The logistical challenge of policing more than a million square miles of ocean is an international problem that requires an international solution, said The Guardian in an editorial yesterday. Excerpts:
Be it from the tiny inlets of the Malacca Straits, the remote islands of the Java Sea, or fishing villages on the Somali coast, piracy is back. It went out of fashion after the Napoleonic wars, but has been rising steadily ever since the end of the Cold War. Reports of four-hour gunbattles between the Indian Navy and pirates in the Gulf of Aden, or the seizure of one of the world’s largest tankers with $100m of crude oil aboard, or a vessel carrying 33 Russian tanks, should not be surprising. What is eye-catching about the latest attacks is the scale of the pirates’ ambition. At least 92 ships have been attacked this year in and around the Gulf of Aden, more than three times the number in 2008. But is it so remarkable that the Sirius Star, a Saudi supertanker, was seized 450 nautical miles off the Kenyan coast, when fully loaded supertankers sit low in the water and travel slowly, and pirates now use mother ships with GPS positioning devices and speed boats in tow to extend their range? Most of their targets are sitting ducks and there are flocks of them — 20,000 oil tankers, freighter and merchant vessels transiting the Gulf of Aden each year. Many of the attacks off the Horn of Africa have taken place under the nose of a large US military presence. The US Fifth Fleet, which is responsible for US naval forces in a vast area of sea from the Gulf to the coast of Kenya, has rightly appealed for help from other navies, including the Russian. The fleet has established a shipping corridor which can be policed — if the ships stay inside it. But that is not happening. Nor should all the attention focus on Somalia, the ultimate failed state. The attacks are being launched from fishing villages in Puntland, the northern quasi-independent part of Somalia. Indeed in the short period when the Islamic Courts were in power piracy dropped.
