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By Root 887 0

possible—as Boyah and his colleagues have suggested to me—that the threat is largely a bluff. Unfortunately, even if shipping owners wished to gamble on this dubious assertion, the pirates still possess a viable option between the two extremes of murdering the crew or releasing the ship without a ransom: the threat to transfer the crew ashore and abandon or scuttle the hijacked vessel. Indeed, this manoeuvre has already been carried out on multiple occasions; in the case of the Rockall hijacking (see Chapter 4), a German couple was held in the mountains near Bossaso for months, and a similar fate befell Paul and Rachel Chandler, elderly British yachters who were held near Harardheere for over a year under intolerable conditions.

The problem with “getting tough” with the pirates is that just one misstep could occasion a monumental financial or even ecological disaster, to say nothing of the potential loss of life. As we saw in the case of the Victoria, pirate gangs often incur considerable operating expenses in expectation of a certain ransom payment, and potentially owe hundreds of thousands of dollars to dangerous creditors on land. In short, coming home empty-handed might prove as lethal to them as facing a team of Navy SEALs. They are scared, desperate, and unpredictable, and only one jittery finger on a grenade launcher would be needed to detonate an oil tanker and send a few hundred million dollars—more than the total of all ransoms paid to date—straight to the bottom of the ocean, leaving deadly toxic chemicals washing ashore on Somalia’s beaches.

In essence, the risks of employing hardball tactics—either by refusing to pay ransoms or through direct military assaults—far outweigh the few million dollars such a strategy might save. The fact is, with only a fraction of 1 per cent of all ships passing through “pirate waters” being successfully hijacked, paying ransoms is economically sustainable for the long term (although this might change if ransom amounts continue to rise). Bowing to extortion may be humiliating, and the months of lost labour and capital inconvenient, but at least usually no one dies. The long-term cost of “giving in,” on the other hand, is measured by the increasing ransoms paid to the pirates, and, with the higher stakes, the ever-growing chance of incurring loss of life.

One thing, at least, is clear: when the situation on the ground produces men desperate enough to set out into the Indian Ocean in four-metre skiffs without enough food and fuel to return—their only hope of survival either to capture a vessel or themselves be captured—military force alone will not be a sufficient deterrent. Short of convincing Somalia’s warring factions to lay down their Kalashnikovs and come together to form a functioning national government overnight (which many analysts seem to treat as a realistic solution), Somali piracy is unlikely to be completely eradicated in the foreseeable future. Any feasible solution must therefore aim at the pragmatic mitigation, not the elimination, of piracy.

With that in mind, what can the international community do against piracy?

1. FINANCE AN EFFECTIVE AND WELL-PAID PUNTLAND POLICE TASK FORCE.

A coast guard is a legitimate last line of defence against piracy in a mature state, but in Puntland a much more cost-effective strategy would be to invest in a police task force capable of stopping the pirates before they reach the sea. Train and equip police officers, perhaps through an expansion of the police training program already operated by the UN Development Programme. Fund small permanent garrisons in Eyl, Garacad, and other coastal towns, and provide all-terrain vehicles that will allow for a rapid response to pirate threats. Salaries should be high enough—in the region of President Farole’s suggestion of $300 per month—to deter corruption and reduce the allure that piracy has presented to members of the security forces in the past. In the longer term, provide funding for roads, radar stations equipped with high frequency radios, and other basic infrastructure in the coastal