When Somali pirates killed four Americans, criminals pulled the triggers, but the guns and bullets were paid for by the families, employers and national governments that ransomed earlier hostages.
As I sadly anticipated in this space more than a year ago, the institution of paying ransoms has led to more pirate attacks and more-violent pirates. In 2010, pirates off the coast of Somalia hijacked a report estimate of ships. (1) They seized 49 vessels and took 1,016 crew members hostage.
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We received news that other delight craft, this one a sailboat with seven Danish citizens aboard, has been commandeered by pirates in the Indian Ocean. The boat, whose passengers consist of three children between the ages of 12 and 16, was reportedly headed toward Somalia. It would be the first known abduction of children by Somali pirates.
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The international society has tried to deal with the problem, but it has not made any serious attempt to do the one thing that could precisely put a stop to this wave of crime on the high seas: make distinct that piracy does not pay.
Rather than cut off the flow of funds, marine nations deployed more patrols in the pirates' hunting grounds. The International marine Bureau credits patrols with cutting the estimate of attacks in the Gulf of Aden from 117 in 2009 to 53 in 2010. But pirates have circumvented the patrols by greatly addition their reach. Increased attacks in the Red Sea and in the Indian Ocean east of Somalia brought the total estimate of attacks in 2010 to 217, compared to 212 in 2009.
The ocean has thus far proven too big for the patrols to keep tabs on the dispersed pirates. The European Naval Force now attempts to patrol about 2 million square marine miles, an area nearly four times the size of Alaska. As pirates have been forced to move farther from shore, they have also started to seize larger ships to use as floating bases, Giles Noakes, head of protection at the Baltic and International marine Council, explained to Bloomberg.
There have occasionally been attempts to rescue hostages. These efforts sometimes succeed, but they also put captives and would-be rescuers in harm's way. Last week's killings on the captured yacht, the Quest, came after U.S. Naval forces blocked the pirates. The killings on the Quest may also have been retribution for earlier U.S. Efforts to keep pirates from their prey. The Quest was attacked just after a Somali pirate was sentenced to more than 33 years in prison for participating in the 2009 hijacking of the Maersk Alabama. The U.S. Navy successfully defended that ship, shooting two pirates in the process.
Pirates have said that they will continue to kill hostages rather than surrender them to rescuers. (2)
A Navy extra operations team killed two pirates aboard the Quest. Two more were dead when the U.S. forces boarded the boat, apparently as a corollary of internal fighting. Thirteen others were arrested, but their absence will not constrain the pirates' manpower. As Roger Middleton, an examiner covering Somalia at the Royal found of International Affairs in London, told Bloomberg, "Every time some of them are arrested, there are fullness of others happy to take their places because it's so well paid." As with the drug trade in our hemisphere, there will always be habitancy willing to risk death or arrest if the inherent recompense is big enough.
Governments and shipping companies that pay ransoms and also pay for stepped-up patrols are funding both sides of the piracy fight. This can lead only to escalation, with each year bringing more kidnappings and more violence. Midpoint ransom payments rose to .4 million last year, compared with 0,000 in 2005, according to the One Earth future Foundation. It is no wonder that pirates have ample resources to invest in larger and more deadly operations.
I still believe the steps I recommend in my earlier column make more sense. Shipping in pirate-prone areas should be required to voyage in convoys with an armed escort. Boat traffic on the Somali coast should be quarantined within that country's 12-mile territorial limit until Somalia is able to end piracy through onshore law enforcement. (At the moment, the Somali central government has barely enough force to operate a few blocks of territory surrounding its offices in Mogadishu). Governments and companies that succumb to ransom demands should be blacklisted and barred from international ports. Individuals and corporations should be strictly prohibited from paying any ransom.
Combating pirates effectively will want much more international cooperation, coordination and toughness than we have yet seen, but there is simply no other solution. We cannot buy our way out of this question because pirates are not in the firm of reducing the estimate of hostages they hold. The pirates are not stupid. They will never allow the estimate of hostages held at any singular time to drop to come to be small enough estimate that foreign governments might be comfortable invading the pirates' land bases to put them out of firm for good.
The question has already reached a scale that ensures that some hostages are going to be killed. It may or may not be the unfortunate individuals who happen to be held right now in Somali harbors, or in less vulnerable inland hideouts. The best-case outcome probably would occur if the pirates became convinced that no more ransoms were forthcoming, that further hijack attempts would be thwarted, and that they would be allowed to leave with their old ill-gotten gains if they released their most recent batch of hostages unharmed. Approximately every other scenario to shut down the pirate trade involves the likelihood of innocent habitancy getting hurt.
The Quest incident proves that we can't keep seamen and travelers safe by retention the pirates in business, either. All we get is more pirates, and more ruthless ones at that.
We can also assume that the pirates' gangs are using their wealth ashore in ways that make a functioning civil society in Somalia more elusive than ever. Somalia did not originate this problem. We did, by paying ransoms. We are therefore going to have to be the ones to fix it.
Sources:
(1) Bloomberg: Pirate Attacks Spur 36-Fold increase In Ransoms: Freight Markets
(2) The Guardian: Somali Pirates Threaten To Murder More Hostages After Deaths Of Four Americans
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