After months of relative calm, the waters off the Somali shore is shivering again under the shadow of the pirates with at least six ships being hijacked and one U.S. captain abducted since the beginning of this month.
The new wave of terror came as dozens of warships from the U.S., Russia, France, Germany, Spain, India, China and other countries are gathering in the Gulf of Aden to the north of Somalia to secure the crucial international maritime route.
The international efforts have so far foiled hundreds of attempts to hijack merchant ships in the 800km-long waterway. While Somali pirates seized nearly 38 percent of the vessels they targeted in 2008, their success rate in the first two months of this year plummeted to about 13 percent due to the strong presence of naval ships.
However, there are still 14 vessels and about 200 crew members currently under the control of pirates, according to the International Maritime Bureau based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
In 48 hours between April 4 and 6, five ships were hijacked, some of them in the Gulf of Aden heavily guarded by naval forces.
The attack shows the patrols by warships have not been an effective deterrent measure in the war on piracy since the bandits are determined to make money at whatever cost.
According to Jane Campbell, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet based in Bahrain, it would take 60 naval ships to adequately guard vessels traversing the Gulf of Aden, far beyond the number of the warships now deployed in the area.
Furthermore, the sea gangs have devised new strategy to circumvent the patrols by operating far off the coast in the Indian Ocean. Three ships, owned by Germany, French and Taiwanese companies, were hijacked 700 to 1,300 km off the east shore of Somalia early this month.
"It's an incredibly vast area, and basically we're seeing pirates in more than a million-square-mile operating area," said Campbell. "So while the presence of naval vessels has had an effect, we continue to say that naval presence alone will never be a total solution. It starts ashore."
Even the slump in attacks since January, some experts said, is not attributable to the patrols -- it was due to turbulence of the sea brought by the winter monsoon.
"The weather has improved west of the Seychelles and pirates have realized that they have much more freedom of action down to the south because the coalition is not there in great numbers," Graeme Gibbon Brooks, the managing director of British company Dryad Maritime Intelligence Service, was quoted as saying.
One potential method of deterring piracy off the coast of Somalia is for companies to arm their ships. Pottengal Mukundan, director of the International Maritime Bureau, however, believes this approach could make matters worse.
"We feel that arming merchant vessels is not really the answer. Given the current legal framework in which merchant shipping operates, we may be creating more problems than trying to solve them," he was quoted by Radio Netherlands as saying.
Noel Choong, who heads the International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Center, said the ships' best option is to keep a round-the-clock watch and take off at the first sign of trouble.
"It's very simple. The minute they notice small boats approaching their ship, they should take evasive measures, increase speed and at the same time radio for help. A lot of ships escape by doing this," Choong said.
Ships also should install barbed wire or similar deterrents on the ship to prevent pirates from scaling the sides and boarding.
Roger Middleton, a piracy expert at the London-based think-tank Chatham House, said ships can take evasive procedures such as using water cannons to flood the engines of the pirates' skiffs.
Anti-piracy training courses, like the ones taken by some members of the U.S.-flagged ship briefly seized last week before the crew took it back, also might help, Choong said.
Source: Xinhua
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