Fighting piracy

The results look bleak. Pirate attacks nearly doubled to 102 in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year, the International Maritime Bureau recently reported. Most of the attacks occurred in the Gulf of Aden and off the eastern coast of Somalia, precisely in the area where the international community has sent more than a dozen warships to deter and prevent piracy.

It's impossible to know how many attacks would have taken place without the presence of navy ships from around the world in the region, experts believe international cooperation needs to be improved to make the fight against piracy more effective.

Improving coordination is the aim of a conference in Kuala Lumpur which gets underway Monday and which brings together top maritime experts, diplomats and security officials.

Four missions, four commands, one task

Yet getting everyone on the same page can be a challenge.

Bjorn Seibert, a Research Affiliate for Security Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lists the various international missions deployed: "You have the EU's mission, you have NATO's mission and then you have two Combined Task Forces led by the United States, Combined Task Force 151 and 150, which operate in the same area with the same task."

The answer Seibert and Peter Lehr give when asked whether the four missions suffer from a lack of cooperation is clear: "I would say they are hampered at the moment," argues Lehr, a piracy specialist at the University of St. Andrews.

He points out that the different missions have different chains of command, different rules of engagement and operate under different domestic laws. That means that for example Dutch or German warships can only apprehend pirates if they pose a threat to their national interests, explains Lehr.

"Recently a Dutch warship arrested pirates and freed Yemeni hostages, but then realizing that no national interest was threatened they had to release the pirates, which means they had to bring them on the shore again, letting them actually go back to their pirate ports and then strike again," says Lehr. "That's the problem."

A more tragic example of the lack of international cooperation mentioned by both experts happened late last year. An Indian warship sank a Thai fishing boat it mistook for a so-called pirate mother ship, killing 15 Thai crew members.

"This would be something that under EU rules of engagements would not have been possible," says Lehr.

Merging missions

The international community has recognized coordination is necessary. At the beginning of the year the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia (CPGSC) was launched to do exactly that.

While the CPSC is a step forward because it provides a broad framework under the United Nations for countries to engage in counter-piracy, it does not provide much help in the concrete fight against pirates taking place every day, the experts say.

Instead as a more practical approach, suggests Seibert, the Europeans should ask themselves whether they really need to participate in four different operations to address the same problem. The answer could be to merge the EU and NATO missions and create one combined structure.

"Something like this has been done before in 1992 in Bosnia where both the Western European Union and NATO had separate naval forces and they had eventually a unified command", argues Seibert. "So that's something that you could look into at least over the long term in Somalia too."

Lehr agrees that it is vital to establish one set of rules of engagement under the same chain of command. "But that's wishful thinking, that won't happen anytime soon, I fear," he adds and points out that the international community has been faced with the same problem in Afghanistan for years.

More air patrols

But even if a unified command structure proves to be impossible to implement, there are other measures to bolster the effectiveness of counter-piracy operations, such as increasing the number of airplanes patrolling the region.

Still, given the recent spike in attacks despite the naval missions in the area, do counter-piracy operations stand any realistic chance to stop the pirates?

Everybody, especially the navy commanders running the operations, knows that it is impossible to tackle piracy with a naval mission, says Lehr. It must be solved on land.

"But you can deny the pirates the long reach they have at the moment. They are operating from mother ships which give them a reach of up to several hundred nautical miles off their shores. If you can ferret out these mother ships and either arrest or sink them you will turn this high-sea piracy into coastal piracy again which means it will be less lethal, it will be less of a problem."

Author: Michael Knigge

Editor: Trinity Hartman