The old approach to dealing with pirates

Earlier this month, Russian Special Forces stormed a hijacked Russian oil tanker, shot one of the Somali pirates and arrested the other ten.

A day later, the Russian government announced they were freeing the pirates because they didn’t want to pay for their imprisonment.

Then, in typical Russian style, they took them out to sea, confiscated their navigation equipment, and released them in their little boat. The pirates are now missing, presumed dead.

It’s a peculiar sequence of events. But is this the way forward for dealing with the problem of Somali pirates?

Piracy is now rampant off the coast of Somali and in the Gulf of Aden – one of the world’s busiest shipping routes.

In 2009 there were 217 attacks by Somali pirates with 47 vessels hijacked and 867 crew members taken hostage. Given the state of lawlessness and corruption within Somalia, these figures are expected to rise in 2010.

A lot of companies simply pay the million dollar ransom to get their ship, crew and cargo back (the Russian ship, the Moscow University, was carrying $50m worth of crude oil).

However, international war ships are now heavily patrolling the area and can come to the aid of hijacked ships more quickly.

And the shipping crews are getting smarter too. When they realised they were being hijacked, the crew of the Moscow University disabled the ship, sent out a distress signal, locked themselves in a safe room and waited for the big guns to arrive.

With no humans at risk, the Russian forces easily overcame the stranded pirates.

Russian officials initially said the captured pirates would be taken to Moscow to face charges.

However, the defence ministry later advised that the remaining ten pirates would be released due to “imperfections” in international law and “an incomplete international legal basis” to keep pirates detained.

They also mentioned something about not wanting to “feed some pirates.”

Having already stripped them of their weapons and navigation equipment, the Russians then took them 300 miles out to sea, and released them in their inflatable boat. Officials on the ship say they lost contact with the boat’s radio beacon within an hour.

Given that the offending pirates are now missing and presumed dead, there has been speculation that Russia may have let some old rules of the sea apply – be it straight execution or simply leaving the pirates in a state where their chances of survival were minimal.

This view is apparently shared by the pirates’ associates, who are now threatening retribution against Russian vessels.

To be fair on the Russians, the practice of releasing captured pirates minus their weapons and navigation equipment a long way from shore is not unusual.

This is because there is no set international process or court for prosecuting pirates. It’s all well and good capturing them, but deciding what to do next is proving problematic for the international community.

There are plenty of suspected Somali pirates awaiting trial: 100 in Kenya, 38 in the Seychelles and a number in the US, France and the Netherlands. But the process is slow, costly and in no way centralised.

So perhaps the old fashioned way of dealing with such captives might be used more often. The method is efficient, and some might say just – the pirates are pirates after all.

But it’s severely inhumane and possibly a little harsh considering the pirates rarely ever harm their hostages, and are largely responding to illegal fishing in their waters by Europeans and Asians.

Indeed, most people would say leaving Bernie Madoff and other white collar thieves in the middle of the Atlantic would be going a bit far.

Back to the front line though, you can only assume the use of safe rooms by crews will catch on. And therefore more ships could get returned without having to pay a ransom.

But given this, and the unclear international law on the matter, one could also assume that more pirates will end up dead. This could result in a fresh approach to hijacking from the pirates themselves.

And if things do take that course, the previously routine game of piracy in the Gulf of Aden – steal a boat, get some money – could potentially get a whole lot more violent.

By Lenska Papich