By DAVID STRINGER
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Hutton told BBC radio he believes Somalia could become a terrorist refuge like Afghanistan before the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.
"Somalia is a basket case," Hutton said. "It is a classic area where you have got ungoverned space, no effective state apparatus and criminality and potential terrorism."
British and U.S. warships are patrolling waters off the Somali coast following an increase in piracy, including the recent seizure of a Saudi supertanker loaded with $100 million of crude oil.
"The world can't stand by and see the pirates carry on in the way that they are. We have a collective responsibility to act," Hutton said.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is planning to ask the United Nations to authorize raids inside Somalia on bases used by pirates. But Hutton would not say whether he thought Western military forces needed to root out pirates on land and help rebuild law and order.
"It is far too early to speculate about that," Hutton told BBC radio. "Right now, our mission is dealing with the immediate problem that pirates pose to international shipping on the high seas, but there needs to be proper discussions, of course, about how we can properly deal with this problem in the long term."
Hutton, speaking at a security conference in Bahrain, said he is concerned about the uses to which the millions of dollars in ransoms being collected by pirates could be put.
"We don't want that money to be used to fund insurgencies or terrorism around the world," he said.
But he said Britain has no information that Somali pirates have links to terrorist or Islamic extremist groups.
Source: AP, Dec 14, 2008