Maritime Terrorism and Piracy in the Indian Ocean Region

Awet Weldemichael, Patricia Schneider, Andrew Winner, Awet T. Weldemichael

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317529323
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Unregulated or lesser regulated maritime spaces are ideal theatres of operation and mediums of transportation for terrorists, insurgents and pirates. For more than a decade, the Indian Ocean waters adjoining Somalia have been a particular locus of such activities, with pirates hijacking vessels, and Al Qaeda and Al Shabab elements travelling between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, operating lucrative businesses and even staging deadly operations at sea. These operations and threats however, remain, by and large, understudied. Responses to the two threats have varied, highlighting the lack of cohesive regional and global institutions with the mandate and the capacity to address them. Those scholarly deliberations on Indian Ocean maritime security focus on piracy and armed robbery at sea, while their terrorist/insurgent counterparts have eluded sustained scrutiny. This volume will help close that gap by looking at both from the field in Somalia and Yemen, within broader frameworks of regional maritime security and port-state control, international maritime law and the ongoing search for maritime resources. The European, African and Middle Eastern case studies add salience to the regional and international complexity surrounding maritime security off the Horn of Africa. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of the Indian Ocean Region.

INTRODUCTION
Maritime terrorism and piracy in the Indian Ocean Region

 

Terrorist attacks have been carried out at sea and using the sea by nationalist-separatist groups, leftist extremists and Islamist fundamentalists. Prominent cases in the Indian Ocean region include al-Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole in 2000 and on the French tanker Limburg in 2002, as well as Lashkar-e-Taiba’s use of a maritime approach in its terrorist attack on Mumbai in 2008. Other terrorist groups that have been active in the maritime realm in the Indian Ocean include LTTE (Sri Lanka) and Al Shabaab (Somalia). Despite the gravity of these attacks and the potential for terrorist groups to continue using the relatively less-regulated maritime realm, the phenomenon remains relatively understudied. Indeed, over the past decade, much of the scholarly discussion on maritime security in the Indian Ocean has focused on piracy and armed robbery at sea. National and international responses to the two maritime security issues in the Indian Ocean have varied widely as well, highlighting not only the difficulty of addressing the issues per se but also the lack of a shared framework or institution in the region with both the mandate and the capacity for addressing both phenomena.

The international community has so far responded to maritime terrorism and piracy in the Indian Ocean with a mix of legal and regulatory frameworks and cooperation agreements such as SUA, ISPS and C-TPAT, as well as joint and independent naval responses (coalition task forces under the aegis of Operation Enduring Freedom, EU NAVFOR Atalanta) and United Nations Security Council resolutions on piracy. The effectiveness of these measures is difficult to assess, particularly in regard to the less-frequent phenomenon of terrorists’ use of the maritime realm. What can be done is to look at some cases as well as a range of responses to identify the breadth and diversity of the challenges, as well as the span of tools available for national and international policy-makers to use when combating maritime terrorism and/or piracy in the Indian Ocean.

This special issue has its origins in a panel on maritime security that took place at the April 2012 International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention in San Diego, California. The panel aimed to draw attention to the concept and phenomenon of maritime terrorism (with a focus on the Indian Ocean) and review the international countermeasures and preparedness to overcome it. What was discovered during both the writing of the papers and the discussions at the panel was that the issues of, and responses to, maritime terrorism and piracy in the Indian Ocean are sometimes intertwined. To complement the papers that were presented at the panel, we sought additional contributions from established scholars of relevant geographical and thematic fields: Douglas Guilfoyle, Stig Hansen and Martin Murphy.

The articles in this special issue can broadly be placed into three categories: four case studies of specific maritime security challenges and national responses to them; one examination of the overarching issue of non-state actors and maritime security; and two that discuss international legal and regulatory responses to maritime security issues in the Indian Ocean. In the first category, Awet T. Weldemichael’s piece on Somalia frames illegal fishing and toxic waste dumping as corporate terrorism at sea and reconstructs the evolution and typology of piracy off the coast of Somalia from a Somali perspective. He concludes that sustaining the gains against piracy requires reining in international corporate crimes, and joining hands with the Somalis, who, carrying the heaviest brunt of piracy, have been fighting it from within.

