute for Security Studies.

“Yet, rather than contain the problem, the warships have driven Somali pirates further into the Indian Ocean,” she said in the latest issue of the institute’s journal. “There have been numerous attempts to combat piracy off the coast of Somalia, yet it is escalating.”

Ms. Osiro estimates that there are 1,000 to 1,500 Somali pirates operating in the seas today, roaming as far as 2,000 kilometres from their base in Somalia. They have launched attacks as far south as the Mozambican channel, as far north as the Red Sea, and as far east as the Maldives and the southern coast of India.

“This is a vast area, and the navies cannot realistically cover it,” Captain Pottengal Mukundan, director of the International Maritime Bureau, said in a recent report. The bureau is urging vessels to stay at least 600 nautical miles away from Somalia’s coastline – although even that distance might be insufficient to protect themselves.

A senior United Nations official, Lynn Pascoe, described the piracy situation as “appalling.” In a report last month, he warned that the Somali piracy crisis is “outpacing” the international efforts to solve it.

A study by the U.S. government in September found that Somali attacks had soared dramatically in the past three years – from 40 attacks in 2007 to a reported 218 attacks last year. The number of hostages seized by the pirates rose fivefold in the same period, reaching 867 hostages last year, and the total amount of ransoms increased from $3-million in 2007 to about $74-million last year.

There are “not enough naval vessels among all of the combined navies in the world” to patrol the entire area of operations of the Somali pirates, the study concluded.

The pirates are often surprisingly low-tech. They bump across the waves in small skiffs, clambering barefoot as they scale the walls of ships, and their weapons are often so old that they are rusty. But they are increasingly violent and ruthless, not hesitating to fire their automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. And they have successfully dodged the anti-piracy fleet, putting their speedboats onto larger “mother ships” – or hijacked vessels – so that they can travel far away from the naval armada before launching their attacks.

The pirates are supported by shadowy financiers who are rarely caught. There is growing evidence that Somalia’s Islamic militants, including the feared al-Shabab radical group, are beginning to use piracy to raise money for their relentless rebellion against Somalia’s government.

Ship owners are responding with a dizzying array of defensive tactics: sonic beams; laser pointers; water cannons; rolls of razor wire; barred windows; lubricant foam to make stairways dangerous; teams of guards with sniper rifles, and “safe rooms” with reinforced steel walls to protect the crew if the pirates climb aboard. But none of this is working, and desperate governments are looking at new options.

They have searched for countries willing to put the pirates on trial and imprison them, but almost every country in Africa (and in the West) is unwilling. Kenya has conducted most of the piracy trials, but it complains of being the “dumping ground” for arrested pirates. The Kenyan government is threatening to halt the trials unless it gets more money for its overloaded legal system.

Nobody knows what to do with the pirates. Hundreds of them are simply disarmed and released after they are captured. Shipping companies continue to pay ransoms, even to suspected terrorists, because they know that a refusal to pay ransoms could damage their commercial interests.

In desperation, many governments and ship owners are turning to mercenaries and private security armies. London-based insurance and shipping companies, for example, are planning to support a private navy of 20 armed patrol boats, with mercenaries on board. But the legal status of these mercenaries is unclear, and their existence could lead to controversial actions such as gun-running and executions at sea. In South Africa this month, police arrested four people who were allegedly smuggling weapons for an anti-piracy force in Somalia.

“A return to privateering indicates that the Somali buccaneers have overwhelmed the naval armada,” Ms. Osiro says. “The common thread of these anti-piracy responses is that they follow the path of least resistance. They seem to have been chosen to provide cosmetic solutions and circumnavigate the only obvious resolution: stabilizing Somalia.”

Source: theglobeandmail.com

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