from todays New York Times Op-ed. I can't imagine this goes over well with the sailors of the Royal Navy.
"ON April 11, French commandos went in with guns blazing and captured a gang of pirates who days earlier had hijacked a luxury cruise ship, the Ponant, and held the crew for ransom. This was the French solution to a crime wave that has threatened international shipping off Somalia; those of us who have been on the business end of a pirate?s gun can only applaud their action.
The British government on the other hand, to the incredulity of many in the maritime industry, has taken a curiously pathetic approach to piracy. While the French were flying six of the captured pirates to Paris to face trial, the British Foreign Office issued a directive to the once vaunted Royal Navy not to detain any pirates, because doing so could violate their human rights. British warships patrolling the pirate-infested waters off Somalia were advised that captured pirates could claim asylum in Britain and that those who were returned to Somalia faced beheading for murder or a hand chopped off for theft under Islamic law.
A violation of human rights? In 2007, 433 crew members were either taken hostage, assaulted, injured or killed by pirates. Three seafarers are still missing and presumed dead. According to the International Maritime Bureau, the anti-piracy watchdog of the International Chamber of Commerce, over the past 10 years 3,200 seafarers have been kidnapped, 500 injured and 160 killed.
Modern-day pirates are not like Errol Flynn or Johnny Depp swinging through the rigging, but well-armed militiamen equipped with rocket-propelled grenades, assault rifles, global positioning systems and high-speed motorboats who have long terrorized the shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden and literally gotten away with murder. During the week before the French raid, half the pirate attacks in the world occurred in the gulf, a strategic waterway that leads into the Red Sea and thus to the Suez Canal and Europe. Two weeks before the attack on the Ponant, a huge crude-oil carrier ? a monster of a ship as long as the Chrysler Building is tall ? en route to the Middle East was attacked by pirates firing automatic weapons. The vessel managed to flee.
The Ponant was not the first cruise ship attacked off Somalia. In November 2005, the American ship Seabourn Spirit was attacked. The quick action of the master and the use of a Long-Range Acoustic Device, a sonic weapon that can blow out eardrums, drove off the pirates (an unexploded rocket-propelled grenade, however, did embed itself in the stateroom of a passenger). The Ponant will not be the last cruise ship to be attacked; undefended passenger vessels are among the ships that are most vulnerable to pirates (the Ponant, for example, has a water-hugging swim platform that made it easy to board).
Hijacking a ship and kidnapping the crew for ransom is a lucrative business in Somalia. It is less risky than robbing a bank and more profitable than pulling up half-empty fishing nets. Two weeks before the Ponant was captured, Somali pirates released the British-Irish-Russian crew of an ice-breaking tug traveling from Russia to Singapore who had spent 47 days in captivity. The captain had surrendered his vessel after the wheelhouse windows were blown out by gunshots. The ship owner paid a ransom of about $700,000. The French were reported to have paid $2 million for release of the 30 crew members of the Ponant before their military took action.
This is not a problem without a solution. Just a few years ago, piracy was out of control in the Malacca Strait, the waterway through which 80 percent of crude oil to Japan and China is shipped. But the recent combined efforts of the region?s littoral states ? Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore ? have nearly eliminated piracy in the strait. The French are hoping that a concerted international effort off Somalia will have similar success.
France is also lobbying the United Nations Security Council to adopt an international anti-piracy law. Jean-David Levitte, the top diplomatic adviser to President Nicolas Sarkozy, said his government hoped that the organization would consider the creation of an international military force ?to deal with this plague.? Once we could have expected the British to lead such an effort; now we don?t even know if they will join it.
The British fear of breaching the human rights of pirates has not gone down well in the maritime community. Andrew Linington, the spokesman for Nautilus, a British-Dutch seafarers trade union, has called the Foreign Office?s policy ?a get out of jail card? for pirates.
?We despair,? Mr. Linington told me. ?We are meant to be a major maritime country. The U.K. is heavily dependent on maritime trade ? 95 percent of trade comes and goes by sea. Yet the Foreign Office has its head in the sand. It is just wishing the problem would go away.?
The British attitude has come a long way since the days when pirates were chained to pilings at Wapping and left there until the tidal water of the Thames ebbed and flowed over the bodies three times. So much for Britannia ruling the waves."