Annina C. Bürgin and Patricia Schneider analyse Spanish and German regimes of maritime security governance, respectively, as they play themselves out in theIndian Ocean. Whereas both countries take an active part in multilateral counter-piracy operations in the Indian Ocean – mainly EU NAVFOR Operation Atalanta – Spain facilitates the deployment of private security companies onboard Spanish-flagged vessels operating in high-risk areas. Although Germany, as a leading maritime nation with a large container shipping industry, is heavily affected by Indian Ocean piracy and its ship-owners have repeatedly asked for state or private vessel protection, it has until recently avoided facilitating private security companies. Both authors offer convincing explanations for why two EU members have different approaches. Bürgin emphasises, among other factors, the significance of the fisheries sector to the Spanish economy and the overall influence in Spanish politics of groups and companies active in the maritime industry. For her part, Schneider shows the near-paralysing conflict of interest among the very diverse German stakeholders and the complex German federal system that bestows responsibility for maritime security on various authorities, both from the federal states and Berlin.

Stig Hansen analyses maritime security concerns as they relate to, and are affected by, Yemen against the backdrop of state weakness and its ongoing conflicts. He concludes that Yemen’s geostrategic location along two maritime highways and in the midst of regional rivalries is of importance not only to that country but also to maritime security in its adjacent waters.

Martin Murphy’s piece perhaps offers a bridge between the case studies and the deeper examination of legal and regulatory responses to maritime terrorism and piracy. He touches on the diverse and multifaceted actors (states and non-states alike) across the wide Indian Ocean region. By focusing on non-state actors within a context of overlapping rivalries among states for resources and geostrategic positioning, he argues that the Indian Ocean will continue to offer opportunities for the use of violence to promote one’s interests, terrorist or otherwise.

This potential of using the maritime realm for violence or other illegal activities will continue to affect shipping in the Indian Ocean for reasons that Sam Bateman expounds in his article. Bateman shows how, although flag states are in principle responsible for safety and security standards on vessels, in practice it is the regimes of Port State Control, and adherence to and implementation of those regimes by the port states, that makes the real difference. Weak to non-existent Port State Control mechanisms in the western and north-western Indian Ocean have, however, enabled non-seaworthy vessels to operate in those waters, endangering themselves and their crews to maritime predation and the environment to accidental pollution or slicking.

Finally, Douglas Guilfoyle brings the discussion back to international rule of law through an analysis of how piracy off Somalia has been treated in legal parlance. Studying the various international conventions, Guilfoyle shows that pirates are neither combatants to a conflict nor do their actions fit the extant legal framework against terrorism. As a result, he demonstrates that international responses to piracy have so far been in the realm of law enforcement legal paradigm, despite the prominent use of naval forces to patrol areas of the Indian Ocean and notwithstanding the often overlapping methods of piracy and maritime terrorism.

Andrew C. Winner
Professor of Strategic Studies, Strategic Research Department,
Director, Indian Ocean Studies Group,
US Naval War College

Patricia Schneider
Senior Researcher, Institute for Peace Research and
Security Policy at the University of
Hamburg (IFSH), Germany

Awet T. Weldemichael
Department of History, University of Kentucky, and
Unité de Recherche ‘Migrations et Société’ (URMIS)
Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7, France

Maritime corporate terrorism and its consequences in the western Indian Ocean: illegal fishing, waste dumping and piracy in twenty-first-century Somalia

Awet T. Weldemichael^a,b

^aDepartment of History, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA
^bUnité de Recherche ‘Migrations et Société’ (URMIS), Université Paris Diderot, Paris, France

This paper identifies the root causes and general typology of the widespread phenomena of piracy off the coast of Somalia. It shows that piracy in this region started as a direct response to illegal fishing, with widespread claims of hazardous waste dumping offering added moral justification. It argues that the two international crimes that are the root causes of Somali piracy constitute corporate terrorism at sea. The alacrity of the earliest illegal trawlers that were captured by the fishermen to pay ransom unleashed the scourge of criminal/ransom piracy that has overshadowed – in figures and discourse – ‘defensive’ piracy. Restoring the state and combating poverty can help minimise the favourable conditions that latter-day pirates exploited to launch their trade, but will not eradicate piracy without successfully containing the corporate terrorism that triggered it in the first place. Moreover, combating poverty among fishing coastal communities require the eradication of illegal fishing.

