By The Editors

April 9, 2009,

On Wednesday, Somali pirates seized the Maersk Alabama, a cargo ship carrying food aid to Kenya. The crew managed to retake the ship within hours, but not before the pirates took the ship’s captain, Richard Phillips, hostage.

The unarmed container ship was the first American-flagged vessel to be captured in the latest wave of pirate attacks off the Horn of Africa.

Is there a way to stop these pirate attacks, which are becoming ever more brazen and sophisticated?

The ‘Black Hawk Down’ Effect

Nikolas Gvosdev is a senior editor at The National Interest and a professor of national security studies at the United States Naval War College.

We need to stop thinking about Somali pirates as simple fishermen with AK-47s. The pirate organizations operating from Eyal and other places are becoming more sophisticated in their attacks. They are targeting vessels not just off the coast or in the Gulf of Aden but hundreds of miles into the Indian Ocean. With reports that 20 percent of all ransom money received is reinvested by the pirate groups into better boats, G.P.S. systems, satellite phones and payments to informants working in the Middle East, Somali pirates are able to both evade the multinational naval task forces operating in the area and find new targets.

Pirates are enjoying the vacuum created by the unwillingness of governments and companies to set ground rules.

At present, pirates have much to gain and little to lose by continuing to strike. Navies are patrolling ship lanes rather than trying to block pirates from leaving their ports. Some countries only have a mandate to protect ships that fly their national flags. Others have limited rules of engagement. There are more commercial ships spread out over a large area than the warships currently on station can protect. Moreover, because Somali pirates generally do not harm crews, ships or cargoes, it is still cheaper for companies to pay ransom than risk the destruction of the vessel.

Pirates are also enjoying the vacuum created by the unwillingness of governments and private companies to set ground rules. As long as countries continue to decline prosecution of captured pirates, there is no effective legal deterrent.

The only way to ameliorate this problem is to control piracy from land. But unfortunately, there is continued reluctance among many governments to do anything “on shore” — memories of “Black Hawk Down” are still strong.

But there has to be a change in the incentive structure for pirates. Right now, companies and some governments are still willing to pay ransom. Might they instead hire clans to combat piracy, along the “sons of Iraq” model? Maybe foreign naval forces in the area should work to guarantee that Somali fishermen are free to ply their trade without fear of either pirate attack or the arrival of foreign fishing fleets to illegally fish Somali waters.

After all, the genesis of the pirate gangs were the militiamen taken on board Somali fishing vessels to attack the famed “zombie fleets” from other countries. Perhaps it’s time for the international community to deal directly with the self-proclaimed governments in Somaliland and Puntland, rather than hoping against hope that a central government in Somalia will be reconstructed.

Even if only a fraction of the total number of vessels in the area are attacked, Somali pirates are raising the costs for ships transiting the Gulf of Aden to get to Europe via the Suez canal, as well as those leaving the Straits of Hormuz and moving down the coast of Africa. Keeping these sea lines open is vital to the health of the global economy.

Haul Them Into International Court

Douglas R. Burgess Jr., a postdoctoral fellow at the New York Historical Society, is the author of “The Pirates’ Pact: The Secret Alliances Between History’s Most Notorious Buccaneers and Colonial America.”

Clearly the best course of action right now is to let the Navy do its job, and hope that Captain Phillips will be rescued soon.

But I was struck by a comment reported in The Times this morning from Lt. Nathan Christiansen of the Fifth Fleet, that “where the cops aren’t, the criminals are,” indicating the difficulty of patrolling an area more than one million square miles in size. Once the pirates have left Somalia, tracking all of them is practically impossible. The solution, then, needs to not only involve patrols at sea but also effective deterrents to keep the pirates from sailing in the first place.

If more pirates are successfully brought to justice, it will not take long for the risks of the enterprise to discourage others.

Few states have committed themselves to prosecuting the Somali pirates, and the pirates know it. If an international body like the International Criminal Court were willing to accept jurisdiction, this would radically change the current situation. States whose navies capture pirates will not need to bear the burden of prosecution, unless they wish to. If more pirates are successfully brought to justice, it will not take long for the risks of the enterprise to discourage others.

In the case of the Maersk Alabama, I think the pirates overreached themselves. The United States will henceforth be even more committed to ending the problem of Somali piracy. This is precisely the attitude that led the nations of Europe to band together in the 19th century and commit themselves to capturing and prosecuting pirates, with the result that piracy virtually vanished for more than a century.

Source: New York Times

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