Pirates of Somalia: The Curse of the Failed State

The incident was hardly Eyl’s debut as a latter-day pirate haven or the last attack emanating from Africa’s longest coastline, the 2,285-kilometer-long littoral of Somalia (the de facto Republic of Somaliland has another 740 kilometers of coast, most of which is on the Red Sea). Just two months earlier, on February 1, a brand-new Danish-owned icebreaker en route to the Russian Far East, MV Svitzer Korsakov, was likewise seized off the Puntland coast and brought to dock at Eyl where its six-member international crew – a British captain, an Irish engineer, and four Russians sailors – was held hostage for 47 days until the owners paid a ransom of $1.6 million. Barely a week later, on April 20, a Basque tuna fishing boat, the FV Playa de Bakio, was seized along with its twenty-six crew members – thirteen Spanish citizens and thirteen African nationals – some 217 nautical miles (400 kilometers) off the Somali coast. Although the Spanish navy dispatched the Álvaro de Bazán-class Aegis-equipped frigate SPS Méndez Núñez to the area and put a team of combat divers on alert, the Socialist government of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero opted instead to pay a reported $1.2 million ransom last Saturday (Deputy Prime Minister María Teresa Fernández de la Vega Sanz called it “finding a collaborative solution to a complicated situation” and hailed the “cooperation and diplomacy” which took place between her leftist regime, the vessel’s owners, and representatives of the hijackers).

No doubt the prospect of a handsome payoff and the relative unlikelihood of consequences – the French military operation is a rather unique exception – has encouraged the spate of attacks. Just one day after the Playa de Bakio was captured, the MV Al-Khaleej, a United Arab Emirates-flagged cargo ship, was briefly hijacked off the Puntland port of Bosaso (some of the attackers were later apprehended after Puntland militia stormed boat; a local court summarily gave seven hijackers and four accomplices life sentences). The International Maritime Bureau recorded a total of thirty-one cases of piracy in international waters off of the one-time Somali Democratic Republic in 2007. So far in 2008, there have been twenty-three attacks. (These figures do not include attacks which go unreported or those which occur within the twelve nautical miles of the coast which constitute the territorial waters once claimed by that state.)

Not only are the attacks increasing in frequency, but they have also evolved into more tactically sophisticated operations involving faster attack craft – some purchased with the proceeds of earlier successful attacks – working at ever-greater distances thanks to GPS and other new technologies. Until five years ago, vessels were advised to stay at least 50 nautical miles away from the Somali coast; a spate of hijackings subsequently led to the doubling of the cautionary exclusion zone. Most recently the recommended distance was 200 nautical miles, but the Playa de Bakio seizure last week illustrates that even that may not be far enough. Furthermore, while the attackers have generally demanded ransoms for newer vessels, as The Guardian‘s Nairobi-based correspondent Xan Rice reported last Sunday, they have also occasionally asked for the temporary use of older boats whose owners do not report them missing. The seized vessels, many of which hail from East Asia, are used for a period as “mother ships” for other attacks before being set free.

The recent attacks are yet another a reminder not only of the threat to international security presented by the vacuum of the former Somali state – Somaliland, as I have repeatedly recalled, being an exception (see my arguments for recognizing the northwestern republic and my outline of a road map towards achieving that objective) – but also of the irresponsible unrealism of current approaches to coping with it. My very first column in this series more than two years ago discussed piracy off the Somali coast. Shortly thereafter, I warned of the uselessness of the self-appointed “Transitional Federal Government” (TFG) of Somalia headed by “President” Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, noting that the fourteenth such interim entity since 1991 was “at best a gang headed by a crook” which could not even control its putative capital. Unfortunately, the only thing that has changed is the ensuing period has been that the situation has worsened: maritime attacks are up and the TFG is even weaker in the face of attacks by both Islamist insurgents and clan rivals who have ratcheted up the pressure in recent weeks (according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than half of the population of Mogadishu has fled the city, including some 7,000 last week alone). The TFG “president” spends most of his time abroad – he was in Washington last week making the rounds, after having spent most of the first part of the year in London (although even I cannot blame him for not wanting to be in Mogadishu these days) – while at home his latest “prime minister,” Nur “Adde” Hassan Hussein, and their 73-member cabinet do their best to spend the international assistance that comes in before they are swept from power. The utter illegitimacy of the TFG regime (see my report last month) even allows the pirates to claim that in fact they are the ones acting in defense of Somalia against alleged “poaching” by foreigners said to encroaching on Somali waters.