"ON April 11, French commandos went in with guns blazing and captured a gang of pirates who days earlier had hijacked a luxury cruise ship, the Ponant, and held the crew for ransom. This was the French solution to a crime wave that has threatened international shipping off Somalia; those of us who have been on the business end of a pirate?s gun can only applaud their action.
The British government on the other hand, to the incredulity of many in the maritime industry, has taken a curiously pathetic approach to piracy. While the French were flying six of the captured pirates to Paris to face trial, the British Foreign Office issued a directive to the once vaunted Royal Navy not to detain any pirates, because doing so could violate their human rights. British warships patrolling the pirate-infested waters off Somalia were advised that captured pirates could claim asylum in Britain and that those who were returned to Somalia faced beheading for murder or a hand chopped off for theft under Islamic law.
A violation of human rights? In 2007, 433 crew members were either taken hostage, assaulted, injured or killed by pirates. Three seafarers are still missing and presumed dead. According to the International Maritime Bureau, the anti-piracy watchdog of the International Chamber of Commerce, over the past 10 years 3,200 seafarers have been kidnapped, 500 injured and 160 killed.
Modern-day pirates are not like Errol Flynn or Johnny Depp swinging through the rigging, but well-armed militiamen equipped with rocket-propelled grenades, assault rifles, global positioning systems and high-speed motorboats who have long terrorized the shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden and literally gotten away with murder. During the week before the French raid, half the pirate attacks in the world occurred in the gulf, a strategic waterway that leads into the Red Sea and thus to the Suez Canal and Europe. Two weeks before the attack on the Ponant, a huge crude-oil carrier ? a monster of a ship as long as the Chrysler Building is tall ? en route to the Middle East was attacked by pirates firing automatic weapons. The vessel managed to flee.
The Ponant was not the first cruise ship attacked off Somalia. In November 2005, the American ship Seabourn Spirit was attacked. The quick action of the master and the use of a Long-Range Acoustic Device, a sonic weapon that can blow out eardrums, drove off the pirates (an unexploded rocket-propelled grenade, however, did embed itself in the stateroom of a passenger). The Ponant will not be the last cruise ship to be attacked; undefended passenger vessels are among the ships that are most vulnerable to pirates (the Ponant, for example, has a water-hugging swim platform that made it easy to board).
Hijacking a ship and kidnapping the crew for ransom is a lucrative business in Somalia. It is less risky than robbing a bank and more profitable than pulling up half-empty fishing nets. Two weeks before the Ponant was captured, Somali pirates released the British-Irish-Russian crew of an ice-breaking tug traveling from Russia to Singapore who had spent 47 days in captivity. The captain had surrendered his vessel after the wheelhouse windows were blown out by gunshots. The ship owner paid a ransom of about $700,000. The French were reported to have paid $2 million for release of the 30 crew members of the Ponant before their military took action.
This is not a problem without a solution. Just a few years ago, piracy was out of control in the Malacca Strait, the waterway through which 80 percent of crude oil to Japan and China is shipped. But the recent combined efforts of the region?s littoral states ? Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore ? have nearly eliminated piracy in the strait. The French are hoping that a concerted international effort off Somalia will have similar success.
France is also lobbying the United Nations Security Council to adopt an international anti-piracy law. Jean-David Levitte, the top diplomatic adviser to President Nicolas Sarkozy, said his government hoped that the organization would consider the creation of an international military force ?to deal with this plague.? Once we could have expected the British to lead such an effort; now we don?t even know if they will join it.
The British fear of breaching the human rights of pirates has not gone down well in the maritime community. Andrew Linington, the spokesman for Nautilus, a British-Dutch seafarers trade union, has called the Foreign Office?s policy ?a get out of jail card? for pirates.
?We despair,? Mr. Linington told me. ?We are meant to be a major maritime country. The U.K. is heavily dependent on maritime trade ? 95 percent of trade comes and goes by sea. Yet the Foreign Office has its head in the sand. It is just wishing the problem would go away.?
The British attitude has come a long way since the days when pirates were chained to pilings at Wapping and left there until the tidal water of the Thames ebbed and flowed over the bodies three times. So much for Britannia ruling the waves."
