Clinton announces U.S. anti-piracy initiative

Clinton announces U.S. anti-piracy initiative    U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unveiled plans Wednesday to step up the response for fighting piracy off the coast of Somalia as the United States develops a long-term strategy for maritime security in the region.
   Clinton made her remarks amid escalating attacks against merchant shipping including the U.S.-flag Maersk Alabama and the Liberty Sun.
   “We have to act swiftly and decisively to combat this threat.” Clinton said. “These pirates are criminals. They are armed gangs on the sea. And those plotting attacks must be stopped, and those who have carried them out must be brought to justice.'
   Analysts say the ultimate solution to piracy is not at sea, but on land. Stabilizing the lawless nation will require strong international assistance for a central government with popular support, economic development and viable employment opportunities. The current transitional government is too isolated and powerless to apprehend the pirates.
   On Friday, an interagency group from departments of State, Defense, Justice, Transportation, and Homeland Security will meet with members of the intelligence community to review recent events and potential responses.

Clinton

   Clinton also announced she has directed a State Department team to work with shippers and the insurance industry to address gaps in their self-defense measures.
   'Defending against piracy must be the joint responsibility of governments and the shipping industry,' she added. 'But let me underscore this point: The United States does not make concessions or ransom payments to pirates.'
   On the multilateral front, Clinton called for immediate meetings with the members of the 30-nation International Contact Group on Piracy to develop an expanded multinational naval response against the pirates.
   There are about 18 naval warships providing escorts and patrolling a 1 million-square-mile area in the Gulf and Indian Ocean. NATO has seven ships in the area primarily to protect food aid. The European Union has a small contingent on a one-year mission and the United States is leading a small task force of ships. Several other nations — India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia — have single vessels in the area, while Japan and China have two and three vessels, respectively. Russia has also rotated a number of naval ships to the waters off Somalia. In most cases, these other countries are operating on their own to protect ships flying under their flags or with cargo or crew ties to the homelands.
      She urged nations to take responsibility for prosecuting and imprisoning captured pirates, develop strategies to secure the release of ships and crews held by Somali pirates, and explore ways to track and freeze pirate assets in order to eliminate the financial rewards of hijacking at sea.
   Targeting pirate finances would follow similar techniques used against terrorists and drug kingpins, and could include cracking down on the companies that do business with pirates, she said at the State Department.
   The legal ambiguity of piracy has constrained law enforcement efforts because many governments do not want the headache of a complex prosecution and dealing with what could turn out to be stateless persons. Piracy is punishable on the high seas, but international law recognizes a 200-mile exclusive economic zone beyond a nation's shores that throws into question where piracy laws apply, according to Ruth Wedgewood, a professor of law and diplomacy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
   Also, countries are reluctant to capture pirates without a clear idea of how to return them home upon completion of their sentence when international consensus appears to agree that prisoners can't be repatriated to places where they are risk of being abused.
   Some militaries that have made arrests at sea have dropped pirates off in Kenya for prosecution, but Kenya has overcrowded jails, a poorly defined criminal code and lax security that could result in pirates escaping detention, Wedgewood said Tuesday on KCRW's nationally syndicated public radio program 'To the Point.'
   'So the new legal invention is called a 'ship rider' in which you put a Kenyan on board to actually take the arrest rather than have the moral and legal problems of handing over someone to another country,' she said.
   'But Kenya made very clear it doesn't want to be a dumping ground for all the pirates in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden,' noted David Shinn, professor of international affairs at George Washington University and a former ambassador to Ethiopia. 'So there's going to be a point at which Kenya says, 'it's really not our job to take care of all of these people'. A few have been prosecuted in France. The U.S. ought to prosecute the one pirate it now has in custody' from the Maersk Alabama attack.'
   The International Criminal Court could alleviate the situation by agreeing to take piracy under its jurisdiction when the treaty outlining its mandate is revisited in 2010, Wedgewood said.
   Another focus of U.S. efforts will be on nation-building. Clinton said she is sending an envoy to attend a conference on Somali peacekeeping and development that begins on April 23 in Brussels, Belgium.
   The meeting is designed to build law enforcement capacity in Somalia that can go after pirate organizations and provide incentives for young men there to go into other lines of work.
