Somalia PM fears warships alone won't stop piracy
NAIROBI (Reuters) - Somali Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein said naval patrols would not stop piracy and appealed for more help to tackle criminal networks with links beyond the Horn of Africa nation.
The audacious hijack of a supertanker 450 miles off Kenya on Saturday was the latest in a spate of attacks by Somali pirates which has sparked international alarm and threatens to push up the cost of goods and commodities around the world.
Hussein said piracy should be confronted on land and at sea and it would become clearer in the coming months which organizations outside Somalia were involved in hijackings.
"We are very sorry that this piracy problem is not limited only to Somalia but is affecting the whole region, is affecting the world," he told Reuters in an interview.
"The warship operations alone will not be sufficient. Since there is a piracy network, it means an operational network which includes the sea, the land and also outside the country sometimes," he said.
The supertanker was seized despite the deployment of a naval force including NATO and European Union members' ships to protect one of the world's busiest shipping areas. U.S, French and Russian warships are also off Somalia.
"I think this is linked to some other organizations. I don't think that this is only, purely, Somali piracy," Hussein said. "Criminal groups, definitely ... it is an assumption. But of course in the coming months, definitely, the picture will be more clear."
Analysts suspect the Somali pirates are being helped by Yemenis, and possibly Nigerians. They fear the spoils may end up funding international terrorist groups, though there is no hard evidence of this.
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Analysts say international efforts should, besides sending warships, focus on financial networks recycling the tens of millions of dollars of ransoms paid this year.
"There's a financial network that needs to tracked down. There needs to be a multi-agency response," said Jason Alderwick, a maritime defense analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Hussein said Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG) did not have the means to take on the pirates and called for international help to establish a viable coastguard.
Maritime analysts say foreign warships will have a tough time stamping out piracy because the pirates have shown they can strike over a vast expanse of sea. The area hit by hijackings so far is more than a million square miles.
Since hijacking the supertanker, Somali pirates have struck twice in the Gulf of Aden, one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world linking Europe to Asia and the Middle East.
Diplomats say only a solution on the ground in Somalia will eradicate the problem. Islamists control most of south Somalia, feuding, heavily armed clan militias hold sway in many other areas and the weak, Western-backed TFG is in the capital Mogadishu.
"The fact that all these things are happening, these are part of the legacy of the long years of civil war in the country, the warlord system, lack of law enforcement, poverty," said Hussein.
"We are very happy that now we see that the piracy problem is becoming a common problem and we see common efforts to address the issue. We will play our role of course, but our capacity is very limited."
