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Repressing Piracy off the Coasts of Somalia

Although the South China Sea suffered the most attacks, piracy off East Africa, much of it carried out from Somalia, came in second. Somalis have never exploited the potential of their seas for various reasons. According to coastal residents, extensive illegal fishing inflicts damage in several ways.

Piracy activities often occur in the Gulf of Aden, Guardafui Channel and Somali Sea, in Somali territorial waters and other areas. It was initially a threat to international fishing vessels, expanding to international shipping since the second phase of the Somali Civil War, around 2000.

Most obviously, “foreign trawlers” directly compete for fish with local communities, including those where fishing is the traditional, and only, livelihood. Depleted stocks may deny locals not only scarce income, but food.

Those who had ventured out to sea were out muscled by illegal foreign fishing trawlers and they depleted the stock of fish in these territorial waters and polluted it by dumping nuclear and toxic wastes.

The trawlers not only compete with locals for catch within fisheries, but seek to deny them access outright, with aggressive, armed guards serving as a powerful deterrent.

Locals generally cannot identify the originating states of the foreign fishing vessels or the nationalities of their crews, because it is too dangerous to approach them on the water. This prevents residents from fishing in areas where trawlers are operating, which may be the richest fishing grounds.

These fears are grounded in tales of trawlers confronting local fishing vessels without provocation, endangering fishers and destroying their equipment. The most commonly reported form of this was trawlers stealing or cutting locals’ fishing nets.

Aside from the physical danger, the economic impact is significant: replacing a single net might cost a fisher a month’s income or more, and some report having several nets destroyed in a single encounter. These adversity prompted the Somalis to test new ways of making money and former fishermen joined hands with the militia and unemployed youth to hijack vessels and demand ransom. This was the start of piracy in Somalia.

Somali pirates have attacked hundreds of vessels in the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean region, though most attacks do not result in a successful hijacking. In 2008, there were 111 attacks which included 42 successful hijackings.

Looking only at attacks in international waters, East Africa was well in the lead in 2010, reports the IMO. The only lives lost that year were during East African attacks, while the number of crew members taken hostage there, usually for ransom, reached 629, far higher than anywhere else. According to the International Maritime Bureau, a piracy reporting centre based in Malaysia, some 54 crew members and passengers have been killed worldwide since 2006.

At the height of their power in 2011, Somali pirates launched 237 attacks off the coast of Somalia, according to the International Maritime Bureau. Attacks sharply subsided due to better security protocols.

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According to Statista, the number of attacks off the Somali coast fell dramatically to just eight in the five-year period between 2015 and 2019. Piracy attacks in Somali waters peaked in 2011, when 160 attacks were recorded, and incidents had soared to 358 during the the five-year period between 2010 and 2014. This drop is widely regarded as a result of concerted efforts to reduce crimes at sea [Chart above].

Enormous economic losses

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Somalis over the years have lived under the most trying circumstances imaginable, facing acute poverty, lawlessness and anarchy. Of course, there have been a lucky few who had defected from their homeland and escaped the rigors of the civil war.

Those who did not defect to other lands had to endure destitution, prolonged drought, and desertification and soil erosion. Many Somalis are nomads who eek out their meager livelihood from their flocks, but natural disasters have wiped out humongous portions of their livestock, leaving them stranded with no alternative income to support their families. A tiny percentage of the population who are farmers had to witness the decrease of their yield of crops due to soil erosion, lack of fertilizers and instability.

The income gap between the minority elite and the poor have widened tremendously. In Somalia, they have the freest liberated open market economy in the world, with no central bank to control money supply, set interest rates or control inflation. Economic policies are balanced by demand and supply.

Those who have ideas and resources galore are thriving entrepreneurs minting tax free profits, while the majority can hardly make both ends meet. The remittance from the Somali Dias pore Community and aid from international humanitarian organizations keep the economy going.

In the past pirates once flooded the market with money, causing the cost of living to rise sharply. They also terrorised the local community, but they rarely killed anyone. While pirates also held some of the sailors they captured hostage as they demanded huge ransoms, sometimes of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The possibility of huge riches seemed to have been the main driver of piracy off the Somali coast. But it was the lack of an effective central government since the collapse of the Siad Barre regime in 1991, and the subsequent disbandment of the Somali navy, that enabled it to happen.

Although the number of successful Somali hijackings was lower during 2011 than at any time since 2007, individual ransom payments, and the time taken to negotiate them, steadily increased over the same period. Evidence presented to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, and published in their January 2012 report “Piracy off the Coast of Somalia”, was that whereas in 2007 ransom payments were in the order of US$600,000 for each merchant vessels, four years later the average payment was closer to US$5 million.

The US-based non-governmental One Earth Future Foundation, in a study on naval piracy, estimated that Somali pirates extorted some $177 million in ransom in 2009 and $238 million the following year. Including the costs of higher insurance premiums, re-routing ships, anti-piracy security and the impact on regional economies, the total annual costs may range between $7 billion and $12 billion, the study finds.

Some individual payments have been much higher, with ransoms for at least two vessels being reliably put at over US$10 million each. One Earth Future Foundation, in their working paper “The Economic Cost of Somali Piracy 2011”, put the total amount of ransoms paid during the year 2011 at US$160 million, representing only 2 per cent of the Foundation’s estimate of the total direct economic cost of Somali piracy during the year.

Some arrested Somali pirates and senior officials have sought to justify the explosion of piracy off East Africa by citing illicit activities by foreign vessels off the Somali coast. Somali fishermen have long complained that foreign ships have been hurting their livelihoods by over fishing nearby waters, often with large illegal nets. Some have also claimed that toxic wastes have been dumped in the Indian Ocean.

Political will to address piracy

Meanwhile, not everyone holds these views, and there is currently a public perception of a concerted drive by some governments to strongly discourage the payment of ransoms to Somali pirates, with the intent of removing the incentive for hijackings, with a view to reducing or eliminating them entirely.

Piracy in African longest coast has become a significant non-traditional security challenge to many nations. The increasing number of such attacks as a result of failure of Somali government to tackle its internal problem drew the attention of international community who lent a drastic response thereby curtailing the number of such incidents significantly now.

The intensity of the attacks had its implications on international shipping and maritime security of near and distant countries like China, which has of late become assertive.

Combating piracy activities

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Security Council Resolution 1816 of 2008 and others broaden the scope of the existing narrow international law rules on piracy, especially authorizing certain states to enter the Somali territorial waters in a manner consistent with action permitted on the high seas.

Security Council resolutions are framed very cautiously and, in particular, note that they ‘shall not be considered as establishing customary law’. They are adopted on the basis of the Somali Transitional Government’s (TFG) authorization.

Action against pirates in many cases involves the use of force. Practice shows that the navies involved limit such use to self-defence. Use of force against pirates off the coast of Somalia seems authorized as an exception to the exclusive rights of the flag state, with the limitation that it be reasonable and necessary and that the human rights of the persons involved are safeguarded.

The route through the Indian Ocean past the Somali coast became known as one of the most dangerous sea passages in the world. Some years ago, the European Union, Nato and others began to deploy naval forces to the region shortly after the UN Security Council allowed warships to enter Somali territorial waters.

The decisions announced in March 2012, first by NATO and then by the EU, to extend their naval operations off Somalia until at least December 2014, were intended to send a clear message of a continued commitment.

When, additionally, in light of an understanding reached with Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, the EU announced that the rules of engagement applying to its forces were to be extended to allow for activity against Somali coastal territory and internal waters, it was taking an inevitable step which acknowledged that piracy cannot be eradicated by action at sea alone.

In conjunction with the deployment of warships, surveillance aircraft, and support services by many nations, other measures being taken against piracy off Somalia include efforts by an increasing number of shipowners to harden merchant vessels against attack (including the provision of citadels), although there is still much more that could be done to achieve this; the use of military or private armed guards on board some merchant ships or on escort vessels transitting the Indian Ocean; a trend towards re-routing vessels close to the western coast of India, instead of by a more direct route or around the Cape of Good Hope; the apparent intent of the Puntland authorities, now under an international spotlight linked to the provision of aid, to take more effective action against pirates operating from their territory; and the increased willingness of a number of nations to accept captured suspects for trial.

On the other hand, though, there is equally widespread agreement that without changes in the underlying conditions, most importantly rampant illegal fishing and piracy will return. The only item for debate is whether that resurgence will wait for the departure of the navies.

The ongoing maritime operations against piracy off the coast of Somalia have not only put naval enforcement against piracy at sea in the spotlight, but also the legal aftermath of what to do with pirates after their capture.

While warships at sea within the current legal framework of UNCLOS and the UN Security Council amplifications specifically adopted for the case of Somalia can effectively perform their tasks, the question of what to do with the pirate suspects is still not satisfactorily resolved.

As a consequence, attacks against merchant vessels and international trade run the risk of being ‘consequence free’, in which the perpetrators are not being held accountable. Participating nations are confronted with the fact that military operations against piracy, which is essentially a criminal offence, need a comprehensive approach to ensure accountability.

To counter this criminal activity at sea nations try to strengthen the judicial infrastructure through national prosecution or transfer suspects for prosecution in the Horn of Africa region. As these options are not considered to be enough, and hampered by other non-legal factors, some nations call for an international court as a possible long term solution.

 

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