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Piracy to increase
(Sep  11  2009)

Piracy is likely to increase again in the Gulf of Aden/off Somalia, once the current Monsoon season is over, warned a leading naval officer.

Capt Georges van Aalst of EUNAVFOR told the ICS conference that the pirates were building up their technical expertise.

He also said that as many as 30 warships were patrolling the Gulf of Aden/Somalia areas at any one time and warned that this situation could last for another five or six years.

He urged companies and vessels to register with MSCHOA (www.mschoa.org) before transiting either area.

In the Gulf of Aden, a Group Transit Theory project has been set up whereby ships gather in convoys at set speeds relating to different ship types, depending on the number of naval units available.

Kim Hall of the Center for Naval Analysis warned that thus far, there were too few countries willing to prosecute the pirates and that many navies had different rules of engagement, which caused problems.

She called for an improved security and defensive efforts by the shipping industry, a continued naval presence albeit in a large area and the continued development of an international framework for resolving piracy cases.

As for tracking the ‘mother ships’, the conference was told that many dhows had been taken and used as ‘mother ships’, which made this task almost impossible.

Cash ransoms paid were also proving to be almost impossible to trace and the general consensus of opinion was that the Yemen could soon be a pirate base.

ICS' Spyros Polemis said along with other conference delegates that this was just skirting the problem as the answer was political. “We are treating the symptons, but not the cause,” the conference was told.

Polemis said that some ICS members were using armed guards and would not go back to not using them.

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