From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Wed Dec 02 2009 - 06:17:49 EST
A Fishing War Off Somalia?
By: <http://miller-mccune.com/about/profile/638> Michael Scott Moore |
December 02, 2009 | 05:00 AM (PST) |
Despite some successes in thwarting Somali pirates, itchy trigger fingers
may serve no one's interests except for private security agencies.
When pirates attacked the Maersk Alabama for a second time this year on Nov.
18, a private security team fought them off. The reaction in the American
press was instant. "Lesson from foiled pirate attack on the Maersk Alabama?"
wrote the <http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1119/p02s01-usmi.html> Christian
Science Monitor. "Fire back."
Some observers fell over themselves advising Spain to arm its fishing boats,
because a Spanish tuna trawler, the Alakrana, had just been released a day
earlier for a reported (and record-breaking) ransom of $3.3 million. The
Spanish government had already changed its law in October to allow fishing
vessels to carry weapons. And on Sunday another Spanish trawler was attacked
by two persistent pirate skiffs. The Ortube Berria had an armed team aboard
and shook the pirates only with gunfire.
"They would not give up. They would simply not give up," the trawler's
captain
<http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gB7YMEDuCwwY9ncDOtPAkEI4-
H2wD9C9B6T00> said. "If we had not been armed, they would have caught us."
The kneejerk response is: So what? It's a dangerous world, and if ship
owners and their crews want to risk an escalation with pirates by hiring
private gunmen, well, firms like Xe (formerly
<http://hamptonroads.com/2009/05/sailors-blackwater-antipiracy-ship-claim-ha
rrassment> Blackwater) are here to help.
But hiring armed teams to defend fishing boats is a delicate matter.
European trawlers like the Ortube Berria and the Alakrana have been
unwelcome off Somalia for years because in the absence of a strong Somali
government, they've been known to help themselves to the fish. These fishing
disputes, from some Somalis'
<http://miller-mccune.com/europe/what-are-those-warships-doing-off-somalia-1
615> point of view, led to piracy in the first place.
"And now foreign fishermen are hiring private security, which is a little
scary," said Stig Jarle Hansen, a Horn of Africa expert at the
<http://www.nibr.no/publikasjoner/rapporter/1221/> Norwegian Institute for
Urban and Regional Research. "Some of these companies I don't trust. And now
they will go into Somali waters," he predicted, "and there you can have
increased armed clashes not just between pirates and private security but
even between full-time fishermen and private security."
One reason for the fishing chaos off Somalia is not just a lack of local
enforcement, but a failure by the Somali government to assert its "economic
zone" in the water - conventionally a 200-mile band of control. Territorial
waters reach 12 miles out to sea, but since a U.N. agreement in 1982, a
nation's "exclusive economic zone," or EEZ, can extend 200 miles before the
ocean becomes a free-for-all.
Like a lot of African countries, said Hansen, the Somalis never formally
claimed an EEZ. "So the argument amongst some of the illegal fishermen is
that this zone has not been declared. That's why they say it's possible to
go in and fish."
But legal experts say the argument is weak, since the international
precedent of a 200-mile EEZ is so well established. The U.N. declared it
enforceable as part of its
<http://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/convention_overview_conve
ntion.htm> 1994 Convention of the Law of the Sea.
America, at first glance, has no dog in this race. But the conflict between
Somali and European fishermen is a precise echo of the so-called "tuna war"
off Ecuador in the 1960s and '70s, when Ecuador, Chile and Peru were trying
to assert a 200-mile fishing zone for themselves. American tuna boats
recognized a 3-mile limit. When Ecuador seized and fined an American vessel
in 1963, a series of escalations - seizures, warning shots, formal trade
sanctions - continued for at least eight years, until governments in the
Western Hemisphere came to an informal agreement on 200-mile zones. That
agreement set the precedent for the U.N.'s 1982 convention.
Europe and Africa are engaged in a similar struggle now: Illegal foreign
fishing is a problem up and down the African coast. But fishermen in the
Americas waged this war without large-scale piracy, without rocket-propelled
grenades and without private commando teams on their tuna trawlers. The
Somali situation is at risk of becoming entrenched.
"A whole entire business has grown out of piracy," said Hansen - and not
just among Somali pirate masters. "You have a lot of private security
consultants, who do pirate negotiations, risk management and so on. It's a
big industry on the Western side of things, with a big interest in keeping
things going."