US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday unveiled a plan to fight piracy, while the US captain rescued in a dramatic operation after days of being held hostage off Somalia arrived in Kenya yesterday.
Clinton vowed to call for “immediate” meetings of the Contact Group on Piracy Off the Coast of Somalia to discuss the four-point plan that also calls for strategies to secure the release of ships and crews held by pirates.
The chief US diplomat said she was also sending an envoy to the Somali donors conference in Brussels next Thursday to improve the situation in lawless Somalia and help implement the plan.
“These pirates are criminals, they are armed gangs on the sea,” Clinton told reporters. “And those plotting attacks must be stopped, and those who have carried them out must be brought to justice.”
She also dismissed suggestions that international efforts to end the poverty and lawlessness in Somalia — the root cause of the piracy — were now being ignored to fight the symptom.
“So it’s not that they have been forgotten or even separated,” Clinton said.
“You’ve got to put out the fire before you can rebuild the house. And, right now, we have a fire raging,” Clinton said.
“The critical mass of hijackings and kidnappings has risen dramatically, in part because the pirates got better vessels and could go further out to sea, and they began to use mother ships,” she said, adding that they are “more sophisticated.”
Clinton also dismissed suggestions that it would be difficult to track the ill-gotten gain of pirates operating out of Somalia, where state institutions have collapsed in the last two decades.
“We track and freeze and try to disrupt the assets of many stateless groups,” including Islamist terrorists, Clinton said.
“We notice pirates are buying more and more sophisticated equipment ... buying faster and more capable vessels,” she said.
With the outlaws “clearly using ransom money for both their personal benefit and for piracy, she said there were “ways to crack down on companies that do business with pirates.”
The Pentagon is to study ways of combating pirates terrorizing seas off the coast of Somalia, spokesman Bryan Whitman said on Wednesday, stressing a military solution was not the only one.
A US-led task force is already operating in the region in a bid to halt a spate of attacks by the pirates.
Whitman said the problem had to be addressed “on a multitude of levels, one of them is maritime operations to discourage that activity, others are the evasive actions of the crew to prevent their ship from being hijacked.”
The contact group on piracy was established under a UN Security Council Resolution on Jan. 14 to coordinate actions among states and organizations to suppress piracy off the coast of Somalia.
Participating countries include Australia, China, Denmark, Djibouti, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Kenya, South Korea, the Netherlands, Oman, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Spain, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, the UK, the US and Yemen.
Sources close to the pirates have said French ships are now also a prime target after French commandos recently stormed a yacht on which two French couples and a child were held. One male hostage and two pirates were killed.
The French navy on Wednesday also intercepted a pirate “mother ship” in the Gulf of Aden and detained 11 fighters, the French defense ministry said.
RESCUED CAPTAIN
Captain Richard Phillips arrived in the port of Mombasa aboard the USS Bainbridge, the warship behind his rescue last weekend, as the 19 US crew members from his ship, the Maersk Alabama, separately returned home.
Mombasa port police commander Ayub Gitonga confirmed Phillips was on the Bainbridge along with a fourth pirate, who survived the rescue operation in which three of his fellow bandits were killed by snipers.
Asked whether the surviving pirate would be tried in Kenya, Gitonga said: “The decision is yet to be made.”
Crew members from the Danish-operated Maersk Alabama were flown to an air base outside Washington and greeted by family and friends in the early morning hours after being in Mombasa since the vessel docked there on Saturday.
Pirates had attacked their ship in the Indian Ocean on April 8 and took Phillips hostage on a lifeboat after his crew managed to overpower the bandits.
After the US navy operation that rescued Phillips, pirates pledged to target Americans in revenge for the sniper killings.
On Tuesday, pirates said they attacked a US freighter with rockets to “destroy” the ship as revenge, but the Bainbridge came to the rescue of the freighter, the Liberty Sun, which escaped.
Aided by good weather, Somali pirates have intensified attacks off the lawless country’s coast in recent days, with at least 10 ships seized since the beginning of this month.
The pirates have defied an international naval presence in the region to carry out the hijackings, which have wreaked havoc on one of the world’s busiest shipping routes and left Western powers pondering how to stop the attacks.
IDENTIFY
In related news, Somali Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke said his government had identified many pirate leaders but needed more resources to go after them.
Sharmarke told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview that he was willing to share that information on pirate leaders with other governments.
He said he planned to fight the bandits by building up military forces and establishing intelligence gathering posts along Somalia’s coastline. But it’s not clear how that can really take place, since his government controls only a few square blocks of the capital, Mogadishu, with the help of African peacekeepers.
Also See: US lawmaker calls for return of private pirate hunters
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