The Saudis chose to negotiate. The Indian Navy opened fire. The US Navy said shipping companies should do more to protect their vessels, and the ship owners said governments should guard the high seas.
But everyone wants the barely functioning government of Somalia to control the pirates who sail from its ports to seize the cargo ships and tankers that ply past.
Mightily armed, but slightly baffled, 21st century civilisation appears to have no collective answer to piracy, a scourge once considered banished into history.
“These are not just unskilled bandits,” Russian navy spokesman Igor Dyagalo said. “Most likely we are dealing with two or even three pirate syndicates planning these attacks. They have very good sea communications, and they’re wellarmed.” Indian officials said on Wednesday a navy ship exchanged fire with a suspected pirate vessel before blowing it up in waters off the African coast. And over the weekend, pirates took control of a Saudi oil tanker, leading to negotiations with the Saudi government.
Shipping and security officials said pirates are exploiting the maritime equivalent of what military officers on land call ungovernable spaces: vast, remote regions made lawless because of failed states, mostly out of the reach of international militaries.
They find the ships fairly easy to capture, and many shipping companies willing to pay lucrative ransoms to free hijacked crews and cargo.
Like the globe’s other piracy hotspot, the narrow spit of sea between Malaysia and Indonesia called the Strait of Malacca, the Gulf of Aden is one of the most sensitive chokepoints in global commerce, a passageway for an array of valuable cargo like oil, weapons, and manufactured good shuttling between Europe and Asia.
These waters are four times the size of Texas. And while the stable, comparatively wealthy East Asian countries that line the Malacca Straits have committed their naval and coastal forces to stamping out hijackings and piracy, the Gulf of Aden is bordered by poor or dysfunctional countries like Djibouti, Yemen, and particularly Somalia, home to a long-simmering civil war and a central government that barely exists.
“The area is much bigger,” said Rand Corp’s Peter Chalk, author of a recent study on piracy and terrorism at sea.
“You do not have that kind of regional cooperation now, and you have a huge void of governance in Somalia. All of those factors make dealing with this problem that much more difficult.” That inability risks halting maritime activity going from the Indian Ocean into the Red Sea. Already at least one major shipper, Norwegian oil and chemical tanker operator Odfjell, has announced it is halting all transits through the Gulf of Aden by its 100- vessel fleet.
Others may soon follow. Shipping consultants have reported a skyrocketing of insurance premiums for ships passing through the vast waters between the Horn of Africa and the Arabian peninsula, with some estimating the costs rising as much as tenfold. BGN Risk, a British firm that analyses corporate risk, said the additional costs to the shipping industry could total $400 million per year.
“The vast extension of the pirates’ reach will extend the area deemed as insecure by international shipping — and more importantly by insurers,” wrote London-based energy analyst Samuel Ciszuk in a report Tuesday for IHS Global Insight.
Many international shippers insist it is not their role to fight pirates.
Vladimir Mednikov, vice president of Sovcomflot, Russia’s largest shipping company, said governments and the international community should secure the open seas.
“We are peaceful people. We are not in the business of war,” Mednikov said. “We are carriers of oil and gas and other commodities.” Cyrus Mody, manager of the International Maritime Bureau in London, an arm of the International Chamber of Commerce, said his organisation would like to see more naval stops of so-called “mother vessels,” the base ships used by pirates as jumping off points, which should then be confiscated.
But Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said some of the blame must fall on the shippers themselves, who have not done enough to protect their cargo.
“I take issue with this whole notion that it’s incumbent upon the armed forces of the world, the navies of the world, to solve this problem,” Morrell said at a Pentagon news conference Wednesday.
“The shipping companies also have an obligation to secure their ships, to prevent incidents such that we’ve been seeing at alarming rates over the past several months.” Pentagon officials bristled at suggestions that the US and allied navies have not actively pursued the suspected Somali pirates, arguing that a NATO task force in the region and other allied naval vessels have taken aggressive action to curtail their activities.
The officials said one of the principal reasons for establishing its new Africa Command, formally inaugurated just last month, was to combat piracy both around the Horn of Africa and the similarly oil-rich Gulf of Guinea in west Africa.
The United States Navy says intelligence officials are watching for signs of terrorist involvement in piracy. “Wherever there is big money, you will find terrorists,” said US Navy Vice Adm William E Gortney, commander of all coalition navies in the region, though he added that the recent spate of piracy off the Somalia’s coast shows no signs of links to international terrorists.
© The Washington Post
