NATO navy patrols African Horn, seeks new ways to crush Somali pirates
10 March 2014, 11:49 -- NATO vessels patrol the dangerous waters off the Horn of Africa to prevent pirates from seizing passing ships. In the meantime, NATO crews are rehearsing the recapturing of hijacked vessels in a move that involves the use of helicopters. Such exercises are repeated almost daily to keep the crew sharp for actual encounters with the pirates who still threaten the trillion-dollar shipping that passes near the Somali coast.
NATO, the European Union and other countries have helped drive down piracy since the freighter Maersk Alabama was hijacked by four ragtag Somalis in 2009, but there are still attacks nearly every week in the area.
Some 90 per cent of all global trade by volume is shipped by sea, and about half of that passes through the Indian Ocean, including one-third of Europe's oil supplies. More than 22,000 cargo ships travel through the so-called Gate of Grief, the strait between Yemen and Djibouti that links the Red Sea and the Suez Canal to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. But the NATO forces operate from the Persian Gulf to the Seychelles in the south and the Maldives in the east, covering an area greater than 2 million square miles or the size of Western Europe.
The patrols use a variety of measures to verify the activity of shipping off the coast of Somalia, separating out legitimate maritime traffic from suspected pirate vessels, and often escorting ships through the trickiest passages.
The NATO counter-piracy task force has an array of dazzling technologies at its disposal, from stealth technology to avoid enemy radar, ballistic missiles that could sink an aircraft carrier, sniper rifles that have an effective range of three miles, and infrared cameras to see figures from seven miles away. They also have AWACS surveillance planes, use Mercury, a secure internet-based communication system, while unmanned drones are used to spot pirate camps.
Álvaro de Bazán, the flagship of NATO's anti-piracy mission, can send teams to preemptively board a suspect vessel, and even use force to stop them.
There are other factors that have helped curb piracy. One is that captains sailing at-risk areas have been advised to maintain high cruising speeds (preferably faster than 18 knots), building citadels to protect the crew and fitting razor wire along a ship's side. Number two is the use of private armed security guards on board the ships. They have proved a powerful deterrent and not a single vessel with guards has been boarded.
But it is the presence of the NATO fleet – bolstered by the flotillas from the EU and other navies – that has been most imposing, of course.
Yet, the pirates have adapted to the naval presence. They use satellite phones and GPS to communicate, and are also heavily armed with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s. Now that high-value ships sail much farther from the coast, the pirates have learnt to roam farther by using 'mother ships' - powerful deep-sea fishing vessels seized earlier - as floating bases for their speed boats or skiffs. The mother ships allow the pirates to stay at sea for more than a month at a time. While the average distance for an attack in 2005 was 109km away from the coast, by 2012 this figure had risen to 746km. They are still holding more than 70 sailors hostage.
The pirates normally hold the seized ship, its cargo and its crew for ransom for anything up to $7 million – a fortune in Somalia where there are no jobs and almost half the population needs food aid after 17 years of non-stop conflict.
This is why everyone in the anti-piracy effort is cautious about recent figures from International Maritime Bureau (IMB), a body that fights shipping crime, showing that piracy at sea is at its lowest level in six years. The IMB says there were only 15 declared incidents off Somalia last year – down from 75 in 2012, and 237 in 2011. But Pottengal Mukundan, IMB's director warns that the pirates continue to operate and the situation off the Horn of Africa can quickly change. So, such actions as aerial surveillance, the interdiction and disarming of pirate vessels and the detention of suspected pirates can only be done by the naval vessels, he adds.
There is also consensus that the seas will need policing as long as the underlying causes of piracy remain. Somalia is still a failed state, a chaotic, impoverished, lawless land that is chronically insecure and now increasingly prey to Islamic terrorism (the Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi last year was the work of Somalia-based Islamist militant group al Shabab).
Voice of Russia, the Independent
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