Kenyan Intervention in Somalia Will Have Minimal Effect on Piracy

October 25, 2011 Leave a comment

Kenya has entered into Somali-territory and is making slow progress northward. As yet, it is not entirely clear what military objective Kenya seeks to obtain. At its outset, the Kenyan government justified the incursion based upon recent kidnappings of foreign tourists and aid-workers, asserting that they were all the work of al-Shabaab. However, It appears that only the latter attack on Spanish aid workers for the charity MSF can be attributed to al-Shabaab. While the other two attacks on tourists near Lamu were likely the work of pirates/armed bandits. More recently, sources in the Kenyan military have asserted:

Kenya’s military says it plans to remain in Somalia until the Shabab’s capacity is “reduced” and Somalia’s weak, American-backed transitional government is able to function.

The more immediate goal appears to be to take the port town of Kismayu, one of Somalia’s biggest towns and a major money-earner for the Shabab. The United States and France have joined in this fight, emboldened by the success of using air power to assist foreign ground troops in Libya. The Kenyan incursion into Somalia falls within the U.S.’s fight against the Shabaab which until now was limited to targeted drone strikes in the Shabaab controlled areas.

Although principally a military intervention against the Shabaab, this is also an opportunity for Kenya to root-out pirates based in the south of Somalia and to discourage any further attacks on tourist-areas on its coast. While the Shabaab was initially hostile to pirates, asserting piracy was contrary to Islam, it appears Shabaab has become more tolerant of pirate gangs in view of the revenue they can produce. They are not working together, but appear to have reached a détente.

It is possible that Kenya’s intervention will prevent further pirate attacks in its coastal tourist areas. However, the vast majority of pirate attacks at sea originate in the breakaway region of Puntland, far to the north of the Shabaab controlled areas. Therefore, Kenya’s incursion into Somalia, while perhaps limiting attacks on tourists in Lamu, will not have any meaningful impact on attacks in international waters which have so affected commercial shipping.

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Sophisticated Planning Operations of Somali Pirates

October 24, 2011 Leave a comment

A newly-released report by a UN agency (UNOSAT) statistically analysed 2005-2009 Somali piracy attacks and reached some surprising conclusions which contradict widely-held assumptions about the reactivity of pirates. It concludes:

• The dramatic expansion of piracy in the Indian Ocean was initiated during the spring of 2008 – predating major international naval patrols;
• Falling piracy success rates may be partially the result of a statistical bias due to changes in incident reporting over time, and may reflect a naturally occurring decline resulting from more aggressive pirate rules of engagement and a large influx of untrained pirate recruits;
• A significant majority of failed attacks on merchant vessels occurred without any direct international naval assistance;
• Counter-piracy training, technology and tactics of merchant vessels has likely had the greatest impact on improved maritime security levels and falling hijacking success rates in the Gulf of Aden

Many have assumed that the increasing use of international naval assistance (such as the EU NAVFOR Atalanta mission) have reduced the success-rate of pirate attacks. The UNOSAT report finds that pirate activity had moved away from the Gulf of Aden (formerly the primary targeted area) and into the Indian Ocean, before the international community created a safe-travel corridor and protected convoys in the Gulf. This suggests a level of sophistication and planning on the part of pirate organizations. Before the international community could react, Somali pirates were already picking their next targets.  As the report puts it:

The more convincing interpretation of the dramatic spread of piracy into the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean was that this was a deliberate strategy planned and initiated not in reaction to anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf, but as part of a hugely successful piracy expansion program – most visibly and successfully demonstrated at that time in the Gulf.

The report also points out that falling success rates do not necessarily mean success in the fight against piracy. For the actual number of successful pirate attacks increased from 2008 to 2009 despite a reduced rate of successful attacks. Faced with more difficult conditions, pirates simply initiated more attacks. The report suggests that the higher number of attacks required use of less-experienced recruits and this may partly account for the reduced rate of successful pirate attacks.

One final point identified by the report is the correlation between a lull in attacks with the seasonal monsoon from May/June through mid-September. It is possible that the recent attacks on land-based tourists in Kenya were an attempt to increase ransom-revenues during the monsoon – when attacks at sea were not possible. Always looking for new opportunities, tourists located less than 100km from the Somali border must have appeared easy targets, especially considering attacks have been attempted as far as 1600 nautical miles from the Somali coast.

Although this report is not fully up to date, the implications are that pirate criminal organizations have a sophisticated planning apparatus, in which shipping lanes, vulnerabilities, sea conditions, and potential ship defences are all taken into consideration. It also suggests that pirates are proactively seeking new targets. This explains why countries far to the south, such as Mozambique and South Africa, are considering the potential of attacks in their own waters.

