WASHINGTON AND LONDON — The Saudis chose to negotiate. The Indian navy opened fire. The U.S. navy said shipping companies should do more to protect their vessels, and the ship owners said governments should guard the high seas.
But everyone wants the barely functioning government of Somalia to control the pirates who sail from its ports to seize the cargo ships and tankers that ply past.
Mightily armed, but slightly baffled, 21st century civilization appears to have no collective answer to piracy, a scourge once considered banished into history.
"These are not just unskilled bandits," said Russian navy spokesman Igor Dygalo. "Most likely we are dealing with two or even three pirate syndicates planning these attacks. They have very good sea communications and they're well armed."
Indian officials said Wednesday that a navy ship exchanged fire with a suspected pirate vessel before blowing it up in waters off the East African coast. And over the weekend, pirates took control of a Saudi oil tanker, leading to negotiations with the Saudi government.
Shipping and security officials say pirates are exploiting the maritime equivalent of what military officers on land call ungovernable spaces: vast, remote regions made lawless because of failed states, mostly out of the reach of international militaries. They find the ships fairly easy to capture, and many shipping companies are willing to pay lucrative ransoms to free hijacked crews and cargo.
Like the globe's other piracy hot spot, the narrow Strait of Malacca between Malaysia and Indonesia, the Gulf of Aden is one of the most sensitive choke points in global commerce, a passageway for an array of valuable cargo such as oil, weapons and manufactured goods shuttling between Europe and Asia.
While the stable, comparatively wealthy Southeast Asian countries that line the Malacca Strait have committed their naval and coastal forces to stamping out hijackings and piracy, the Gulf of Aden is bordered by poor or dysfunctional countries like Djibouti, Yemen and particularly Somalia, home to a long-simmering civil war and a central government that barely exists.
"The area is much bigger," said Rand Corp.'s Peter Chalk, author of a study on piracy and terrorism at sea. "You do not have that kind of regional cooperation now, and you have a huge void of governance in Somalia. All of those factors make dealing with this problem that much more difficult."
