World can’t let this last for long
We feel relieved at the release of the Samho Dream, a 300,000-ton crude carrier, by Somali pirates over the weekend. We are also concerned that the record-high payment of $9.5 million has left a bad precedent for 26 other captured ships and 400-odd hostages waiting to be ransomed in the African country, including the 241-ton Korean trawler Keummi.
Government diplomats and company officials deserve praise for seven months of hard bargaining to bring back 24 crew members and $170 million worth of crude oil relatively unscathed.
Yet the question remains: How long should this be allowed to go on? The frustration grows even deeper now that the pirates seem to have included Korean ships among their main targets, and that the kidnapping continues despite the government’s dispatch of a 4,500-ton destroyer complete with up-to-date patrolling devices to the Indian Ocean to protect Korean-flagged commercial vessels.
True, Queen Elizabeth I knighted Francis Drake, the most famous pirate of Great Britain, in the 16th century. But that was then, and the world can ill afford to let piracy grow in scale and more systematized to emerge as a country’s main cash cow in the 21st century.
Somalia is one of the so-called failed states gripped by virtual anarchy for nearly two decades. Even the United States has given up trying to normalize the country since the ``Black Hawk Down” incident in the early 1990s. All this shows that any serious efforts to clear up Somali pirates should be multilateral and made not just on the sea but on the land as well.
So the governments involved should step up maritime patrols and the sharing of information, and, at the same time, help the poverty-stricken East African country and its neighboring states strengthen their basic capacity to maintain public peace and order by arresting pirates, putting them on trial and having them serve jail terms. International cooperation to block the pirates’ money-laundering channels and information-gathering routes should also follow.
Given the rampant piracy is due in considerable part to the lack of other ``normal” industries, foreign governments also might as well consider replenishing infrastructure for industrialization in the long run.
It is against this backdrop Korea will take up the chairmanship of the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia (CGPCS), in its annual meeting in New York Wednesday. About 50 governments and international agencies are taking part in the CGPCS, which was set up in January 2009 to fight hijackings on the seas, which cost at least $1 billion in East Africa alone, in damages to crews and vessels, delayed cargo transportation and insurance payments.
Korea is urged to play a leading role in pushing through the organization’s pending issue of setting up an international court to punish arrested Somali pirates in Kenya. Seoul should also be ready to redouble maritime patrols in the region under consultation with the United Nations and International Maritime Organization.
Letting the pirates roam the sea unchallenged is a global shame.