By Zachary Kussin
As Jason McClure writes in this week's magazine,
piracy off the coast of Somalia has become a major maritime headache.
Just last week, on Aug 20, another three vessels -- a Malaysian palm oil
transport, a Japanese tanker, and a German cargo ship -- were hijacked.
The machine gun-carrying pirates threatened uncooperative crewmembers
with death, locked them up and steered the vessels to pirate bases on
the northern Somali coast. Shortly thereafter, they began ransom
negotiations with the ships' owners. The Gulf of Aden, which lies off
Somalia and leads to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, is now considered
to be the world's riskiest area for international shipping, according to the
International Maritime Bureau, a non-profit organization dedicated to
fighting marine crime. So far in 2008, 15
vessels have been hijacked off Somalia alone.
Lawlessness and heavy traffic -- 7.5 percent
of world shipping passes through the Gulf each year -- makes the area a fat target for pirates. They can operate in
Somalia's territorial waters with impunity. The Somali government,
unable to patrol the Gulf on its own, asked the United Nations for help
back in June, and the result was Resolution 1816, which allows the
United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Pakistan and Canada
to help patrol the dangerous waters. The measure will help cargo
containers and other commercial ships, of course, but its intended
beneficiaries are the ships delivering humanitarian assistance to
Somalia, which depends on food aid to feed close to three million of
its desperately poor inhabitants.
The multilateral initiative hasn't
lived up to expectations, however. In its three months on the job, the
Canadian security contingent, which will head up the patrol until
December, has helped prevent just two hijackings. And as of now, no
naval force has agreed to take over from Canada once its six-month
rotation is up. Pottengal Mukundan, the
IMB's director, attributes the lack of participation "to items
in other nations' foreign policy agendas, such as the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, which surpass piracy." For now, ship crews will
have to keep rolling the dice, or avoid the Gulf of Aden altogether.
Somalia isn't the only high-risk area. The other coast of
Africa sees its share of action too; 14 hijackings have taken place off
Nigeria so far this year. Nigerian piracy, like Somalian, is
fueled by large local militias, who turn to ocean marauding as a source
of funding. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta
(MEND), a militant group fighting to localize control of Nigeria's oil,
is the largest offender. They send out armed gangs aboard small
speedboats who violently force their way onto oil tankers and abduct
crewmembers for ransom. Hijackings have been
attributed to a decline in security throughout the Niger Delta region;
the 14 hijackings so far this year is about on a par with 2007's 25 total attacks, and
has already surpassed the 12 attacks in 2006.
What's needed, of course, are cops. The Strait of Malacca between Malaysia
and Indonesia, once the riskiest stretch of water in Asia, now "sees
less than a handful of attacks per year," says Mukundan. Hijackings have fallen steadily since
the Indonesian navy began a concerted anti-piracy campaign five years ago. So far this
year, only 11 on-board thefts have been reported. In Africa, weak regional governments aren't likely to be able to take such action to
protect their waters anytime soon. Transport companies have turned to the United
Nations and multilateral security operations to take their place, though results have fallen short of expectations.
