Shipping, defence and legal experts on Tuesday gathered in Dubai for an intensive three and a half hour seminar focusing on the ever-growing issue of maritime piracy in the region.
Vessel seizures by Somali pirates are on the rise and the last 12 months have seen an exponential rise in hijackings with around 819 hostages currently being held on 51 seized vessels.
Piracy and hijacking events by the pirates have seen a paradigm shift in tactic in recent months. The experts said that the pirates have adapted to changing weather and climate patterns on the high seas and are now able to operate year-round using “mother-ships” which are larger hijacked vessels such as tankers, instead of their smaller exposed high-speed skiffs.
This all-weather capability is helping the pirates who were previously confined to the Somali coast, to operate much further afield. Acts of piracy by Somali pirates have been recorded as far as the Indian and Sri Lankan coast recently.
Both the experts and the attendees of the seminar were under no illusion about the difficulty and complicacy of the topic as it has major industry-wide implications for all parties concerned, namely for vessel charterers and ship owners.
Some attendees representing regional and international shipping, were visibly irritated by the global response currently being given on piracy, with a few calling on outright armed retaliation to repel the pirates.
Putting the matter into perspective Lt. Cdr Allan Eastham of the United Kingdom Maritime and Trade Operations (UKMTO) office in Dubai which oversees much of the marine traffic in the Gulf region, said that policing the seas in the region with 25 naval vessels is like “having 25 police cars patrolling the whole of Europe”.
“UKMTO will help but bear in mind the Indian Ocean is a large area so we will take some time to respond,” he explained, perhaps adding to the overall sense of helplessness across the shipping industry in the region.
Stephen Askins of international law firm Ince & Co. addressed the fact that Somalia remains a lawless state, definitely paves the way for piracy to exist to the levels it does especially in the Indian Ocean and increasingly the north Arabian Sea which in particular has seen around half a dozen hijackings in nearly as many months.
He admitted rather reassuringly that the “default position of the Somali pirate is not to harm the crew during hostage negotiations” despite the killings of the four Americans on their yacht in late February which was seized in the Arabian Sea.
