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On a Vital Route, a Boom in Piracy
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The U.S. 5th Fleet in Bahrain on Monday urged the private shipping industry to do more itself against the pirates. That would include shippers considering hiring private armed security escorts, Winstanley said.
Ultimately, "the root cause is ashore, in Somalia, and there's obviously a limit as to what influence navies or the commercial shipping sector can have about that," Winstanley said.
Somalia has been without a functioning government since 1992, and the country is in the hands of rival armed clans. Since 1993, when 18 U.S. servicemen died capturing two Somali clan leaders, the West has largely regarded Somalia as a graveyard for any Western military missions to restore order.
In Yemen, across the Gulf of Aden from Somalia, a regional commander of Yemen's five-year-old coast guard thought of the big weapons and fast ships the Somali pirates were amassing with their millions of dollars in ransom, and he worried.
"The French know how to deal with them, killing one of them. This is very nice," said Lotf al-Baraty, chief of the Yemeni coast guard's Gulf of Aden region.
Yemen has 1,200 coast guard personnel in the Gulf of Aden but no vessel longer than about 75 feet.
Like scores of private and military commanders on duty at any one time in the Gulf of Aden, Baraty has listened helplessly to distress signals from hijackings in progress. Since it would take any Yemeni ship hours to reach the scene, "we can do nothing," Baraty said.
On patrol in the Gulf of Aden, 20-year-old Ahmed al-Gunaid, commanding officer of a Yemeni coast guard vessel, kept a watchful eye on passing ships. Fretful ship captains in the vicinity called repeatedly, asking Gunaid's crew to check out unknown vessels around them.
In a year of patrolling, Gunaid said, he had been close enough to respond to a distress call only once, when the pirates attacked a Japanese oil tanker. But by the time his ship reached the tanker, the pirates had been gone for two hours.
That was just as well, Gunaid said toward the end of the day's patrol, as the sinking sun cut a white path across the Gulf of Aden. "I know if I'm in combat with them . . . three or four RPGs, and I'm done."
