SOMALI piracy appears to be rising up the international agenda, after Russia’s head of state, the Nippon Foundation and top naval officers in the US all offered separate suggestions for tackling the growing scourge.
Russian president Dmitry Medvedev on Monday called for an international court to be set up to try alleged pirates. The demand comes after the Russian navy recently revealed that it had captured a pirate vessel with 29 people on board off the coast of Somalia, but had not yet decided where to try the suspects.
Mr Medvedev told Russian television: “It is necessary to consider all possibilities, including, maybe, the formation of some kind of international court on this theme.
“Often states where these pirates come from do not take any actions, in short, they aid this kind of crime.”
In London, Nippon Foundation chairman Yohei Sasakawa today used his keynote address to the International Maritime Law Institute to call for what he termed an “ocean peacekeeping initiative”.
Drawing on the experience of the Malacca Strait and Singapore where, in recent years, “piracy has declined significantly”, Mr Sasakawa pointed out that this was a result of international cooperation “in actively supporting the framework of countries that border the Strait and the countries and companies that use them”.
His so-called OPK initiative would include “monitoring from air, land and sea, the coastal areas near pirate strongholds”, but crucially he argued there was a need to coordinate the fight on an international basis “under United Nations leadership”.
“Through the sharing of command and communications systems, as well as a common code of conduct, we should be able to look forward to well-controlled and effective activities,” he said.
Most controversially, however, Mr Sasakawa advocated copying the user-pays framework he has advocated to fund maritime safety in the Malacca Strait to help fund anti-piracy operations.
“While it is critical for the international community to cooperate in dealing with piracy, I think the time has come to expect the private sector to also make various contributions,” he said.
Meanwhile, US chief of naval operations Admiral Gary Roughead told reporters after a speech at the recent Navy League conference that action against pirates on land was needed to resolve the crisis.
“Pirates don’t live at sea. They live ashore. They move their money ashore. You can’t have a discussion about eradicating piracy without having a discussion about the shore dimension.”
He said the area off the coast of Somalia was four times the size of Texas and there were complex legal issues involved. Moreover, it is not clear that the shipping industry wanted to begin using armed convoys to protect ships against pirates.
Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also told the media after the conference that he did not support putting arms on commercial ships and that it was up to merchant ships to pay for their own protection.
“I am not a proponent of putting arms on anything,” Adm Mullen said, adding commercial shippers could hire private security, but did not want to “because it costs them too much money”.
He pointed out that less than 1% of the ships transiting the Gulf of Aden fall victim to attack, and combating piracy was therefore not his top priority.
He said one analysis had shown it would take 1,000 ships to effectively fight piracy, more than the entire US Navy fleet. “I’ve got a big globe. I don’t have 1,000 ships that I can devote to that,” he said. - Additional reporting by Richard Meade .
Source: LloydsList
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