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By Root 951 0

call, a nearby warship generally has a window of fifteen to forty minutes in which to respond before the pirates manage to board the vessel. Assuming the ship is outfitted with a helicopter (which has a maximum speed of about 320 kilometres per hour) ready for immediate launch, it must be within about eighty kilometres of the scene of attack in order to have a realistic shot at mounting a successful rescue operation. Yet Somali pirate attacks have occurred along an east–west axis 3,000 kilometres wide, from the depths of the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea, and along a north–south axis ranging the 3,700 kilometres from Oman to Madagascar—an ocean surface area two-thirds the size of the United States. For the crews of the warships in the combined international naval effort, struggling to contain an estimated 1,500–2,000 pirates operating in small groups of six to twelve, hunting pirates must seem like playing a losing game of Whac-a-Mole. In fairness, controlling such a vast area is not quite as hopeless as I have made it out to be; pirate attacks tend to cluster around shipping lanes, and by patrolling these routes warships greatly improve their odds of disrupting pirate operations. But it is generally accepted that no purely military solution exists to the problem of Somali piracy—at least none that is both economically and politically feasible.

* * *

When EUNAVFOR warships sailed into the Gulf of Aden in December 2008, they came with a plan. In cooperation with the other naval forces, NAVFOR established the Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor (IRTC), a heavily patrolled safe zone running 650 kilometres along the Yemeni side of the Gulf of Aden. In conjunction with regularly scheduled convoy escorts, the IRTC was immediately effective in restoring some order to the stretch of water that wary mariners had nicknamed “Pirate Alley.” But though the statistics show that the IRTC was initially effective in reducing the success rate of pirate attacks, the absolute number of hijackings steadily rose. In 2008, there were 134 attacks, mostly concentrated in the Gulf of Aden, resulting in 49 documented hijackings. In 2009, the number of attacks increased to 228, with 68 successful hijackings. The next year saw 74 hijackings for 243 attacks, and as of February the figures for 2011 stood at 14 hijackings for 40 attacks—on pace to exceed the 2010 total.1

These numbers reveal a small drop in the hijacking success rate (37 per cent to 30 per cent) from 2008 to 2009,2 corresponding to the increased naval presence towards the end of 2008 and the creation of the IRTC. Though the hijacking success rate has remained between 30 and 35 per cent since 2009, the economic incentive—as measured by ransom amounts—has been steadily increasing. In 2008, the average pirate ransom fell in the range of $1.25–$1.5 million, which grew to $2–$2.5 million in 2009 and to $3–$4 million in 2010, highlighted by the record $9.5 million bounty paid to release MV Samho Dream, a South Korean oil tanker commandeered in April (the vessel earned her hijackers more than three times the amount garnered by the headline-grabbing supertanker Sirius Star merely a year earlier.) In 2008, the pirates earned a total of $25–$35 million, a figure that shot up to $70–$90 million the following year. Yet in 2010, as average ransoms spiralled upwards, ransom revenues surprisingly fell slightly, to $65–$85 million. With the number of hijackings continuing to rise, this seemingly paradoxical drop in earnings was explained by lengthening periods of captivity, as avaricious pirate bosses began to drag out negotiations for months longer in the hope of securing themselves premium ransoms. As a consequence, the majority of vessels hijacked in 2010 were not ransomed until well into 2011.

Of course, not every hijacked ship is a multi-million-dollar lottery ticket; many are dhows or small fishing trawlers manned by poor Yemeni or South Asian crews. Lacking the defence of being worth ransoming, the fishermen are often set adrift or even killed, their vessels converted for use as pirate