The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [65]
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Unlike rival street gangs, pirate groups do not have formally demarcated “turfs” that they jealously guard from their enemies. Yet the geographical locations of hijackings have correlated with remarkable accuracy to the geographical origins of the hijackers. All ships known to have been seized in the Gulf of Aden, for instance, have ended up in Puntland ports, while the vast majority of those hijacked in the far south, near the Seychelles and Madagascar, have been taken to Harardheere. Thus, as the choice pirate hunting ground shifted from the Gulf of Aden to the Indian Ocean, Puntland’s strategic importance waned. Many pirate groups continued to operate out of the region, but they mostly used the southern port of Garacad, which had the dual advantages of being more remote and isolated than Eyl, as well as closer to the Indian Ocean shipping lanes.
Perversely, the constant naval pressure may also have bred a higher class of pirate, because the groups operating upwards of 1,500 kilometres into the Indian Ocean required a much higher level of sophistication—in terms of boats, supply logistics, navigational skills and equipment, and perhaps intelligence networks—than those who had previously floated in the Gulf of Aden, waiting for any target of opportunity to come along. The forces of artificial selection meant that only the most advanced pirate gangs were likely to survive in the new reality created by the Gulf of Aden safety corridor.
The pirates’ Indian Ocean expansion did not go unnoticed by the international naval forces. In April 2010 I spoke to Commander John Harbour, the media spokesman for EUNAVFOR, via telephone from his London office. According to Harbour, the upper echelons of EU leadership had vigorously debated how to respond to the pirates’ change in tactics. Some voices, he said, had argued for a complete blockade of pirate ports along the entire length of the Somali coast, an approach that he viewed as unrealistic: “The Somali coast is over a thousand miles long, and although it’s got maybe six or seven main [pirate] ports, we haven’t even got enough ships to cover those. What we can do, with good intelligence, is find the pirate camps and sit off of them. These camps can be anything from a mothership, a couple of skiffs, and a few barrels on the shore covered by a tarpaulin, to ten motherships and thirty skiffs.”
Locating and blockading these floating bases, often through information gathered by maritime patrol aircraft, formed the first pillar of the EU’s latest counter-piracy strategy; by interdicting suspicious craft before they reached the international shipping lanes, NAVFOR hoped to contain the problem at its source. In many ways, NAVFOR’s vessels had begun to operate like the defensive line of a football team, concentrating their forces at the line of scrimmage but positioning safeties further afield to intercept any opponent slipping through the perimeter. “The new strategy was basically to take the fight to the pirates,” Harbour explained. “First, interdict them off their bases. Then, have ships available in a second layer, maybe one to two hundred miles off the coast, who can respond to attacks. Finally, have maritime patrol aircraft and ships in the deeper Indian Ocean, who can visit the scene after an attack has occurred.”
Over the previous month, he estimated, NAVFOR had disrupted twenty-five pirate “attack groups”—each consisting of a mothership towing two skiffs