Panel: No immediate solution to pirates

[unhappycamper]

Panel: No immediate solution to pirates
By Philip Ewing - Staff writer
Posted : Monday Nov 24, 2008 20:19:47 EST

The piracy scourge off the lawless coast of Somalia isn’t likely to abate anytime soon, according to a panel of four experts convened Monday in Washington — in fact, they said, it’s likely to get worse.

As long as Somalia has no effective central government to keep pirates from taking refuge in harbors and land bases, attackers will continue hijacking ships and bringing in lucrative ransoms, the panel members agreed, speaking in a session at the conservative Heritage Foundation. But short of full-scale land invasions to break up pirate networks and seize the ports they’re using as sanctuaries — a course none of the panel members recommended — the world can only fight the symptoms, not the causes of piracy off Somalia, they said.

There is even a great deal of circumstantial evidence that the government of Somalia, such as it is, “is enjoying the fruits of piracy,” said J. Peter Pham, director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University. So both the current dysfunctional government and any replacements have an incentive to let the hijackings continue, he said. What’s more, the seizure of a 300,000 ton-oil tanker, the Sirius Star, reassured pirates they can capture the largest and more valuable vessels on the ocean with impunity, said Dominick Donald, chief analyst for the British security firm Aegis Defense Services.

“They’ve eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge,” he said. The international navies that patrol off the coast of Africa did nothing to stop or recover the Sirius Star, which shows anyone “with a stolen fishing boat, some Soviet weapons, GPS and an illiterate crew that we can do it, too.”

Donald pointed out that the Somali pirates had also shown they could observe and adapt to the tactics of the warships patrolling the region. Most of the naval ships around the Horn of Africa are there to protect U.N. humanitarian shipments, not fight pirates, Donald said. On top of that, attackers need only about 15 minutes to come alongside a slow-moving cargo ship, scale its deck and take it over. Even if a watch-stander sends a distress signal, none of the U.S. or international navies is likely to be able to respond in time.


Rest of article at: http://www.navytimes.com/news/2008/11/navy_pirates_112408/%2e