1. Introduction

Piracy is an age-old crime. In the words of Martin Murphy (2010, p. 1), ‘when the maritime Abel slipped his boat into the water for the first time Cain was close behind’. In Somalia, however, it is a relatively new phenomenon. In a recent overview of Indian Ocean piracy, pioneer of Indian Ocean world studies Edward Alpers (2011) rules out the historicity of Somali piracy. The fact that buraad badeed, the Somali phrase for piracy (meaning bandits of the sea), entered the lexicons of daily Somali life no more than two decades ago is also indicative of piracy’s recent advent into the country’s conflict-ridden political economy. This does not mean that attacks against ships did not occur in Somali waters before. It only means that they did not occur sufficiently to enter public discourse. But when they did, there emerged a dilemma in explaining why they have been steadily rising since 2001 and exploded as of 2005.

Many analysts agree that the nexus between hazardous waste dumping and illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing prompted Somali piracy (Menkhaus 2009; Tharoor 2009; Waldo 2009). In 1997, a United Nations consultant, Mahdi Gedi Qayad (1997), sent an early warning that ‘the absence of a national government and the availability of huge natural marine resources in Somali waters attracted the international poachers and also motivated the illegal fishing and the damaging of the previously unpolluted ecological system’. Ten years later, a United Nations body concurred with Qayad’s findings and noted its consequences.

In 2008, the United Nations Somalia Monitoring Group (2008) reported that ‘the ecology and economy of these areas have been adversely affected by years of illicit overfishing by foreign vessels and the dumping of toxic waste into Somali territorial waters’. The group went on to say that ‘[g]enuine economic hardship, whether directly related to these factors or not, and a sense of grievance against foreign exploitation of Somalia’s maritime resources, not only inspire many pirates, but also serve to legitimize their activities in the eyes of their communities’. Similarly, Mohamed Abshir Waldo (2009) writes that, since the collapse of the central government,

poaching vessels encroached on the local fishermen’s grounds, competing for the abundant rock-lobster and high value pelagic fish in the warm, up-swelling 60 kms deep shelf along the tip of the Horn of Africa. The piracy war between local fishermen and IUUs started here.

Based on an analysis of documented cases of piracy off the Somali coast, Stig Jarle Hansen (2009, p. 10) contradicts these claims. Accordingly, ‘Somali pirates have always targeted non-fishing vessels’. But the unpredictable ebb and flow of pirate attacks before 2005 made piracy an unexplained puzzle, leading him to the conclusion that there ‘is some truth to all’ the views that hold 1991, 1994–1995, 2003 and 2005 as start dates for Somali piracy (Hansen 2009, p. 19). Although Hansen accurately captures the conflicting views as to when piracy started, hence the puzzle, the widespread tendency to lump together criminal gang attacks in par with attacks by the rebel Somali National Movement (SNM) and aggrieved fishermen is the source of the confusion.

That confu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgement
• 1. Introduction: Maritime terrorism and piracy in the Indian Ocean Region
• 2. Maritime corporate terrorism and its consequences in the western Indian Ocean: illegal fishing, waste dumping and piracy in twenty-first-century Somalia
• 3. Spanish maritime security governance in the Indian Ocean Region
• 4. German maritime security governance: a perspective on the Indian Ocean Region
• 5. Yemeni security-political dynamics and maritime security in the Indian Ocean Region
• 6. The abundant sea: prospects for maritime non-state violence in the Indian Ocean
• 7. Maritime security and port state control in the Indian Ocean Region
• 8. International law and counter-piracy in the Indian Ocean
• Index