When the Jolly Roger flies over Somalia
Piracy can’t be beaten at sea. The solution lies on shore, at the source of the problem
At first blush, the outbreak of piracy off the coast of Somalia seems like a prime opportunity for the world’s navies. Nobody likes pirates, and naval commanders have been taking them on since the days of the Barbary Coast. You could almost hear the cheers when an Indian frigate sank a pirate mother ship in a clash in the Gulf of Aden this week. As the pirates grow bolder – they have hijacked 36 ships this year, including the Saudi supertanker taken on the weekend – warships from India, Russia, NATO and the United States have converged on the region to patrol the coast. Even the European Union, keen to build its defence capacity, is getting in on the act.
Unfortunately, it is all a bit futile. Every warship from every navy in the world could not cover the 530,000 square kilometres of the Gulf of Aden. The Arabian Sea, where the supertanker was hijacked, is many times more vast. “The pirates will go somewhere we are not,” says Royal Navy Commodore Keith Winstanley. “If we patrol the Gulf of Aden, then they will go to Mogadishu. If we go to Mogadishu, they will go to the Gulf of Aden.” Even if warships could find and pursue the hijacked vessels, what would they do? With ships’ crews as hostages, retaking them by force is out of the question.
Getting the ships to defend themselves is equally impractical. Insurance and safety policies forbid most crews from carrying weapons. Defending a supertanker such as the captured Sirius Star, three times the size of an aircraft carrier, would require a large, heavily armed force. The Sirius Star had a crew of 25, with no more than six hands on deck at any one time.
No, piracy cannot be beaten at sea. The solution lies on shore, at the source of the problem: Somalia. The destitute country of 9.5 million has been in a state of anarchy since the collapse of the regime led by Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. Gangsters, warlords and jihadists infest its cities. The writ of the internationally recognized central government barely runs beyond the few blocks it controls in Mogadishu, and even there its offices are routinely shelled by its opponents. In a sense, the piracy on its coast is simply an extension of the chaos and lawlessness on land. The only sensible way to quell piracy is to do something about that chaos.
A tall order, no question. Though most Somalis share the same language, religion and ethnic makeup, they are bitterly divided along lines of clan and politics. Every attempt to bring them together through internationally mediated peace talks has eventually fallen apart. An Aug. 18 peace deal, the latest of many, has had no discernible effect on the ground.
Intervention by force has been just as ineffective. In 1993, the United States decided to begin pulling out its troops after 18 of its soldiers were killed in the streets of Mogadishu, the sad end of a mercy mission to feed starving Somalis. Another U.S.-backed intervention in 2006 saw Ethiopian troops overthrow a radical Islamist government, ending a rare and brief period of order in Somalia.
That helps explain why, despite repeated pleas from the transitional government in Mogadishu, neither the United Nations nor the United States has been willing to send in peacekeepers to stabilize the country. The only international presence in Somalia, a 3,000-strong African Union force, is pathetically under-resourced.
But the piracy crisis argues for another attempt at putting Somalia right. With the global economy in such trouble, the international community cannot afford to have pirates disrupt international trade. And Somalia’s chaos does more than breed pirates. It breeds terror and extremism. At present, Islamist militias are battling what is left of the central government for control of the country. The most militant of them, the Shabab, has seized control of several towns. Designated by Washington as a terrorist group, it wants to turn Somalia into a strict Islamic state. The chaos also breeds regional instability. Somalia stands in an arc of danger that includes Congo and Sudan, site of the atrocities in Darfur. Finally, it breeds human misery. In what the UN calls the “forgotten crisis,” more than three million Somalis are dependent on emergency rations for their survival.
For all these reasons, the outside world should stop treating Somalia as a hopeless basket case and renew efforts to pull it back together. A first step would be to put some muscle behind new UN sanctions, approved by the Security Council this week, to freeze the assets of warlords, arms dealers and others who contribute to the country’s lawless state. A second would be to step up efforts to feed hungry Somalis, an effort that might mean helping to protect aid workers. Above all, the international community should put its shoulder behind the intermittent peace talks, led by a UN envoy, that have been going on between rival factions in Djibouti.
Unless other countries act soon, Somalia’s chaos will continue to spill over its borders and its shores.
mgee@globeandmail.com
November 21, 2008
Source: Globe and Mail
