On many days the giant container ships lined up ten deep just outside the entrance to Mombasa’s seaport, awaiting their turn to offload cargo. It was a sign of East Africa’s growing economy that there were more ships than spots at Mombasa’s cargo terminals.
But lately there have been fewer ships. On Wednesday afternoon, just one vessel anchored in the distance, while a handful of outbound vessels emerged from the harbor and turned south.
Across Mombasa, people associated with the region’s sea trade are feeling the pinch. Fewer ships mean less work for ship’s agents, harbor pilots, contract mariners, stevedores and others. Many of them agree on the major cause of the downturn: the thousands of increasingly sophisticated pirates who trawl the waters off the Somali coast, just a few hundred miles north of Mombasa.
This year pirates have attacked more than 100 large vessels and seized scores. Some of the more notable prizes include a Ukrainian ship laden with weapons and a Saudi oil tanker hauling $100 million worth of crude. Many captured ships and their crews have been released after the ships’ owners paid ransoms in the millions of dollars, but some 200 civilian seafarers remain in pirate captivity in Somalia.
Piracy is not a new problem. The pirate scourge has its roots in the 1990s, following the disastrous civil war that left much of Somalia in ruins. Somali fishermen, fed up with foreign fishing vessels taking advantage of the country’s chaos to plunder Somali fisheries, took it upon themselves to board vessels fishing illegally and force them to pay a fee. It was a small step for these do-it-yourself fishery enforcers to organize and equip with heavier weapons, call themselves the “Somali coast guard” and begin holding ships for ransom. By 2005 pirates were capable of mounting coordinated attacks on cruise liners and container ships plying international waters hundreds of miles from Somalia’s coast.
The first true victims — discounting those fishermen illegally working in Somali waters — were Kenyans. In the late 1990s, it was common for Kenyan fishermen to mount fully legal expeditions into Somali waters in search of tuna and other big fish. They would call at the governing committee of a given coastal region and request permission to fish before deploying their nets and lines. Pirates began targeting these operations.
Read the rest at World Politics Review.
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