Grappling with the pirate problem
The Strait of Malacca between Malaysia and Indonesia, and the Gulf of Aden, are among the most sensitive choke points in global commerce; trouble is, the stable, the comparatively wealthy Southeast Asian countries that line the Malacca Strait have committed their naval and coastal forces to stamping out hijackings and piracy, but the Gulf of Aden is bordered by poor or dysfunctional countries like Djibouti, Yemen, and particularly Somalia
The problem will not go away. The Saudis chose to negotiate. The Indian Navy opened fire. The U.S. Navy said shipping companies should do more to protect their vessels, and the ship owners said governments should guard the high seas. Everyone wants the barely functioning government of Somalia to control the pirates who sail from its ports to seize the cargo ships and tankers that ply past. Everyone also knows that the government — if this is the right word to describe the group of people calling themselves “government” — of Somalia barley controls a few blocks in downtown Mogadishu.
Los Angeles Times’s Peter Spiegel and Henry Chu write that shipping and security officials say pirates are exploiting the maritime equivalent of what military officers on land call ungovernable spaces: vast, remote regions made lawless because of failed states, mostly out of the reach of international militaries. The pirates find the ships fairly easy to capture, and many shipping companies are willing to pay lucrative ransoms to free hijacked crews and cargo.
Spiegel and Chu write that like the globe’s other piracy hot spot, the narrow Strait of Malacca between Malaysia and Indonesia, the Gulf of Aden is one of the most sensitive choke points in global commerce, a passageway for an array of valuable cargo such as oil, weapons, and manufactured goods shuttling between Europe and Asia. There is a difference, though: The stable, comparatively wealthy Southeast Asian countries that line the Malacca Strait have committed their naval and coastal forces to stamping out hijackings and piracy, but the Gulf of Aden is bordered by poor or dysfunctional countries like Djibouti, Yemen, and particularly Somalia, home to a long-simmering civil war and a central government that barely exists.
“The area is much bigger,” said RAND Corp.’s Peter Chalk, author of a study on piracy and terrorism at sea. “You do not have that kind of regional cooperation now, and you have a huge void of governance in Somalia. All of those factors make dealing with this problem that much more difficult.”
