asianaffairs

December 2008

Piracy off Somalia

Getting out of control

The concern that this lucrative source of new money has the potential to fund Islamist terrorism is for real.

By Andrew Small

MODERN-DAY BLACKBEARDS: The pirates are earning millions of dollars that are being channelled either into buying new and powerful weapons or supporting fabulous lifestyles in the failed and lawless state of Somalia

Hollywood loves a good pirate yarn but even Tinseltown would have a hard time getting a positive spin out of the lawless stretch of coast off east Africa which has suddenly become the ‘crime central’ of world maritime trade.

When the Indian Navy stealth frigate INS Tabar, or Battle Axe, attacked and sank a pirate mother ship the rest of the world could only look on with envy at this clean and satisfying end to a nasty confrontation in which the pirates had opened fire first. If only all maritime hijackings could be so easily and successfully dealt with in what is developing into an important and lucrative adjunct to the so-called ‘war on terror’.

The pirates are earning millions of dollars which is being channelled either into buying new and powerful weapons for further attacks or supporting fabulous lifestyles in the failed and lawless state of Somalia from where most of them operate. At least that is the situation as far as anyone knows at the present but the potential for this lucrative source of new money to fund fundamental Islamist terrorism must be a real concern, if it is not already doing so.

The presence of the Indian Navy vessel and those of a number of other navies indicates that interested nations are seized of the problem but it is equally clear that the pirates are moving into a higher gear with the hijacking of 2 million barrels of oil worth $100m on board the Sirius Star and the response to them needs to step up in equal measure following 14 attempted hijackings in the ten days before the supertanker was taken.
The statistics of piracy for 2008 are depressing: nine innocent crewmen have been killed in attacks and nine are missing -- presumed dead -- while 581 have been taken hostage and nine kidnapped. At the end of November the pirates were holding 13 vessels captive in the Somali ports of Hobyo and Eyl on the Gulf of Aden and the tally of attacks had already reached 95 for the year—a 75 per cent increase on the previous year.

But with the latest round of attacks comes hope that both China and Japan might be encouraged to get involved in the war of pirates. A Japanese freighter was released towards the end of the month while a Hong Kong registered vessel carrying 35,000 tonnes of wheat had been hijacked on its way to Bandar Abbas in Iran. The Chinese are now learning that their involvement in the commerce of Africa might not be quite so simple as they thought.

But for any new entrants in the anti-piracy campaign there are a number of complications to consider: even the U.S. Navy has warned that the problem of attacks is now so unpredictable and diverse that they cannot be everywhere to protect everyone. The second factor is the legality of taking on these latter-day Blackbeards.

The first problem is the lack of a consistent definition of what piracy is. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea states that piracy is ‘all illegal acts of violence or detention…committed for private ends by the crew or passengers of a private ship.’ But it adds that it can only take place ‘on the high seas’ or ‘outside the jurisdiction of any state’ which excludes the territorial waters of any state including the coastal areas of Somalia. To get around that problem the United Nations passed a resolution in June that permitted vessels that had the clearance of the transitional federal government to enter its waters ‘for the purpose of repressing acts of piracy and armed robbery at sea.’ But that permission does not allow pursuing and boarding a pirate vessel or arresting those on board—to do so requires the further permission of the government which could be difficult to obtain at short notice in any event.

It is also far from clear that it would be possible to bring the pirates to court successfully in Somalia itself or anywhere else; in Mogadishu there is scarcely a court system outside the Islamic code and within that code any court might take a political view that the attack was justified in view of the overall confrontation between Islam and the West. Indeed, a political defence might be deployed successfully in a western court and it would not be wise of the Americans to try and bracket it with the quasi-legal machinations of the Guantanamo scenario. So, all in all, the Indian Navy was fortunate to be presented with a clear-cut scenario when it confronted these Blackbeards of the Gulf of Aden.

If Japan and China can be persuaded to join India on the high seas then so much the better; after all the original pirates of the Mediterranean and Caribbean were eventually put out of business by strong naval policing of trade routes and the difficulty of tackling larger cargo vessels. Tokyo is considering the dispatch of destroyers and P3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft but processing that willingness through the legislative system is every bit as unpredictable as dealing with the pirates themselves and interlinked, in the minds of legislators, with the current operation assisting the U.S. Navy in its ‘war on terror’ through providing refuelling for their vessels. As a result it could be next year before anything comes of the idea.
In spite of the U.S. Navy's warning that it is largely up to individual owners to make sure their vessels are adequately protected, the Blackwater security company is apparently about to enter the fray with three purpose-built, high speed, heavily armed patrol boats which will be capable of carrying helicopters. Given their record in Iraq there is little doubt that they will make a formidable contribution.

But this is where things could start to get murky: a private security company which seems to be a law unto itself is surely little different from Elizabethan days when the British government dispatched ‘privateers’ to make trouble for its maritime trading rivals and take on their pirates. Indeed, that is how many of the pirates of those days got their first experience of the swashbuckling trade. At least when the navies of sovereign states take on the pirates their governments can be held to account; not so a security company however well funded and trained. It is time for a United Nations anti-piracy fleet to be mustered with contributions from the best navies around the world.

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