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New Contact Group on Piracy Website

October 9, 2011 Leave a comment

The Contact Group on Piracy has just launched a website which compiles a number of very useful resources.  It is described as follows:

Pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 1851, the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia (CGPCS) was established on January 14, 2009 to facilitate the discussion and coordination of actions among states and organizations to suppress piracy off the coast of Somalia. This international forum has brought together more than 60 countries and international organizations all working towards the prevention of piracy off the Somali coast.

According to the U.S. Dept. of State, the website is operated by the Republic of Korea with support from the United States and United Kingdom.

Filed under Worldwide

A Decentralized Approach to Augmenting Somali Governance

October 7, 2011 Leave a comment

The problem of poor governance lies at the heart of Somalia’s famine and its problems with criminality including piracy. In this regard, this week’s Foreign Affairs contains two articles concerning governance failures in Somalia. Each article critiques the Transition Federal Government (TFG) in Mogadishu and suggests the solution to governance is a more decentralized approach. First, Kenya’s President Kibaki writes:

A new round of talks should recognize that ethnic and tribal differences in Somalia are not easily bridgeable. Thus, efforts to support and reform the TFG must be accompanied by a determined effort to decentralize power to Somalia’s different ethnicities and geographies.

While recognizing the need to engage with the TFG, Kibaki presages a federal structure whereby each political subdivision retains considerable autonomy. The second article provides a more extreme view, suggesting the U.S. and UN give up on the TFG altogether. In this article, two members of the Atlantic Council, Bronwyn Bruton and J. Peter Pham, provide a devastating assessment of the TFG’s prospects for success:

This year, the TFG and UN mediators agreed to create a road map for accomplishing these tasks and decided to prioritize local elections. This was a clever move, since doing so will delay presidential and parliamentary elections, leaving the current president, prime minister, and speaker of parliament safely in their seats. Given the inability of the president, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, to collaborate with any faction outside of his presidential compound, it is unlikely that even municipal elections will take place. The road map has probably done little more than postpone the inevitable reckoning by one more year.

As a result, governance in Somalia remains highly fractured and lends itself to continued fighting:

The weakness of both al Shabab and the TFG has produced a confusing security vacuum in Mogadishu that appears to be spreading outside of the capital. As both the TFG and al Shabab falter, Somalia’s watchful clans have stepped into the fray. Various militias, including some led by the warlords who infamously stole food relief and tortured Somalia’s population during the 1991 famine, are vying for control.

Bruton and Pham therefore propose a pragmatic policy they call  “earned engagement”:
[G]overnmental entities, regional authorities, clans, and civil society organizations — would be accorded equal access to international resources, but only to the extent that they prove themselves capable of meeting defined benchmarks and of absorbing the assistance that would be provided them for relief and development. Al Shabab leaders who renounced al Qaeda, promised regional cooperation, and focused on providing for their clan constituencies would be prime targets for engagements, while militant jihadists would be excluded.
To date, the U.S. has actively supported the TFG while engaging with break-away regions, such as Puntland and Somaliland, without acknowledging the independence of the latter. Bruton and Pham suggest engaging instead the clans that form the basis of Somali society, with an immediate goal of disempowering al Qaida. But they also suggest that the provision of humanitarian aid would be more effective and more likely to actually reach the intended recipients through clan leaders.
Considering the TFG has another year to produce some tangible progress, the international community should start engaging with the clans and other break-away regions now. If the TFG fails to produce, the case for continuing to support it becomes ever weaker.

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Kenyan Ready to Start Hearing Piracy Cases Again?

October 6, 2011 Leave a comment

In November 2010, the Kenyan High Court in Mombasa ruled that Kenyan courts did not have jurisdiction to try the crime of piracy. As I have previously noted, the case followed on the the Kenyan Foreign Minister’s assertion that, “We discharged our international obligation. Others shied away from doing so. And we cannot bear the burden of the international responsibility.” The Kenyan Director of Public Prosecutions, is now appealing the High Court decision. Special Prosecutor Patrick Kiage asserts that Kenyan courts derive their jurisdiction from international law, which declares piracy an international crime and that “Under international law, suspected pirates can be charged in any country where they are captured.”

The timing of this appeal is striking as it follows two separate attacks on tourists near Kenya’s border with Somalia, potentially devastating Kenya’s tourist industry. The two recent attacks near Lamu, Kenya (see map) were committed on Kenyan territory. Therefore, even if the High Court’s ruling were to stand, the acts could be prosecuted as murder, kidnapping, armed robbery, assault, or other such crimes under Kenyan national law. Nonetheless, as attacks affect more than just commercial shipping interests (which are in any case insured) and start to affect economic interests closer to home, Kenya will have more of an incentive to advertise its diligence in prosecuting pirates, whether for attacks in its own territory or in international waters.

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