Piracy is making the vital shipping route through the Gulf of Aden a virtual no-go area, and while naval task forces ready for battle, the international community has some catching up to do. Trevor Huggins reports
As the captain of a merchant ship crossing the Gulf of Aden, you realise it’s not going to be a routine day when you look over the side to see a rocket-propelled grenade launcher pointing at you. Piracy, Somali-style, is a thriving international business. Exploiting their country’s lack of effective government since 1991, the increasingly sophisticated and well-armed pirates now use small, high-powered skiffs launched from mother ships anywhere in the Indian Ocean.
For the world’s trading community, the inconvenient truth is that it is largely responsible for creating the very piracy in the Horn of Africa by which it is now plagued. With no visible means of self-defence as Somalia slipped into chaos during the 1990s, the country’s lucrative, unprotected fishing grounds became a target for international trawlers.
Commodore Hans Helseth, deputy chief of staff (operations) of NATO’s Maritime Component Command and a key figure in NATO’s Operation Allied Protector, which is charged with protecting shipping and tackling the Somali pirates, is well-acquainted with the history. “It started when Somali fishermen took back what they thought belonged to them. We have to admit that the international fishing industry has taken advantage of Somalia’s inability to control its own economic zone. European and east Asian fishing vessels have been operating in a 200-nautical-mile area that would normally be patrolled by the state’s coastguard or navy. Foreigners were exploiting Somalia’s weak internal status.”
However, if the piracy began as retribution from local fishermen, it did not remain that way for long. “They very soon realised that the vessel was worth more than the catch, so they hijacked the fishing vessels,” says Helseth. “From there, it was a short way to hijacking commercial merchant vessels.”
The international response has been a patchwork shield of warships, helicopters and aircraft. Between NATO’s Allied Protector, the EU’s Operation Atalanta, whose main task is to protect UN World Food Programme ships, and the US’ anti-piracy task force CTF151, around 20 ships patrol the Gulf of Aden at any one time. Several navies also lend a hand. Though individual agendas vary, much of the protection is aimed at the Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor (IRTC), a stretch of sea along the Somali coast designed as a safer haven for ships passing between the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. Ship owners are encouraged to use the IRTC and notify the maritime authorities of their transit through the area.
However, the size of the corridor — only 12 nautical miles long but 500 wide, and lodged in one million square miles of sea — means safety cannot be guaranteed. The pirates also still enjoy some advantages, including their range of equipment and speed of attack. Rear Admiral José Domingos Pereira da Cunha, whose NRP Corte Real is the flagship of NATO’s Allied Protector, has foiled two attempted hijacks this year, and says: “The pirates use satellite phones, GPS and access to the International Maritime Organization’s Automatic [Ship] Identification System to coordinate and execute their actions very fast. Between an alarm of a vessel and the entrance of the pirates on board it can take three minutes.” Moreover, for the pirates, any ship will do, among the 20,000 passing through each year.
And, as Helseth has found out, because the pirates use standard open boats they can disguise themselves among normal fishing vessels: “From the angle of view from a helicopter or the bridge wing of a ship you cannot necessarily tell them apart. Even if you do find weapons on board, that’s not a crime in itself because the fishermen can argue they need them to defend themselves against pirates, which is potentially true. If they have RPGs and boarding ladders, that’s a clear indication they’re pirates — but when we come to board them, they throw everything overboard. And suspicious activity is not necessarily enough to have them convicted.”
Another advantage is, of course, the sheer scale of the waters to be patrolled. Somalia’s coast is around 3,000km long, with most of it facing the mind-mangling vastness of the Arabian Sea/Indian Ocean. Matters are not helped, though, when advice given by the likes of the EU via its website goes unheeded. In an industry where time is money, some are willing to risk sailing closer to the shore in the hope of saving time and fuel on the journey. Rear Admiral Philip Jones, operation commander for Operation Atalanta, says: “It is quite extraordinary how many of the ships that have been pirated in the last couple of months were not registered on our website and were not taking some of the basic precautions and self-protection measures.”
