NAIROBI, KENYA — The U.S. military is once again tangling with pirates, intervening in waters off Somalia twice last week to help ships seized by hijackers – and bringing to mind another century’s battles off Africa.
Pirates may have swapped muskets and the Jolly Roger for AK-47s and satellite phones, but the root causes of piracy are little changed from when Thomas Jefferson contemplated how to handle attacks on American merchant ships two centuries ago.
“Instead of swinging from ropes, now it’s boarding vessels with automatic weapons,” said Cyrus Mody, a senior analyst at the International Maritime Bureau, which tracks pirate attacks.
The Barbary pirates of Jefferson’s day took advantage of vast, unpatrolled African territory and leaders who encouraged criminality to prey on American merchant ships.
Writing in 1786, Jefferson urged using “ships and men to fight these pirates,” and the U.S. military did just that, battling the Barbary pirates off the shores of Tripoli.
Today, impoverished and weak governments in Africa have few resources to police on land, much less patrol territorial waters that can stretch a dozen or more miles into the ocean. The lack of security near major shipping lanes has created fertile ground for hijackers, and the U.S. Navy came to the aid of hijacked vessels from North Korea and Japan last week in the waters off Somalia.
“This is a very serious security problem on the African coast. These are not pirates who will remind you of Johnny Depp,” Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill told reporters Friday in Seoul, South Korea.
Armed with heavy weaponry, satellite navigational and communications equipment and an intimate knowledge of local waters, they clamber aboard commercial vessels with ladders and grappling hooks.
Virtually nowhere in Africa does a government wield less authority than in Somalia, a land awash in weapons and displaced people, with Islamic insurgents battling government and allied Ethiopian troops. Some Somali pirates are linked to the clans that have carved the country into armed fiefdoms. They have seized merchant ships, aid vessels and a cruise ship. And their motives aren’t always to loot or seek ransom.
Andrew Mwangura, a Kenya-based program coordinator of the Seafarers Assistance Program, which monitors pirate activity, said a recent attack off Somalia appeared to have been a ship agent’s way of resolving a financial dispute.
Pirate attacks rose dramatically off Somalia in the first nine months of 2007, with 26 reported cases, up from eight during the same period last year, according to International Maritime Bureau figures. Nigeria also suffered 26 attacks so far this year, up from nine previously, the bureau said.
Indonesia remains the world’s worst piracy hot spot, with 37 attacks in the first nine months of 2007 – a slight improvement from 40 in the same period a year earlier, the bureau said.
Noel Choong, head of the International Maritime Bureau’s piracy reporting center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, welcomed U.S. Navy action against pirates in African waters, which he says would otherwise be unpoliced.
“There is no law there. But if you allow foreign navies to patrol the area, it will be a major deterrent,” Choong said.
