Canadians engaged in age-old battle

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/05/2009 (5995 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SALALAH, OMAN — Think of HMCS Winnipeg as the thin grey line.

Looming over the dock in this port city, the haze of 40-degree temperatures and dust of the surrounding desert giving the ship a discernible glow, Winnipeg is all spit and polish and sharp edges.

The Canadian frigate is nearly one and a half football fields long, and weighs nearly 5,000 tonnes. And in its current mission patrolling the expansive waters of the Gulf of Aden, Winnipeg and a handful of NATO warships are all that separate the commercial vessels containing trillions of dollars in cargo from the grips of a new generation of pirates.

The pirates are fast, fearless and — given that they originate from the mayhem that is Somalia — they are unrestrained by law. They have swapped their sails for small skiffs and 300-horsepower outboard engines, and cannons for rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

Even so, the challenge facing the Canadian frigate is as old as sea travel. For centuries, water-borne desperados have tormented those who use the oceans to transport goods and people. And for the most part, civilized societies have yet to find a way to completely deter pirates from their nefarious pursuits.

Although their crimes are committed at sea, the infrastructure that supports piracy in this region is constructed on dry land. In this case, the Somali pirates thrive in two breakaway states that recruit and dispatch waves of pirates with remarkable regularity. This is a scenario that commercial ships have seen before.

In 1796, the United States had to strike a treaty with Barbary Coast pirates tormenting its freighters along the shores of what is now Algeria and Morocco. Then-President Thomas Jefferson convinced Congress to pay the pirates the unheard of sum of $1 million to buy U.S. ships safe passage.

Unfortunately, the policy failed miserably, as the pirates saw Jefferson’s capitulation as an invitation to make additional demands for money. Faced with extortionists who had no intention of easing their demands, Jefferson dispatched the newly formed U.S. Marines to destroy the pirate base camps.

The challenge that faced Jefferson bears striking resemblance to the challenge facing the ships now moving through the Gulf of Aden. Although the NATO mission has deterred many attacks, the Somali pirates have proliferated. The result is that ships like Winnipeg are seeing more action, but there are many more attacks they simply cannot respond to.

The world’s most prosperous countries have been flummoxed trying to come up with the best antidote. Attacking the pirates’ bases in Somalia has been ruled out lest the hostages still held by the pirates are killed. The Somali government is not only no help in bringing the pirates to justice, there are concerns they are being paid off by the sea bandits.

It doesn’t help that the terms of engagement is a mish-mash of domestic and international laws, with a smattering of United Nations resolution thrown in for good measure. Some nations, notably the U.S. and the Netherlands, have gone as far as to apprehend and prosecute Somali pirates; others, including Canada, have sought only to thwart the pirate attacks, disarm the assailants and send them back into the gulf to, one must assume, pirate again.

The tolerance for the pesky pirates might be abating. Last month, the U.S. killed several pirates to rescue the captain and crew of an American commercial ship. And the U.S. is already looking at new requirements for ships sailing under an American flag that include new evasive tactics and, some believe, a requirement to provide armed guards.

Unfortunately, this aggressive approach has not achieved the desired result. Pirate attacks have not slowed, and in fact there has been a new ferocity in their methods. Pirates appear now to be arming themselves more heavily, an easy enough task given the billions of dollars in black-market armaments that flow into Somalia every year.

But there isn’t much time for HMCS Winnipeg and its crew of 240 to worry about politics. For the next 11 days, they will look and listen hard for any sign of pirate attacks. And when they get a distress call, they will do what they do best: hunt the hunters.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca