Somali Pirates Provoke Rising Power

Pirates have captured the public imagination for centuries, from the exploits of Blackbeard to Hollywood's jaunty Jack Sparrow and the hijacking of the oil tanker Sirius Star just last week. Brisk adventure and jaw-dropping booty – high seas thievery has long been easy to romanticize and far more difficult to denounce for the serious criminal activity it is.

So it goes for the Somali pirates that have wreaked increasing havoc in the Gulf of Aden and along the coast of Somalia in recent months. Piracy in the region has tripled this year, according to the International Maritime Bureau, with over 120 attacks resulting in 40 hijackings, hundreds of hostages and at least seven dead crew. Estimates of Somali pirates' 2008 ransom income range from $30 million to $150 million.

A recent rash of brazen attacks has upped the ante. The Star hijacking took place a full 450 nautical miles from the coast of Kenya, meaning the pirates have put all area shipping routes at risk. Feeling the heat, major commercial shipping firms – including the world's largest carrier, Copenhagen-based AP Moller-Maersk – have begun diverting their liners away from the area, even though the alternative route around the Cape of Good Hope means millions in extra costs. Analysts estimate up to half a billion dollars lost shipping revenue this year.

Yet rapt news reports highlight the pirates' shiny mansions, advanced weaponry and high-tech gadgets. The international community appears baffled, responding with concern but minimal focus. Most agree that a long-term solution involving the establishment of a stable Somali government could take up to a decade. About short-term responses there has been no such consensus.

In a hastily arranged meeting with its neighbors, Egypt tried last week to forge a joint regional anti-piracy strategy, to no avail. The United Nations has authorized asset freezes and travel bans, despite the fact that Somali pirates live off cash ransoms dropped from helicopters. NATO has dispatched several warships, but like the US and the EU, points out that it has no jurisdiction to attack hijacked ships. The possibility of attacking pirate ships is rarely addressed.

The United States has been particularly feeble. Last week the US Navy told shipping companies to ensure their own security by hiring private contractors. Yet over three years ago Navy Admiral Michael Mullin, now Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested a global security partnership to tackle maritime piracy and terrorism. The only result is the US-run Global Fleet Station, a pilot version of which was launched last year in the Caribbean, suggesting the US is either living in the past or watching too many movies.

Contrast all this with the confident clarity coming from India. Ever since Indian shipowners and seafarers' unions outlined the pirate threat – tens of thousands of Indian sailors and more than a third of India's sea trade pass through the region every year – Delhi has moved with laser-like focus. The navy dispatched a warship to the region in mid-October, and its personnel have in recent weeks foiled three attempted hijackings and sunk a pirate mother ship – the only nation to do so. Last week the Indian government authorized hot pursuit of pirate vessels, announced the imminent dispatch of three more warships and a reconnaissance aircraft and urged the United Nations to orchestrate joint action. The International Maritime Bureau has praised India's response and urged the international community to follow it.

India has been facing down piracy since making maritime history with the rescue of a Japanese vessel from pirate hands in the Arabian Sea in 1999. Indian frigates escorted US warships headed to Afghanistan through the pirate-infested Malacca Straits in 2002. And after the devastating 2004 tsunami as well as after Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar earlier this year, Indian ships were first to deliver aid and relief supplies.

Yet last week's missions marked a sea change – the first time the Indian Navy had fired shots in anger so far from home. The world's largest democracy has long sought to transform its economic growth into military and diplomatic might, and is in the process of acquiring the hallmarks of a naval power – aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. These recent maneuvers, 1800 miles from its shores, represent a more aggressive stance, an effort to exert control over the waters from Djibouti to Indonesia – a stretch of open and not-so-open sea through which 20,000 commercial vessels and crucial regional energy supplies pass each year.

Paired with a successful moon landing earlier this month and the recently completed civilian nuclear deal with the US, India's anti-pirate aggression is the act of a rising world power seizing the opportunity on a flood-lit stage. And this new regional sheriff may be inspiring its neighbors. South Korea is hinting it will soon send a warship to the Horn. Japan, too, is considering sending navy vessels. And just last week, Coast Guard officers from 10 countries – including Russia, China and Korea – received anti-piracy lessons from Indian officers in the waters off Chennai.

The most oft-told pirate tale is that of Caesar's bloody revenge: the confident 25-year-old nobleman persuaded the Cilicians to double their ransom demand, which was duly paid; months later, after raising a navy, Caesar returned to capture and crucify all of his captors. Less familiar is what followed, as Cilician pirates tormented the Roman Empire for nearly a decade, until Roman military leader Pompey waged a fierce, months-long campaign to eradicate them.

Today's crisis in the Horn is not dissimilar, and will require much more than a single battle.

“The only solution I see is a coordinated effort by various naval forces,” said Fred Burton, analyst with Stratfor, a U.S.-based risk assessment agency. “The problem is that no single country wants to take the lead.”

In the past couple weeks India has done just that, but its Caesar-like, lone-wolf aggression will not end the threat. A UN Security Council draft resolution that calls upon capable navies to dispatch armed vessels and combat the menace would be a good first step. But whether the international community is ready to follow India's lead and take on Somali piracy with the seriousness it deserves remains to be seen.

-- edited version of this op-ed ran on page 1A of The National, www.thenational.ae, on Nov 24.

Indian sailors strike for action against pirates

DELHI // Tired of paying the heaviest price for piracy, two leading Indian seafarers’ unions went on strike this week. More than 100,000 sailors refuse to work until their government provides an armed escort for all ships passing Somalia and frees the 18 Indian crew members of the hijacked Stolt Valor.

They may be in for a long wait.

“It’s been five weeks and still my husband is stuck on that ship,” said Seema Goyal, wife of Prabhat Kumar Goyal, the captain of the Japanese-owned, Hong Kong-registered Valour. “I worry about him constantly and our three children don’t understand what’s going on.”

Piracy off the coast of Somalia has more than doubled this year, with 74 attacks and counting. As the increasingly bold and well-armed sea bandits have snatched one after another of the cargo-laden ships passing through the Gulf of Aden, Indian citizens at home and at sea have borne the brunt of the hostilities.

“Because they are skilled and speak English, there are more seafarers from India than from any other nation,” said Sunil Nair, spokesman for the National Union of Seafarers of India. He said more than 150,000 Indian sailors work in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. “Because of this, Indians are at more risk as a result of all this piracy than anybody else.”

On Tuesday, the Somali coastguard freed an Indian cargo ship with two Indian crew members that had been hijacked near Socotra Island a few days prior. Last weekend, Somali pirates released the Deyanat after its Iranian owners paid a reduced ransom. Three emaciated Indian crew members arrived in Mumbai after seven weeks in captivity and related tales of food shortages, constant death threats and drug-addicted captors. And in Salaya, a Gujarati port town, locals are waiting to hear from three ships carrying 15 local seamen who lost radio contact from the region this week.

Mr Nair estimates that 17 of the 30 ships hijacked near Somalia this year have had Indian crew members.

One high-profile exception: there are no Indian sailors among the 20-member crew of the Faina, a tank-laden Ukrainian vessel captured a few weeks ago.

On Sept 15, about 35 pirates stormed aboard the Valor, a chemical tanker, off the coast of Yemen. The hijackers stripped the 22-member crew and confined them to the bridge, according to crew members who have been in phone contact. More than five weeks later, progress has been minimal, even as the ransom demand has dipped from US$6 million (Dh22m) to $2m.

Critics, such as the Hindustan Times, a popular national daily, said Delhi has been “pussyfooting on the issue”. That, however, may not be the case.

“In reality, there’s little the government can do,” said Roger Middleton, senior fellow at Chatham House, a London-based think tank, and author of a piracy study released this month. Mr Middleton said military force rarely works and that ransom ultimately resolves the majority of these incidents.

“It’s very possible that the Indian government is trying very hard to help negotiations behind the scenes,” he said. “We can’t know for sure, and beyond that, they can’t do much other than monitor the situation.”

A K Antony, the Indian defence minister, has repeatedly said India is unable to mount a military attack because it has no maritime agreement with Somalia – a point reiterated on Tuesday by the Somali ambassador to India. In the case of the Stolt Valor, armed aggression would be doubly risky because of the 24,000 tonnes of chemicals in the hull. And responsibility for hijacked ships falls first to the owner nation, then to the country where the ship is registered and finally to the country in whose waters the incident occurs.

“In cases such as this, it is normal for negotiations to take place between the proprietors of the ship and the hijackers themselves,” said Nagma Mullick, spokesman for the ministry of external affairs. “That’s what’s been happening here and our embassy has been working to facilitate those negotiations.”

On Saturday, Pranab Mukherjee, the Indian foreign minister, reassured the captive sailors’ families that their loved ones would return home safely.

That same day India rushed a warship to the Gulf of Aden to protect Indian shipping interests in the region. It is the first time an Indian Navy vessel has been authorised to patrol international waters, a move the navy said was not incident-specific. The patrol comes more than three weeks after the navy requested authorisation to pursue and use force against the Stolt Valor hijackers, but was refused.

Somalia’s caretaker government, battling an Islamist insurgency, lacks the resources to combat the problem. Thus, a flurry of hijackings along the coast has in recent weeks attracted a clutch of foreign military vessels. Still the problem festers. The pirates are holding 10 ships and nearly 200 crew. Some of the $20m to $30m paid to pirates in ransom this year, according to Chatham House, is funding Somalia’s Islamist insurgency and possibly wending its way into international terror networks.

“Operating in an area full of rich pickings and with enormous rewards on offer seems likely to point to a trajectory of increasing ruthlessness,” Mr Middleton wrote. “It is likely to be only a matter of time before more people are killed.”

Such fears may be strongest on the subcontinent, where security concerns have led to the sailors’ strike. When Mr Goyal, the captain of the Valour, spoke to his wife last week, he said the pirates were becoming “increasingly hostile."

-- this story published in The National, www.thenational.ae, on October 24

In Conflict Zones, Aid Gets Defensive

By David Lepeska

The end of humanitarian innocence arrived with a bang on August 19, 2003, when a truck bomb gutted the United Nations’ Baghdad headquarters, killing 22 staffers and wounding more than 120. There had been gruesome and deadly attacks on aid efforts in the past, but none had been so devastating and pointedly directed. The blast tore off the building’s façade, exposing its guts to the dusty city. Parts of desks, chairs, and bodies were strewn about the grounds of what had so recently been the Canal Hotel.

Among the dead were Special Representative and highly regarded career humanitarian Sergio Vieira de Mello and a host of selfless and determined young Arabs. Then-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said the attack “brought us face to face with danger in a new and more intimidating form.” It also removed any lingering doubt about the sanctity of the humanitarian space and irrevocably altered the aid security dynamic.

Even so, the Baghdad bombing was just an exclamation point in a steadily building drumbeat. Major attacks on aid workers more than doubled from 1999 to 2005, according to a joint study by the British government-supported Overseas Development Institute and New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. Even adjusted for a considerable increase of field workers over that span, the incidence of attacks per 10,000 workers rose more than 50 percent. The report, “Providing Aid in Insecure Environments,” also found that aid workers were attacked more for political than economic reasons. “The perception that aid workers are associated with political processes clearly exists in the minds of local belligerents,” the authors state.

As the line between humanitarian and military activity has blurred aid worker security has eroded along with neutrality, jolting humanitarian actors into action. Some of their security decisions have raised ethical questions about equal treatment for all national and international staff. This report dissects what international development organizations have done to adapt, which strategies have been most successful, and what still needs to be done.

Shifting Policy, Coordinating Security

Within weeks of the Baghdad bombing, the United Nations pulled 600 staffers out of Iraq and assumed a lower international profile, as did the International Committee of the Red Cross. Their share of attack victims has decreased considerably in the past five years, the aid worker security report found, but progress towards entrenching adequate security in policy and planning has been fitful.

