Gwynne Dyer, a political journalist who specializes in foreign affaris, devotes this week's column to the problem of pirating. In a straightforward and balanced analysis, he dismisses the claim by some we need to wait until Somalia has restored political order at home before we go after the pirates.

        Do not believe the nonsense about how it's too big an ocean area to monitor and control effectively. This is one of the tasks that great-power navies are designed to perform, and they have the right equipment to do it: satellite surveillance, maritime patrol aircraft, and warships with powerful radars and lethal weapons. Moreover, the navies are usually looking for work, since there is not that much call for their services in peacetime.

        The problem is not the reluctance or incompetence of the navies. It is the whole body of international law and human rights legislation that has emerged in recent decades, which has made the traditional remedies for piracy very hard to apply. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, for example, requires a warship to send a boarding party led by an officer onto any suspected pirate vessel to confirm its criminal intent. Until that has been done, the warship may not open fire.


The solution is to send the navies after them, treating pirates, as they did in the 18th century and earlier, as "enemies of mankind."

        Any country could arrest pirates from any other country or countries and try them for their crimes.  If they were captured in battle,
they were even liable to summary execution. And while it is not the 18th century any more, a UN Security Council resolution decreeing universal jurisdiction would certainly transform the situation.

        Suppose that such a declaration were made, and it was then announced that any non-military vessels carrying armed men within 500 kilometres (300 miles) of the Somali coast would be subject to arrest. If they did not submit when challenged, they would be sunk without further discussion. Do that a couple of times (as the Indian warship INS Tabar did last week), and the pirate threat drops away very fast.

        Has the UN got the spine to declare those rules for the Gulf of Aden and the oceans bordering East Africa?  Perhaps. It has just given the Indian navy the right of "hot pursuit" of suspected pirate vessels into Somali territorial waters, but it needs to go a good deal further. This thing can be stopped, with very little loss of life, if we just change the rules of engagement.

Dyer's columns are internationally syndicated and appear in 40 different countries.

 

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