Furthermore, the fact that many of the recent attacks come from Puntland, the traditional fief of Abdullahi Yusuf’s Darod clan-family, raises serious questions not only about whether the TFG’s capo is even interested in curbing the problem, but whether many close to him – if not the man himself – might not be directly profiting (although direct evidence of his complicity is hard to come by, in 1998, when he was self-proclaimed president of Puntland, an Italian-owned fishing trawler, the MV Bahari One, was twice seized the region’s militia and brought to Eyl before being ransomed by its owners). Certainly it was rather interesting that this year’s attacks come largely from Darod-dominated Puntland; last year, while Abdullahi Yusuf squared off against his “prime minister” of the time, Ali Mohamed Gedi, a member of Abgaal clan of Mogadishu’s Hawiye clan-family, the attacks centered on that southeastern port city, only to diminish considerably after Gedi was forced out in October.

The problem is not only the inability or unwillingness (or both) of the TFG to do anything about the maritime attacks originating on the Somali coastline, it is the fact that current international law is hopelessly inadequate to cope with the challenge. As I noted in a column last fall, piracy is rather technically defined in international law and hence, “while the jurisdiction of the U.S. and any other civilized nation over [those attacking shipping] is undisputed should the incidents occur in international waters…, legal authority is less clear when they take place within territorial waters, even those of a defunct state.” As a result, as John Burnett, author of Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas, reported in an April 20 New York Times op-ed: “The British government on the other hand, to the incredulity of many in the maritime industry, has taken a curiously pathetic approach to piracy. While the French were flying six of the captured pirates to Paris to face trial, the British Foreign Office issued a directive to the once vaunted Royal Navy not to detain any pirates, because doing so could violate their human rights. British warships patrolling the pirate-infested waters off Somalia were advised that captured pirates could claim asylum in Britain and that those who were returned to Somalia faced beheading for murder or a hand chopped off for theft under Islamic law.” (Burnett was referring to the stunning April 13 Sunday Times report, headlined “Pirates can claim U.K. Asylum,” that first publicized the type of “guidance” which the Royal Navy personnel patrolling off the east coast of Africa were receiving.)

Currently, the United States and France are working together to draft a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing any responsible government to arrest the Somali attackers – even within the collapsed state’s territorial waters – and to prosecute them. While such a measure would go a long way towards both resolving the legal loophole created by the international-recognized TFG’s lack of effective authority and overcoming the scruples of the Whitehall mandarins of British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, it leaves unaddressed the two more basic questions.

First, safeguarding vital shipping lanes like those near the Horn of Africa requires the commitment of adequate forces to actually conduct maritime security operations (MSO) there. On April 22, for example, the Comandante Cigali Fulgosi-class patrol boat Comandante Borsini repulsed an attack on the India-bound Italian-flagged tanker MV Neverland. Currently, Combined Task Force 150 (CTF-150), a multinational coalition naval force which is coordinated with and incorporates elements of the U.S. Navy’s Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet patrols the Gulf of Aden, the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea, and the western parts of the Indian Ocean. Command of CTF-150 rotates between the participating countries which have included, at one point or another, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Pakistan, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Most recently, French Admiral Jean-Louis Kérignard relieved Pakistani Commodore Khan Hasham bin Saddique of command in the task force’s area of operations at the end of February. Eradicating the scourge of maritime attacks, however, will require a more permanent military presence than the ever-shifting ad hoc flotilla which coalition members have contributed. Given the international community’s common interest in keeping these strategic waters open to commerce, an intensive, concerted effort to secure them ought to be considered at the highest levels.

Second, there is little point in addressing the challenge of “piracy” off the Somali coast if one is unwilling to confront the lack of legitimate and effective government which is at root of the problem. As I argued here over a year ago, the international community needs to “formally acknowledge de jure what is already de facto: the desuetude of ‘Somalia’ as a sovereign subject of international law. Unitary Somalia is not only dead, but the carcass of that state has been putrefied; reanimation is no longer in the realm of possible.” To apply Max Weber’s thesis, a government like the TFG that does not even enjoy the monopoly on the legitimate use of force in its own capital – much less elsewhere in the territory it claims as its own – is no government at all. Instead of constantly trying to put the best face on a bad situation, as State Department spokesman Sean McCormack tried to do last week, the emphasis should be shifted to local Somali entities which have taken responsibility for governance in their respective regions. As I argued in the March/April issue of The National Interest, these latter – the Republic of Somaliland, the Puntland region, and others – should be progressively rewarded for achieving benchmarks of progress. In the meantime, an internationally-sanctioned force should assume a protectorate over the former territorial waters, not only policing them and prosecuting violators of the peace, but also managing marine interests such as fisheries for the nascent polities among the Somali.

The problems created by a political and legal vacuum like the one resulting from state failure in Somalia are manifold and complex. Dealing with them will require resolute determination, adequate force, and, above all, an objective appreciation of the realities faced as the responsible governments of the region and the world together confront head-on – as they must – the growing threat to both mariners and their vessels. In today’s globalized world, connected as it is by sea lanes, unruly waters represent as significant a security challenge as any ungoverned lands.