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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.
Source: People’s Daily Online
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