Somali pirates ‘heading to Asia’

Somali pirates are responding to anti-piracy efforts off the African coast by moving further into Asian waters, says US Admiral Robert Willard.

He says the only solution to solving the piracy issue is to restore stability inside Somalia, which has been without an effective central government since 1991. Willard is the head of the United States Pacific Command, with 300 000 troops serving under him.

"It's remarkable that 28 nations combining their maritime forces together in the Gulf of Aden have not been able to defeat this challenge," Willard told the Asia Society on a visit to Washington last Thursday. “The pirates are just ranging farther out into the Indian Ocean - hundreds of miles, quite literally.”

A number of ships have recently been attacked in the Indian Ocean. On February 5, the Greek-flagged merchant ship Chios was attacked about 100 miles off the Indian coast. The attack was unsuccessful but it alerted the Indian Coast Guard to a hijacked Thai fishing vessel, which was liberated from pirates. The week before, the MV Verdi was approached by pirates off India’s coast. An Indian Coast Guard aircraft responded and tracked the pirates down to another hijacked Thai fishing vessel, which was also liberated. On February 8 the Italian-flagged oil tanker MV Savina Caylyn was captured 800 kilometres off the west coast of India and some 1 300 kilometres off the Somali coast.

According to Willard, the pirates are posing particular problems for the Maldives, a lightly populated archipelago of 1 192 coral islands best known for its beach resorts. Willard said he recently visited the Maldives where President Mohamed Nasheed told him, "his problem was that either abandoned pirates or pirates that were lost in the middle of the night in their activities, or otherwise detached from their motherships, were now landing in the Maldives."

Willard also foresaw pirates moving as far afield as the South China Sea. While piracy off the Somali coast is most often in the spotlight, it is also a big problem in the Caribbean, according to the International Maritime Bureau (IMB).

Pirates used to be very active in the Malacca Strait but their activities have been curbed there through a highly successful campaign of patrolling, arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning pirates. Conditions onshore improved with a peace settlement among rebels in Aceh in 2004, which led to economic development and improved living conditions, Gulf News reports. 

Willard said that joint action by Southeast Asian nations has all but eliminated the piracy that once plagued the Strait of Malacca -- a vital route for oil that powers Asia's largest economies.

So far no nation, not even the United States, has seriously contemplated fighting piracy on land by destroying pirate bases, according to the Economist. Instead, the international community runs several seaborne anti-piracy missions off North Africa, with the European Naval Forces Operation Atalanta, NATO-led Operation Ocean Shield and Combined Taskforce 151 led by Americans. Atalanta was originally set up to safeguard the United Nation’s World Food Programme aid deliveries to Somalia but has expanded to take on a general anti-piracy role. Other nations like South Korea, China, Japan, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and India also have ships off the East African coast. China’s deployment marks the first time in modern history that it has deployed on a potential combat mission far from its territorial waters. Willard praised the coordination between the US and Chinese navies over piracy, saying: "We've been impressed with the effort that China has made."

Although waters in the Gulf of Aden are now safer, the international efforts have pushed pirates move farther offshore, even going as far as India and Mozambique. Colonel Richard Spencer, the British chief of the EU’s naval force, told the Economist that policing this enlarged area would require five times as many warships as the international task forces can muster.

Willard said that a naval approach to piracy will not solve the problem. "I don't think you're ever going to defeat this threat at the far extremes of their operations on the sea lanes," he said. "But rather you have to go to the centres of gravity - the source on land in the Horn of Africa - and put a stop to that.”

The UN and other organisations agree that solving piracy involves solving the issue on land, and not at sea, by creating economic prosperity, a functioning legal system and a stable government. A UN report last month called for a multi-dimensional approach to the issue: economic, security, and judicial or penitentiary. The report recommended the international community set up courts and prisons in Somaliland and Tanzanian. The Somali courts would operate under Somali jurisdiction and laws.

The report called for a modest US$25 million special funding, in order to better coordinate and empower the fight against piracy. In comparison, the UN estimates piracy costs the world economy $7 billion a year.

Willard said that Somalia's scourge also presented legal quandaries as sailors are not sure what to do with captured pirates. Some 700 suspected and convicted pirates are now in detention in 12 countries, more than half of them in Somalia, according to Yury Fedotov, executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. 

At the moment very few countries are prepared to hold and prosecute pirates, while lawlessness in Somalia makes trials there practically impossible. Somalia’s neighbour Kenya has become the lead prosecutor of suspected pirates, after persuasion from the West, but suspended prosecutions in November last year.

Despite the agreements with Kenya, suspected pirates have been taken to the Untied States, France, Yemen, Germany and the Netherlands, among others, for prosecution. In the first case to come to trial in Europe, a Dutch court sentenced five Somali men to five years in prison for attacking a Dutch Antilles-flagged cargo ship in the Gulf of Aden in 2009.

In a historic move last Wednesday a US federal court sentenced a teenage Somali pirate, Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse, to nearly 34 years in prison after the US Navy caught him attacking one of their ships. And in a first in Asia, a Malaysian court last week charged seven suspected Somali pirates for firing at Malaysian forces. They face the death penalty if convicted.

Meanwhile, the Seychelles has said it will host a second UN-supported centre to prosecute suspected pirates seized by foreign navies. It has amended its criminal code to enable it to prosecute them under universal jurisdiction, according to the BBC.

According to the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), Somali pirates are holding 33 vessels and 712 hostages. In January this year there were 35 attacks on ships, with seven of them being successful, giving the pirates a further 148 hostages, according to the IMB. The situation will worsen in March when the monsoon abates and the Arabian Sea grows calmer - experts predict 2011 will be the worst year of Somali piracy. The IMB also reports that 1 016 sailors were taken hostage off Somalia last year and 49 ships hijacked, while 28 ships with 638 crewmembers are currently being held.