That said, it is far from plain sailing for the pirates, whose mother ships are in turn being stalked by warships. “This is not a game, but it looks like one. We are trying to identify their movements, their routines and they are looking for information on where the warships are,” says Pereira da Cunha.
Merchant ships can help by travelling as fast as they can, avoiding the area with the highest risk of pirate attack during dawn and dusk — ideally transiting at night — and keeping a good lookout. “It is amazing the variety of preparedness that we’re finding in ships for a transit of the Gulf of Aden,” says Jones. “Weave to throw the skiffs off the beat, high-pressure water hoses and barbed wire across the most vulnerable access points. On many occasions, we’ve found that even under sustained fire, if you’ve got the crew safely inside the superstructure, you can actually outrun the pirates.” Even holding off them for 30 minutes can be decisive. “Experience will have told the pirates that within half an hour we’ll have some sort of military force with them — a ship if it’s close enough or certainly a helicopter or maritime patrol aircraft,” adds Jones.
Another option is simply not to visit the area, thereby avoiding the risks and the higher insurance premiums sought by brokers. But as Neil Roberts, a senior underwriting executive at Lloyd’s Market Association (LMA) points out, the detour along Africa’s western coast is not an option available to all and it too comes at a price. “The bigger ships and tankers were being re-routed fairly frequently from January onwards via South Africa. But they can’t all do that. It’s a very bad weather area a lot of the time, so it’s got to be a pretty substantial vessel. And there’s a cost involved: extra fuel and an extra two weeks on the charter.”
It all leaves the business community and the world’s navies looking for long-term solutions. Neither of Jones nor Pereira da Cunha think the problem can be eradicated. “The more warships you can put in the area the better,” says Jones. “But you could put another 100 warships in the area and you still wouldn’t give a complete guarantee because we are dealing with such vast expanses of ocean.”
Though that view shared is by the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), which monitors piracy around the world, it would like to see more targeted action. IMB Director Captain Pottengal Mukundan says: “In the Gulf of Aden a very large number of attacks have been prevented by naval action. It’s working. But it’s a completely different challenge in the Arabian Sea/Indian Ocean. They need to go aggressively against the mother ships… I don’t see any other option. In that expanse of sea, you can’t depend on a reactive response.”
For some, including the LMA’s Roberts, the answer lies in a little-publicised document called the Djibouti Code of Conduct, which was agreed in January by countries in the region. The code, designed to improve cooperation in tackling the pirates both on the sea and in the courts, was signed by nine nations at an International Maritime Organisation meeting in Djibouti. The IMO hopes more signatories will follow and that the likes of NATO, the EU and the maritime industry will provide financial and technical help.
International forces could also help in more ways than simply providing battleships. Jan Fritz Hansen is executive vice president of the Danish Shipowners’ Association, one of whose members, AP Moller-Maersk, made headlines when its Maersk Alabama was the subject of a hostage taking in April. The drama ended with the captain being freed, one pirate being detained and the three others, aged between 17 and 19, being shot dead by snipers. Hansen, who felt the IRTC corridor was “quite safe”, says his association will press for a coastguard service to be created in the area, one that would also tackle interloping fishing trawlers.
Ultimately, the real solution – and hardest to achieve – is to resolve Somalia’s problems ashore. Helseth says: “There are 150 countries in the world with a coast and we only have a real problem with one: Somalia, a failed state. Once there is a reasonably capable government in place, the piracy will go away.”
Clearly, while teenage foot-soldiers might be out on the water, those orchestrating the attacks are on land. Jones partly sees his task as influencing “a risk/reward balance, which looks very different depending on whether you’re a 19-year-old sat on a beach in Somalia contemplating an act of piracy or whether you’re one of these shady characters involved in orchestrating the whole thing and who gets a rather large share of any ransom paid. At the moment, the reward for that second group is enormous and the risk is none at all.”
However, Jones believes we are stuck with piracy for some time yet. “I can certainly detect no enormous appetite in the international community at the moment to invest in Somalia the kind of commitment of peacekeeping troops, humanitarian effort, money, time and capacity-building measures to make a real difference. We’ll probably have to do our maritime contribution for some time to come, while the international community works out what it’s going to do about Somalia.”
Source: CNBC
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