JODY CLARKE
Friday, November 05, 2010
advertisements
Written in English, alongside a prayer from the Qur'an in Arabic, on the prow of the 4m-long skiff is a phone and fax number. It even has an address. "PO Box 5529 Dubai -- Inshore fishing vessels." It's not what you'd expect to find on a Somali pirate boat. But then, until last year, the Seychelles was the last place you would expect to find Somali pirates.
"They buy them from Dubai," said Lieutenant Colonel Michael Rosette, looking over the collection of Somali pirate boats the Seychelles coast guard he commands has captured in the past year.
"They don't look like much. But they can make speeds of more than 20 knots. They come fast, firing AK-47s and RPGs, which allows them to put up ladders on the side of ships and board."
Before 2009 there were no attacks on Seychelles-owned vessels by Somali pirates. Last year there were two, with one pirate vessel coming within 15km of the Indian Ocean archipelago's main island, Mahe.
Bad season on its way
And now that the winter trade winds are over and the seas have turned calmer, he expects a lot more in the following months. "It's going to be a bad season."
With up to $12-million in ransoms now been paid for big oil tankers, piracy has never been more lucrative. That makes the job of Rosette and the 100-strong Seychelles coast guard more difficult than ever.
They have just two fishery patrol boats at their disposal and one of them, the Italian-built Andromache, is 28 years old.
This wasn't much of a problem up until last year, when the coast guard's main job was to protect the valuable fishing grounds around the country's 1,3-million square kilometres of territorial waters from illegal trawling. The Seychelles boasts the third-largest tuna stocks in the world. But as international navies worked to rid the shipping canals of pirates around the Gulf of Aden between Yemen and Somalia, pirates have chosen to move south and east of their traditional hunting grounds. And that's turned the Seychelles into a hub for anti-piracy operations in the Indian Ocean.
Source: Mail and Guardian