Why does Somali piracy run so rampant?

Somali piracy has turned increasingly rampant day by day since this April set in, and pirates hijacked the Maersk Alabama, the sixth ship they had attacked in the last week.

Although the American ship, the Maersk Alabama, arrived in the port of Mombasa with the 19 remaining crew members on Saturday, April 11, its skipper Richard Philips remained held hostage by pirates till Sunday. Talks to free Philips had gone on all day last Saturday with local clan elders, reported the United Press International (UPI). And the U.S. Navy later reportedly said that Philips was freed at 7:10 P.M. local time, after US Navy snipers killed three pirates who had been holding the American merchant skipper on a lifeboat at the night of April 12, thus putting an end to the five-day high seas hostage drama on Easter Sunday.

To date, waves of piracy have been running wild and rampant in the Gulf of Eden and Somali waters versus joined efforts of about 30 warships from around the world in an anti-pirate taskforce operation in the sea off Somalia. There are, among others, the following main reasons:

First of all, pirates have extended the sphere of their actions or movement. Andrew Mwangura, the East Africa Coordinator of Seafarers’ Assistance Program, said that the 17,000-tonne Maersk, a U.S.-flagged and Danish-owned container, was hijacked about 650 km off the war-ravaged Somali capital Mogadishu. Somali sea piracy is so far said to have reached out to an area of 2.6 million square km or 1 million square miles off Somalia, with an obvious trend of going further eastward and southward.

Somali pirates seized a 2,000-tonne German container vessel on April 4, some 740 km or 400 nautical miles off the southern Somali port of Kismayo, whereas the hijacking of a Taiwanese ship approximately 1,300 km off Somalia on April 6 is the latest in a series of attacks on the Indian Ocean.

Secondly, there is stepped up collaboration or an exchange of information among the pirate groups. These pirate groups cut across Somali clan lines and tend to live along the coastline with a close link or information sharing between them and the extremist al-Shahab group, which claims that it has links to al-Qaeda.

Somalia is reportedly alive with anywhere from 25 to 30 pirate forces of varying sizes, and they had gone so far to set up the action committee in December 2008 to expand their scope of action and reinforce their coordination in face of joint escort operations of the international community.

Thirdly, Somali pirates have retooled or upgraded their weaponry equipment. They usually use such weapons as rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank rockets and speedboats. But they are currently armed with state-of-the-art automatic weapons. The four pirates, who had taken Skipper Philips into hostage, were even seen communicating with their ringleader and other pirate vessels by satellite phones, local officials said.

United Nations officials estimate that Somali pirates had been paid nearly 100 million US dollars of ransom in the year 2008 alone, and they took a great slice of it for use in the weaponry purchase. In January this year, security forces in northwest Somalis seized nearly 10 small one-time use anti-aircraft missile launchers and arrested two suspects in connection with the illegal weapons in Hargeisa, capital of the state.

The Somali pirates armed with sophisticated weapons feel secure and even fearless and, therefore, they demand much more money from the seizure of hostages. Today, they are still holding 14 ships and 260 crew members. At the night of April 9, according to the office of the French president, the French navy freed a sailboat seized off Somalia in the previous week, but one of the hostages died in an exchange of fire, while four other captives were freed and two pirates killed.

As a matter of course, the thing most crucial nowadays is that there is still “soil” for pirates to “breed” and survive in Somalia, and the settlement of piracy in the southern Somali waters, acknowledged some analysts or critics, hinges largely on the improvement of domestic political situation inside Somalia.

By People’s Daily Online and contributed by Li Xuejiang and Pei Guangjiang, PD resident reporters respectively in the U.S. and South Africa