On the plus side, the U.N. and Interaction, a consortium of U.S.-based NGO’s, have each created Minimum Operating Security Standards, which have been broadly mandated and widely applauded. Furthermore, in 2006 the U.N. joined together with a network of non-governmental organizations to enact a security framework called Saving Lives Together.

Interaction Security Coordinator John Schafer related a tale of the project’s effectiveness. When the Democratic Republic of Congo erupted in violence this past summer a U.S. citizen found himself stuck alone in his compound after local staff left to take care of their families. “Fighting was continuing the whole time,” recalled Mr. Schafer. “It was right outside his gate – there were bodies in the street.”

The American field worker called the U.S. embassy, which told him there was nothing they could do as their doors had already been locked. He called the local U.N. peacekeeping mission, which told him they didn’t know where he was. Finally he called his own headquarters, which in turn contacted Mr. Schafer, who called the head of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations at U.N. Headquarters in New York and gave him the field worker’s position. The U.N. relayed the American’s position back to the field and UNDPKO quickly mounted a rescue mission and saved the worker.

The entire process took six hours, during which Schafer kept up the aid worker’s spirits via Skype chat and used Google maps to pinpoint his location. Mr. Schafer was pleased with the result but acknowledged that Saving Lives Together was more Plan B than anything else. “We can talk all we want about the importance of having security plans on the ground but when the actual emergency hits rarely is it within the parameters of what we planned,” he said. “That’s why it’s important to have a little bit of flexibility in our plans.”

Other efforts have been less successful. As part of the post-Baghdad bombing shake-up the U.N. created the Department for Safety and Security in 2004, which replaced the Security Coordination Office, established in 1988. The new department was given higher-level leadership, additional resources, and tasked to create a new and innovative vision for defining, assessing, and enhancing security for its own and other humanitarian operatives.
Reports of UNDSS have been unfavorable. “Many complain that operation restrictions remain the principal security strategy used by the U.N. in many field-settings,” says the ODI study, adding that the department suffered “from considerable distrust among international NGOs, both in terms of capability and intent.”

Programmers and policymakers have long wanted a database in which to report, record and analyze attack incidents and security failings. Used universally, such a tool would offer a wealth of invaluable security and planning information. But initiatives such as UNDSS’ Security Incident Reporting Service have fallen short of expectations. “It looked like we were about to get going with this universal shared database of incidence and analysis but it’s just completely stalled,” Abby Stoddard, senior fellow at the Center on International Cooperation and the ODI report’s lead author, said in an interview. “It hasn’t gotten up and running, either at the U.N. or through NGOs.”

Nationals in Harm’s Way, Ex-Pats Far Away

Inevitably, the burden has fallen to international NGOs to provide field security, which, according to the industry bible, Koenraad Van Brabant’s Operation Security Management in Violent Environments, is marked by three elements: protection, deterrence and acceptance. The first means reducing vulnerability, the second involves presenting a counter-threat, and the last is about cultivating positive relationships with locals.

For example, Somalia is one of the world’s most high-risk humanitarian environments. An ODI backgrounder advocated community-based strategies yet noted that such practices are often ineffective because “local authorities do not accept national staff members, but want to interact directly with leading expatriate staff.” And with only a few locations accessible for internationals and a heavy reliance on nationals, such interactions seem unlikely anytime soon.

In a perfect world strategies would stress acceptance, but growing security concerns often render acceptance-heavy strategies too costly and difficult to implement. In such areas some aid groups take extreme steps, such as removing all identity markers from facilities, staff, and vehicles to maintain an ultra low-profile. Others take the opposite tack, arming staffers and fortifying offices or hiring military protection. “Both of these approaches can compromise security,” write Ms. Stoddard et al. “Once an organization has confined its staff to a compound, accepted military protection or adopted clandestine programming, its access to security information becomes extremely limited.”

In high danger zones most actors have kept the aid flowing by localizing their efforts. “The way they’ve done this is through remote management, where they will have their national staff or other national organizations that they’ve subcontracted to, or private contractors, do the work,” Ms. Stoddard said in an interview. “The plus side of that is more aid getting to more people because they’re operating.”

