Somalia: Onshore chaos fuels piracy
Published: 01 December, 2008
Proposed measures to curb piracy off the coast of Somalia fail to address the vacuum of power onshore that has allowed criminality to flourish.
For those who retain the romantic notions of piracy taught in Technicolor, the dubious record broken by Somali pirates in November 2008 – the hijacking of the Sirius Star, the largest ship ever to fall to such an assault – may seem an impressive feat of daring. For the rest, it represents the culmination of a year which saw armed attacks on shipping in the Gulf of Aden more than double in frequency, using new tactics and weaponry to threaten not only individual crews, but also the future of the Suez Canal as a major shipping route.
The International Maritime Organisation and various seafaring organisations have expressed concerns that the upsurge in piracy and the consequent increase in insurance premium, notwithstanding the increased risk to life and cargo, make the Gulf, which has annual traffic of 16,000 ships, unviable for commercial operators. AP Moller-Maersk, the Danish shipping company, has said that it will re-route many of its ships around the Cape of Good Hope – a far longer route – and at the time of writing, Frontline, another large tanker firm, said that it was considering the same. If these measures are imitated across the industry, the cost of freight could increase significantly.
In response, Nato and the EU have increased naval patrols, and other nations with shipping interests – notably India and Malaysia – have deployed to the region. However, despite occasional successes, attacks have continued to escalate. The vastness of the area and the tactics of the pirates mean that they are difficult to detect and intercept.
While a naval solution may boost confidence within the shipping industry and their insurers as a whole, the environment that has fostered the development of this industrial scale piracy is a result of long-term instability onshore.
Somalia has been described as the archetype of a failed state, without a functioning central government since the early 1990s and split by an insurgency that is being fought, at least rhetorically, on religious grounds. Only the capital Mogadishu is under the control of the Transitional Government – which has the military backing of neighbouring Ethiopia – and even within the city limits its grip on power is weak. The remaining area of the country is governed by regional authorities with varying degrees of autonomy and control. It is in one of these states – Puntland – from which much of the recent pirate activity originates.
There are also suggestions from various quarters that the evolving piratical industry on the Horn of Africa has political links to actors that are perpetuating the instability in Somalia and further afield, notably the Islamic Courts Union, an association of Islamic councils which seized control of Mogadishu in 2006 until the intervention of the Ethiopian army saw them ousted. Attempts have been made to associate the recent pirate activity with the Hizbul Shabaab, the radical militant wing of the ICU, though some observers are sceptical.
“I haven’t seen any clear evidence of close ties,” says Dr David Smock, vice-president of the US Institute for Peace’s Centre for Mediation and Conflict Resolution and an expert on the region. “I know there’s kind of a western, particularly an American expectation, that this must be connected to the Islamists,” he adds. “In Washington the pattern has been to link everything to that in kind of a simplistic way, but I haven’t seen any clear evidence that there is that link.”
As Mr Smock notes, when pirates captured the MV Faina, a Ukrainian vessel carrying Russian-made tanks and grenade launchers, they made no moves to pass on such equipment to the militants on land, preferring instead to keep to their usual business model of mooring the ship in a safe harbour and demanding a ransom. Furthermore, the ICU and its affiliates have little or no influence in the pirates’ home bases in Puntland, although some attacks have led to ships being moored near Kismaayo, in the south of the country, suggesting that there is activity in nominally Islamist areas.
“I don’t see how the piracy contributes to the cause of the Islamists, it just adds one more cause for international concern and opposition and possibly intervention, so I just don’t accept as a source for funding their movement,” Mr Smock says.
Despite their ideological differences, it does seem likely, however, that there is some complicity between the pirates and almost every group with a modicum of control, according to Professor David Shinn, adjunct professor in the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University and former US ambassador to Ethiopia.
“My guess is that there would be some links between these groups and virtually every source of power on the shore, including the transitional government, or persons who are associated with the TFG,” he says. For the pirates to operate from the shore will involve paying off whoever happens to be in control in that region, Mr Shinn believes.
