SOMALI PIRATES who seized a Ukrainian ship carrying 33 T72 battle tanks - apparantly bound for the autonomous government of South Sudan - yesterday warned against any attempt by Western navies to rescue the vessel's weapons cargo or its crew.
Januna Ali Jama, a spokesman for the pirates in the breakaway north statelet of Puntland said the pirates would soon begin the routine Somali pirate tactic of negotiating the return of the cargo ship Faina to its Ukraine state owners in exchange for a ransom.
Jama told the BBC Somali Service that the pirates demand is £18 million from the Kiev government because apart from the Russian made tanks the Faina is carrying "weapons of all kinds", including rocket-propelled grenades, anti-aircraft guns and many hundreds of thousands of ammunition.
Warning France and the United States, which have warships in the area the Faina was seized - in the Gulf of Aden as it opens into the Indian Ocean - the pirate spokesman said: "Anything that happens is their responsibility."
He said the ship's crew initially fought against the pirate assault, but the attackers, estimated to have been about 100-strong, eventually succeeded in using "tactical manoeuvres" to overpower the crew.
An aide to the Faina's captain told a Moscow news service in a satellite call from the ship's bridge that the vessel is anchored offshore, as the pirates await answers to their ransom demand, and that none of the crew had been injured in the attack or subsequently harmed.
Justifying the attack, Jama said: "I do not think we are in the wrong. Our country is destroyed by foreigners who dump toxic waste at our shores."
Huge waves that battered Puntland after the Asian tsunami on Boxing Day 2004 killed 300 people, destroying thousands of homes and stirring up tonnes of nuclear and toxic wastes illegally dumped offshore in the 1990s.
The United Nations Environment Programme said the tsunami waves washed up rusting containers of toxic waste on the Puntland shoreline which broke up and scattered nuclear, chemical and medical waste inland. UNEP reported many unusual illnesses in the region following the tsunami. It said European companies were involved in the dumping trade, but because of the high levels of insecurity onshore and off the Somali coast, there was never any accurate assessment of the extent of the problem.
Abdullah Elmi Mohamed, a Somali academic studying in Sweden, said European companies charged "approximately $8 per tonne for dumping off Somalia, while in Europe the cost for the disposal and treatment of toxic waste material could go up to $1000 per tonne".
If scores of hijackings of large ships off the Somali coast this year are anything to go by, the Kiev government may have no choice other than to pay the ransom to free the Ukrainian, Russian and Latvian crew, including one 14-year-old boy, and to ensure that the controversial cargo reaches Juba, capital of South Sudan.
Thursday's hijacking of the Faina brings to 62 the number of attacks on large vessels off Somalia this year, and pirates are holding 15 ships and more than 300 crew members, said Noel Choong, who heads the International Maritime Bureau's piracy reporting centre based in Malaysia, another country plagued by high seas piracy.
An irony of the assault on the Faina by an estimated is that it came just as the Royal Canadian Navy frigate Ville de Qu¨¦bec had begun to withdraw from its protection duties further south in waters off the Republic of Somalia. The Canadian government immediately reversed the withdrawal order and its warship will remain in Somali waters until at least the beginning of November.
The Ville de Qu¨¦bec has been protecting merchant vessels ferrying South African-donated grain from the Kenyan port of Mombasa to Mogadishu, capital of the war-torn Republic of Somalia.
However, the pirate syndicates - of which there at least five, each about 1000-strong - operate out of Puntland, far to the north, wrapped around the Horn of Africa where the Gulf of Aden meets the Indian Ocean, which declared itself separate from the Republic of Somalia 10 years ago. Puntland is to Mogadishu what Kurdistan, semi-autonomous and far off in the northern mountains of Iraq, is to Baghdad.
Unrecognised internationally - although the British Embassy in neighbouring Ethiopia maintains close contact with the Puntland government, which is allowing oil exploration by three Western companies - little diplomatic pressure can be put on Puntland, which says piracy grew after international "sea robber" fishing fleets plundered and wrecked its rich fishing grounds. The United Nations estimates that fish worth at least £50 million a year are plundered illegally from Somali waters by Spanish and other foreign boats.
The pirates are unlikely to be unable to unload the tanks because of a lack of specialist heavy-lifting gear in the tiny ports and innumerable coves of Puntland, a barren land three times the area of Scotland which historically depended on fishing and camel and goat-herding.
But that will hardly discourage the pirates. What they want is booty, in the form of on-board cash, cargo and, most importantly, ransom money, which owners are increasingly willing to pay, given the huge values of ships and their cargoes and the daily costs of maintaining them at sea. On the same day as the Faina was captured, another Puntland pirate syndicate released a Japanese ship and its 21-member crew after a £1 million ransom was paid. The 53,000-tonne bulk carrier Stella Maris had a valuable cargo of zinc and lead ingots. And as the Stella Maris was being freed, Somali pirates were hijacking a Greek chemical tanker with 19 crew on board as it sailed through the Gulf of Aden from Europe to the Middle East.
