09 February 2010: Defence Management Journal
Renewed efforts to tackle the problem of piracy in the Gulf of Aden in the last two years are having an effect but the problem has refused to go away. Jason Alderwick, Maritime Defence Analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, explains the difficulties in policing the Somali coast to editor Joel Shenton
The Gulf of Aden, between Somalia's North Coast of Somalia and the south coast of Yemen, hosts a key trade shipping route. The gulf leads in to the Suez Canal, and many ships have been seized and their crew kidnapped on those shipping routes in recent years.
However, attacks such as the kidnapping of British couple Paul and Rachel Chandler have kept piracy in the headlines of late, and shown that the activity is not limited to the Gulf of Aden, having now expanded out into the Somali Basin, off the country's east coast, and further out into the Indian Ocean.
The problem itself has built up gradually over the last three to five years, and began to reach a peak as the EU launched Operation Atalanta at the end of 2008. An Internationally Recognised Transit Corridor has been set up, patrolled by EU and NATO warships, and their ability to deter and disrupt pirate activity has been proven time and time again.
"At any one time you've got up to thirty warships operating in the Somali Basin and the Gulf of Aden, and that has had an effect," says Jason Alderwick, maritime defence analyst from the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
"The number of vessels taken has actually increased slightly," says Alderwick, "but the number of successful attacks has significantly reduced - by about 60%. That's the important figure, because that shows the deterrent value and intervention and disruption value of naval forces, coupled with the commercial operators and owners taking greater responsibility to safeguard their assets as they go through that region."
As for the criminal gangs involved, Alderwick says their tactics have barely changed, allowing navies patrolling the area to anticipate the threat, but that there is an increase in the number and spread of attacks.
"I don't think they're becoming more capable," he says. "Arguably one of the successes in the Gulf of Aden has been to displace some of the piratical activity to the Somali basin."
"If there's been a tactical change it's been the increased use of small pirated dhows to act as motherships from which they would trail five or six skiffs. Then they would go and hunt from these motherships and look for bounty further offshore.
"The initial exclusion zone off Somalia was 200 miles, then 500 miles and in effect we've got attacks happening at 900 miles off the coast," says Alderwick, "which is an awful lot of water space to patrol."
Some private shipping firms have hired armed guards to protect shipments, but there are many legal difficulties involved, and these companies are in the minority. The majority of shipping companies appear to be willing to pay up in order to secure the vast cargos carried on the tankers. Of course, the moment the payment is made the pirates have achieved their goals and the problem remains. Pirates are still capable of eliciting huge sums from commercial operators as ransom payments.
"If you're carrying the insurance and you're correctly covered and you settle the payment, it's hard not to break this down in terms of a commercial arrangement," says Alderwick. "As long as the premium level doesn't outstrip the ransom payments then it's still commercially viable to transit the routes and to operate. That doesn't provide the deterrent to the pirates, but at the moment it's commercially manageable."
Once the payments are made, however, it's not clear where the ransom money goes. This is clearly a cause for concern among the international community.
"There has to be greater effort made from serious organised crime agencies from Europol and Interpol to start looking at trying to track the money," says Alderwick. "Because actually this is cash, not a BACS transaction that's taking place - and vast amounts of cash can be quite difficult to trace. Also there is a lot of money and capital being pushed around the Middle East as well, where money regulations are not as tight as you would find in Europe or the US. So tracking the money can prove very difficult."
It would seem to make sense to call on regional states to police their waters, but it is political instability within Somalia itself that is the problem. The situation on land is giving the pirates a lawless home base to return to, enabling them to continue.
"If you look at the Djibouti peace accord the regional states are quite keen to police and secure their own waters," Alderwick explains. "The key for Somalia is that it's effectively been a lawless state for the last two decades. And so if you don't have the ability to police, enforce and have any jurisdictional control within your territorial waters or exclusive economic zone, that becomes unregulated. That's a safe haven for terrorism, it's a safe haven for criminality and on the criminal side we see piracy, people trafficking, people smuggling, arms trafficking, all sorts of other contraband flow. It's business, and it flourishes where there isn't law. That's the difficulty. It's not the other regional states or their capacity - whilst that is an issue - it's certainly the fact that what you have here is a complete breakdown of institutional capacity and government."
In recognising the trouble created by the situation on the ground, naval operations – almost regardless of their size and intensity – are bound to have difficulty getting anything more than basic control of the shipping lanes. Dealing with piracy as a whole in the region is unlikely to be achievable through purely maritime operations.
"You have to recognise what the utility of the naval assets are in theatre," says Alderwick. "They cannot solve all the problems. What they can do is address the symptoms but they are not going to address the deep rooted causes of piracy, which will only happen when we're prepared to beef up our international support for what's happening on the ground in Somalia.
"You've got a military instrument that is effectively being asked to deal with a constabulary or civil criminal issue. And that is also part of the problem. What you need to be looking at are the governance issues in Somalia, the support for the Transition Federal Government and the semi-autonomous regions as well. Building on their capacity to enforce and control their own exclusive economic zone. All those elements need to come in effect and that's what costs money, looking at the social causes and social problems as well as the maritime security effort that we're seeing now."
Recently, international operations in the Gulf of Aden have come under criticism for not always detaining the pirates they have caught. Alderwick says this is often because the bureaucracy involved in properly processing and charging pirates is too time-consuming for naval crews who could be patrolling.
"On balance what would you rather have?" he asks, "a warship that's tied up in the legal and jurisdictional processes or a warship that has effectively disrupted and deterred and is back out on operations doing more of the same?
"You've got an unprecedented international maritime operation there - that is good," says Alderwick. "Is it perfect? Absolutely not; there are lots of different things, different capabilities that they could do with. We could also attack very heavily on the jurisdictional side because there's been a lot of criticism of deterring and disrupting but no detaining taking place. But actually if you look at it, the Kenyan legal system - and the Seychellois legal system - is virtually overwhelmed as it is now in terms of trying to process the pirates that they do have detained. That's why you don't get every single pirate being detained.
"There are still a lot of legal barriers to work through, but we have to look regionally at addressing this issue," he says. "There's no point, for example, asking the international criminal court to do this. I think what we should focus on is delivering capacity regionally to deal with this issue."
The international community need to take more than naval action to remedy the problem, however, current efforts see the vast majority of ships get through the Gulf, and NATO and EU efforts are keeping the shipping routes open and largely safe – not necessarily an easy task against a determined maritime insurgency.
"Part of the problem is that you've only got a finite number of assets and the Internationally Recognised Transit Corridor is just under 500 miles long," says Alderwick. "It's an awful lot of water space just in the Gulf of Aden to start looking at. If you then factor in the Somali basin and the attacks that are occurring there you're talking of millions of square miles of water space of which you cannot physically patrol every element. It is a very difficult operation to enforce."
"I think that what we can do is maintain the globalised sea lanes of communication so economic free trade flows and oil flows etc. Piracy is still going to happen; it's maintaining the number of incidents to a manageable level, to a perceived manageable level until such time as conditions on the ground improve. And ultimately that's where the focus has to be."
