Piraterie — Admiral Urges Arming of Vessels to Combat Piracy

WASHINGTON, April 16, 2010 — A top Navy com­man­der sug­gest­ed yes­ter­day that com­mer­cial ves­sels should arm them­selves when trav­el­ing through pirate-infest­ed waters off the Soma­li coast.

Navy Adm. Mark P. Fitzger­ald, com­man­der of U.S. naval forces in Europe and Africa and of NATO’s Allied Joint Task Force Com­mand Naples, told Pen­ta­gon reporters that the scope of the pira­cy prob­lem is too great to be policed by mil­i­tary ves­sels alone. 

“We could put a World War II fleet of ships out there,” Fitzger­ald said, refer­ring to the Gulf of Aden and the Mozam­bique Chan­nel off the Indi­an coast, “and we still would­n’t be able to cov­er the whole ocean.” 

On an aver­age day, 30 to 40 ships com­pris­ing inter­na­tion­al mar­itime forces mon­i­tor pirate activ­i­ty in the Soma­li basin and the west­ern Indi­an Ocean, Fitzger­ald said, adding that five to 10 of these ships at any giv­en time are Amer­i­can vessels. 

Anoth­er issue, the admi­ral said, is what to do with pirates who are cap­tured. The inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty, he explained, has not yet answered the ques­tion of how to bring to jus­tice pirates cap­tured at sea. This issue has come to the fore with the recent cap­ture of five sus­pect­ed pirates by the crew of the USS Nicholas in the Indi­an Ocean west of the Seychelles. 

“Catch and release is not a very good option,” Fitzger­ald said. “How do we deal with this? We’ve got to come to some kind of solution.” 

Soma­li-based pira­cy, the admi­ral said, will not go away until a gov­ern­ment in Mogadishu is sta­ble enough to con­front the prob­lem with­in its borders. 

“Right now, we’re try­ing to shoot the arrow instead of the archer,” Fitzger­ald said. He acknowl­edged that the prospect of a sta­ble Soma­li gov­ern­ment is unlike­ly in the near future. The admiral’s com­ments echoed remarks Defense Sec­re­tary Robert M. Gates made last year after Navy SEAL snipers killed three Soma­li pirates while res­cu­ing the kid­napped Amer­i­can ship cap­tain of the Maer­sk-Alaba­ma car­go ship. 

Gates, empha­siz­ing the lim­i­ta­tions of a pure­ly mil­i­tary approach to pira­cy, said some offi­cials have sug­gest­ed bypass­ing the cen­tral gov­ern­ment of Soma­lia and instead estab­lish­ing rela­tion­ships with offi­cials of func­tion­ing local gov­ern­ments there. 

“There is no pure­ly mil­i­tary solu­tion to it,” the sec­re­tary told the Marine Corps War Col­lege in Quan­ti­co, Va., last year. “And as long as you’ve got this incred­i­ble num­ber of poor peo­ple and the risks are rel­a­tive­ly small, there’s real­ly no way in my view to con­trol it unless you get some­thing on land that begins to change the equa­tion for these kids.” But in the near-term, Fitzger­ald said yes­ter­day, it is “incum­bent upon the ves­sels who are sail­ing the high seas to either pro­tect them­selves or accept the dan­gers.” Asked if he would rec­om­mend that com­mer­cial ships arm them­selves, Fitzger­ald said: “I think they should.” 

“Com­mer­cial ships should take appro­pri­ate pro­tec­tions,” he added, “because we can­not offer 100-per­cent guar­an­tees of pro­tec­tion as the ships go through.” 

Fitzger­ald also rec­om­mend­ed track­ing the spoils of suc­cess­ful pira­cy oper­a­tions. “I think we’d be able to trace the financiers [and] the mid­dle­men,” he said. 

Source:
U.S. Depart­ment of Defense
Office of the Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of Defense (Pub­lic Affairs) 

Team GlobDef

Seit 2001 ist GlobalDefence.net im Internet unterwegs, um mit eigenen Analysen, interessanten Kooperationen und umfassenden Informationen für einen spannenden Überblick der Weltlage zu sorgen. GlobalDefence.net war dabei die erste deutschsprachige Internetseite, die mit dem Schwerpunkt Sicherheitspolitik außerhalb von Hochschulen oder Instituten aufgetreten ist.

Alle Beiträge ansehen von Team GlobDef →