The Faina is believed to be heading to the pirate port of Eyl, the main destination of hijacked ships where Puntland entrepreneurs run special restaurants for the hundreds of seized crewmen and where the pirates' accountants make calculations on laptops and drive state-of-the-art land cruisers.
Kenyan and Western officials said that an American warship is steaming toward the hijacked Ukrainian ship to intercept it, and the Russian Navy announced that it too was sending a frigate, named Neustrashimy Fearless, from the Baltic to the region. The commander of the Baltic Fleet, Viktor Mardusin, said the frigate will stay near Somalia "for more than two months in order to guarantee the safety of Russian ships".
Lt Commander Bill Speaks, a spokesman for the United States military, said: "We are aware of the situation and actively tracking it the Faina." In Washington, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said: "I am not going to speculate on the options we might pursue. We very much care about piracy. We are also concerned about that type of cargo and what it might be used for and the origin of the hijackers."
In early September an unidentified warship captured 14 pirates and destroyed their high-speed motorboat. Puntland fisheries minister Abdulqadir Muse Yusuf said: "We are still investigating the identity of the warship that we think could be American."
Puntland's pirates are for the most part former fishermen with no particular political ideology who have turned to the more lucrative work of plying the seas with binoculars and rocket-propelled grenades, travelling from their light speedboats from at least two mother ships far out at sea.
The New York Times reported that pirates tried to attack an American supply vessel last week. However, the ship fired warning shots and the pirates fled. "These pirates are getting bolder every day," said Andrew Mwangura, programme co-ordinator of the Seafarers' Assistance Program in the Kenyan port of Mombasa, who tracks pirate attacks.
There were 17 attacks in Somali waters in the first two weeks of September alone, according to the International Maritime Bureau's Noel Choong. That compares with 13 attacks for the attacks in the area for all of 2007.
"In my time here I must say that this is the most concentrated period of destabilising activity I have seen in the Gulf of Aden," said Commodore Keith Winstanley, the British deputy commander of the Combined Maritime Forces whose members have been confronting Somali pirate repeatedly since mid-August. Besides The US, Britain, France and Canada, 16 other nations contribute to the Combined Forces.
Lloyd's List, the maritime industry's newspaper, forecasts that ransom payments in the Gulf of Aden alone will this year easily surpass £25 million. The newspaper said hijackings have increased insurance costs tenfold this year for shipping in the Gulf of Aden and are creating an underwriting speciality devoted to Somali piracy alone.
International waters are mostly unpoliced. But from the third week in August the Combined Maritime Forces set up a secure shipping lane through the Gulf of Aden, where the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean meets, with a heavy presence of warships and aircraft from Western navies. Pirates have, however, hijacked vessels even inside the security area, according to Choong and Winstanley.
Worldwide, pirates attacked a known 263 large vessels in 2007, up from a reported 239 in 2006, according to Choong's piracy reporting centre. Southeast Asia, especially the shipping lanes of the Malacca Straits between Malaysia and the huge Indonesian Island of Sumatra, used to be the world's busiest place for pirate attacks. Better co-operation between southeast Asian nations and the consequences of the 2004 tsunami have greatly reduced the number of attacks. Many pirates operated out of Aceh, the northern province of Sumatra, but the tsunami destroyed their ports, wrecked their boats and killed many of the pirates.
Somali piracy easily tops the world table, both in terms of the number of attacks and the money made. It is the Somali financiers sitting mainly in Dubai, Britain, Canada, Denmark and Kenya who make the big money by keeping the bulk of the ransom payments. Pirates based in Nigeria and Peru are also climbing the league table.
France is now circulating a draft resolution in the UN Security Council urging nations to contribute more warships and aircraft to the fight against piracy off Somalia. While the Foreign office has ordered the Royal Navy, to the incredulity of the nation's maritime industry, not to detain Somali pirates from fear of human rights complications, the French are being pro-active.
Twelve Somali pirates captured by French special forces will soon go in trial in Paris on charges of hijacking and hostage-taking.
In early September, Somali pirates boarded the 50ft French Yacht Carr¨¦ d'As Four Aces as it sailed through the Gulf of Aden bound for Australia with a retired couple aboard. The pirates demanded and got an £800,000 ransom, but soon afterwards 30 French commandos, modelled on Britain's Special Boat Service, were parachuted nearby at night by plane. Wearing night-vision goggles and undetectable breathing systems, they swam to the Carr¨¦ d'As, clambered silently aboard, shot one pirate dead, captured six others and released the 60-year-old French couple.
In April, French special forces also released the crew and passengers of a French cruise yacht hijacked in the Gulf of Aden. The commandos then landed in the mountains of Puntland and captured six of the pirates and part of £500,000 in ransom money they had been paid.
"France will not accept that crime pays," said French President Nicolas Sarkozy after the second raid, which he supervised from the Élys¨¦e Palace in Paris, 5000 miles away. "This sea piracy is a fully-fledged criminal industry that endangers our fundamental rights, freedom of movement and international trade."
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