   U.S. diplomats will also contact officials in the Somali Transitional Federal Government as well as regional leaders in Puntland to take action against pirates operating from bases in their territory.
   The discussions are intended to gauge what assistance could help the leaders develop the law enforcement capacity necessary to shut down the pirates.
   'We have a pretty good idea where the land bases are, and we want to know what the Somali government, what tribal leaders who perhaps would not like to have the international community bearing down on them, would be willing to do to rid their territory of these pirate bases,' Clinton said.
   Asked whether the international anti-piracy efforts are too focused on military rather than economic development issues, Clinton said, 'You've got to put out the fire before you can rebuild the house. And right now, we have a fire raging.'
   Although piracy has captured world attention in recent weeks, the problem is relatively contained compared to the amount of commercial traffic through the area.
   Last year, more than 20,000 ships transited the Gulf of Aden, of which 100 were attacked and 40 successfully hijacked. More than 50 ships per day transit the Gulf of Aden without incident.
   'The critical mass of hijackings and kidnappings has risen dramatically, in part because the pirates got better vessels and could go further out to sea and they began to use mother ships and they got more sophisticated. And so people who were told stay away from the shore of Somalia, they did, and then they would be accosted 300 miles off the shore,' Clinton said.
   'So I think part of what you're seeing now is a natural reaction to a problem that we did address through the UN, through bringing together the international community, having navies from Japan and China and Korea and Europe and the United States and India all patrolling that water. So we've certainly deterred attacks, but the attacks have continued.
   'I think the attack on a U.S.-flagged vessel and our naval response also convinced people that we needed to take action, because the modus operandi for a lot of countries and shipping companies up until now has been, O.K., they hijacked the ship, they get it into port, nobody's harmed, we pay a ransom, we've done a business calculation so that's the way it is. And I think now people are starting to say wait a minute, you let that happen and you're going to just buy more and more problems for yourself. And so the moment has arrived for us to take a hard look at what we have done that worked and what didn't work,' Clinton said.
      Peter Chalk, senior analyst dealing with transnational security at the RAND Corp., cautioned against taking military action against pirate bases on shore because the likely civilian damage will stir up nationalist sentiment and accusations among Islamic radicals that the United States is intent on killing innocent Muslims.
   'I think you could dangerously exacerbate the situation by those measures,' he said on 'To the Point.'
   Shinn agreed on the same program that sending in commandoes to hunt down pirates would backfire.
   'You'll make a lot of mistakes in the process of trying to identify the pirates, I don't think the intelligence is that good,' he said.
   'I think there would be collateral damage. You would put at risk the lives of those hostages that are still in these pirate dens. I think it would be a formidable task and one that would not be worth the risk.
   Guests on the show recommended several short-term measures to counter the piracy scourge.
   'I think you can take stronger measures in the international waters,' said Shinn, the deputy director of Somalia task force in 1992-1993. 'In fact, I would consider in those instances where you have incontrovertible intelligence that a mother ship is located at some point in the Indian Ocean to take measures to sink that mother ship, perhaps telling everyone onboard to abandon ship before you do. I think that kind of action will get the point across.'
   Commercial shipping operators are reluctant to arm their crews because of concerns they would be outgunned by pirates who could raise their level of violence, many flag state prohibitions against weapons, higher insurance premiums and the prospect they could be subject to national weapons bans or inspections in many ports of call. Instead, most prefer non-lethal defenses such as water cannons, barbed wire, greasing the sides, increased lookouts, evasive navigation tactics, acoustic sound devices and routing slower, low-freeboard vessels around Africa rather than through the Suez Canal.
   Merchant shipping companies should do more to re-route those types of vulnerable vessels, said Derek Reverson, a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College in Rhode Island.
   He said African navies and coast guards, especially those of Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa and Madagascar, are noticeably absent from the naval response and need to be involved if the counter-piracy effort is to be sustained.
   But there aren't many African navies other than South Africa and Egypt that have the capacity to play a useful role, Shinn responded.
   The international community, he added, should also try and address the illegal fishing activity by European and Asian trawlers, some of whom used techniques like dynamiting and drift nets, which diminished fish stocks and led many Somali fishermen to lose their livelihoods. ' Eric Kulisch and Chris Dupin