The international shipping community is looking at the upcoming Djibouti conference in January 2009 to make some headway into tackling the rampant piracy in the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia with the hope of forming an anti-piracy naval force.
Speaking at a seminar on Piracy on High Seas organised by the Association of Master Mariners of Calcutta (AMMC), L K Panda, principal officer and joint director general of shipping, government of India, said that the Arab League of nations are also likely to meet in January as the oil trade in the region has been affected on account of the Somalian pirates.
"Nearly 12 per cent of the world's oil cargo moves through the Gulf of Aden, and 659 miles of coastline off Somalia is susceptible to attack besides the high seas. So far the approach from individual countries sparing their naval forces has been fragmented. A coordinated move is required urgently", Panda said.
Highlighting the legal hurdles, he said the pirates would typically hijack ships in the high seas and navigate them into the territiorial waters of Somalia.
"United Nations (UN) should adopt resolutions and sanctions to tackle the legal complications arising out of a nation's sovereign rights over its coastal waters. International law should facilitate action against the pirates operating out of their Somalian base and not see that as an action against the country itself", he explained.
Meanwhile, UN Security Council resolution 1816 passed in June 2008 had allowed foreign vessels to enter the territorial waters of Somalia to combat pirates in cooperation with the Transitional Federation Government (TFG) of Somalia.
"Somalian pirates have attacked 95 ships this year and 39 have been taken as hostages", Panda said.
Besides this, around 22 ships have gone missing in the last four years and according to unconfirmed reports most of these vessels now had different names, flag and changes in the superstructure, leading mariners claimed here.
These 'phantom ships' were usually deployed by agencies to carry illegal cargo, mariners alleged on grounds of anonymity.
Emphasising on the need to have a concerted international effort to cleanse the coastline of Somalia, Panda said that this was urgently required as taking an alternate route around Africa through Cape Town avoiding the Gulf of Aden would double the distance and add more than 12 days to the ship's itinerary at a speed of 15 nautical miles per hour.
Freight costs would go up by 30 per cent.