Reliance on national staff in the most dangerous and distant aid environments is not new. Oxfam used what some called “long-arm programming” over 50 years ago in India and others employed similar techniques in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Afghanistan throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In theory, such practices decrease risk. But Ms. Stoddard says these practices mean less efficient delivery, a loss of strategic focus, and increased corruption and accountability concerns.

Yet remote management has boomed. Overall, field-based international staff dropped 20 percent from 1997 to 2005, and some of the bigger humanitarian organizations went much further: international field staff for the U.N., CARE and World Vision hovers around three percent today. Most local staff, or foreign nationals, work without adequate training, resources and support. “It’s very uncommon that you would leave them your radios, that you would give them training, that you would give them any of the security assets that you would have,” said Ms. Stoddard.

As a result, national staffers have been left twisting in ever more dangerous winds. While total aid worker victims rose from 66 in 1999 to 211 in 2006, the number of international victims dropped while national victims jumped four-fold. Moreover, of 83 aid workers killed in 2006, 78 (94 percent) were nationals. “What they are doing is abdicating their responsibility for protecting people that work for them,” said Mr. Schafer, pointing out that life insurance payments are considerably lower for a national worker.

Ms. Stoddard explained some of the reasoning behind remote management. “These are local organizations that are doing this work anyway,” she said. “It’s employment for one thing but also they have incentive to help and to partner with internationals… The nationals haven’t really thought through what it means ethically. They’re more concerned with, ‘we want to keep the aid flowing.’”

Protecting Your Own

Although remote management is problematic, it does do precisely that. And because building local capacity has long been a key goal of humanitarian work there is little debate about the utility of nationalizing aid and relief. It simply has to be done better. “The true definition of security is providing it for the entire community,” said Mr. Shafer, referring to internationals and nationals as well as their friends and family. “There can’t just be an evacuation plan only for your ex-pats.”

Ms. Stoddard concurred. “There needs to be some way of assessing what risk you’ll be putting these nationals in,” she said. “They have different vulnerabilities than international staff – that has to be part of your risk assessment. I haven’t seen any evidence that people are now looking at their national staff and coming up with better remote management strategies.”

Conor Foley, a veteran aid worker writing a book about humanitarian aid, said many NGOs were increasing training and resources but that these improvements had been generally ineffective. “Security has become a buzzword,” he said. “But it’s been a bit un-thought out.”

Recently, a major NGO bid on a $300 million USAID project in Pakistan without consulting their security director about the budgeting. “The problem is most people don’t have the systems in place to even make educated decisions on what is acceptable and unacceptable risk for their organization,” Mr. Schafer said. “They don’t have a management system for their security program.”

Thus, many key questions are left unanswered. What is the line of acceptable risk, for instance, and how do you draw it? How much will aid delivery cost you in a higher threshold of risk? What security info are you gathering to quantify the security situation, make programming decisions and put together an operational plan? And if you pull out, how do you assess risk and game plan for nationals, as opposed to internationals?

Because the security risks are not assessed beforehand there’s no funding leeway in the event of a worsening security situation. “First and foremost the NGO’s have to develop systems internal to their organizations,” said Mr. Schafer. Once funding had been tied into security, he added, donors would fall in line.

One hopes they appreciate the urgency. In late October, CARE International’s Battagram, Pakistan compound was riddled with machine-gun fire mere hours after the office of a nearby NGO was bombed, wounding eight Pakistanis. Unknown gunmen attacked and shot dead two Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development staff in Uganda’s Amuru district on Halloween.

In late November unidentified gunmen shot up a Medecins sans Frontieres car in south Sudan, killing four. And in early December top U.N. aid official John Holmes visited Somalia, the world’s most high-risk humanitarian environment. “It is very hard for aid agencies to operate in Somalia because of the general security situation,” Holmes told reporters. He pointed out frequent checkpoints, at which aid workers were harassed and halted, and sharply curbed operations overall. “We need to do more.”

Indeed, multilaterals, aid groups, and donors need to better adapt to a world in which humanitarians wear bullseyes and another Baghdad bombing constantly looms. Adapt, that is, or continue losing ground.

-- posted on devex.com on 17 March 2008