UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on Friday for stepped-up global action to combat the “alarming” increase in pirate attacks, which topped 400 last year.
Addressing a General Assembly conference on piracy, the UN chief said there were 406 pirate attacks last year, 100 more than in 2008. The bulk of the attacks came off the coast of East Africa, which saw a sevenfold increase between 2005 and last year, he said.
Ban called for a reassessment of what’s working and what needs to be improved to combat piracy, adding that suspects must also be brought to justice, “not simply let go, or left to die.”
Anarchy
He said the problem needs to specifically be addressed in Somalia, where anarchy has reigned since 1991 when warlords overthrew long-time dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and then turned on each other.
Rear Admiral Peter Hudson, commander of the EU’s naval counter-piracy flotilla, said that since February there has been “a huge surge” in the number of Somali vessels going to sea to conduct pirate acts.
The EU and other international navies patrolling off Somalia “have interrupted, broken up and dismantled over 60 pirates action groups, processing somewhere over 400 suspected pirates in the last 12 weeks alone, which is three times the number of action groups that we saw last year,” he said.
Hudson said that while the presence of the international flotilla has reduced the number of attacks in the strategic Gulf of Aden from about 20 a month in the summer of last year to about four or five a month today, pirates have successfully moved the attacks farther from Africa and closer to India.
The non-governmental group Ecoterra International, which monitors seajackings, estimates that 464 seamen are currently being held hostage by Somali pirates.
Hudson said that since there are limited opportunities to prosecute pirates, the only alternative is to destroy their equipment so they can’t hijack any other ships and ensure that they can return home in their vessels.
Kenya and the Seychelles have been the only countries prosecuting suspected pirates, but Kenya gave six-months notice last month that it will terminate the trials, citing the high cost of trials and imprisoning suspects.
Kenyan Trade Minister Amos Kimunya told the UN General Assembly “the burden of prosecuting and imprisoning suspects is becoming unbearable and needs to be shared.”
He said Kenya’s commitment has not been matched by international support either financially or “in terms of the social costs of the hostilities that are developing.”
Kimunya said acts of piracy should be treated “as crimes of universal jurisdiction, enabling any state to seize pirates anywhere in international waters and try them.”
Abdurahman Ibrahim, the first deputy prime minister in Somalia’s weak UN-backed transitional government, said if the international community wants to stop piracy it must identify the root causes, create alternative sources of income for fishermen and coastal residents and rehabilitate the Somali coast guard.
“We are ready to actually eradicate this virus,” Ibrahim said. “We know who they are, where they are, what they are doing, when they are doing [it] ... We can do it, but please help us to do it.”
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