There is absolutely nothing romantic about piracy. Heavily armed thugs in fast speedboats prey on yachts, refugee-laden hulks and even huge supertankers, which they board using sophisticated grappling apparatus and ladders, and whose crews they hold, and personal property is plundered. Nor is it simply robbery. Pirates around the world have shown no compunction about slaughtering their captives. The waters off Somalia have become a profitable hunting ground for these sea-borne criminals and it is, therefore, right that the UN Security Council has approved a proposal, drafted by France, the United States and the flag-of-convenience state Panama, that international navies should be empowered to go in and deal with the menace.
It is equally right that this decisive move has, however, been hedged with important limitations. First, the government of Somalia must give initial approval to any anti-piracy operation. Secondly, the UN flatly rejected a French proposal that this aggressive mandate should be extended to other parts of the world where piracy is rife, in particular to the coast of West Africa. What the majority of Security Council members were keen to avoid was allowing an open season on piracy worldwide. The superficial attraction of such a campaign was clearly outweighed by the danger that powerful First World navies would take it upon themselves to introduce some form of maritime colonialism, which would usurp the sovereign rights of countries in whose waters pirates operate. As Indonesia’s ambassador to the UN Marty Natalegawa pointed out yesterday, the situation in Somalia is exceptional. Somalia remains a failed state. Even given a successful outcome of the peace talks between the government and its rivals being brokered by the UN Security Council, it cannot address the problem of the pirates.
The answer in other territorial waters where piracy is rife is for the international community to give support to the local coast guard and navy. Giving powerful navies carte blanche to confront these maritime thieves and killers in such waters would be little different from giving a country like France the right to administer justice on land in a country where one of its nationals had suffered an injustice. That sort of intervention smacks of the worst days of 19th-century European imperialism when, in weakened countries such as China, the “Great Powers” insisted on administering their own law for their own subjects.
Given the huge technical and naval resources of the world’s navies, the operation to locate and crush the Somali pirates, once launched, ought to be over quite quickly with satellite technology used to keep watch on those who escape the initial naval dragnet. The Security Council needs to be alert to the possibility that by drawing out the piracy campaign, some powers might seek to arrogate to themselves the right to operate permanently in Somali waters. That would be just as unacceptable as the depredations of the pirates.
