DAY 50 - 1178 h into the FAINA crisis
UPDATE SUMMARY :
Increased efforts for a peaceful release continued, but the now one and a half month long stand-off concerning Ukrainian MV FAINA is still not yet solved, though intensive negotiations have continued and both sides are striving to finalize the modalities of the safe release of crew and vessel.
Unfortunately the Ukrainian parliament is in serious turmoil but it is hoped that the negotiator and the Ukrainian team up front will not be influenced from the brawls at home and can continue unabated to work in further solving the Faina’s problem and that the positive developments of the last few days can continue.
other news from abducted ships
A Turkish-flagged tanker named ’Karagöl’, owned by Istanbul-based YDC Maritime which is partnered by a deputy from the Turkish AK Party, Hasan Kemal Yardımcı, was sea-jacked yesterday at 16h02 off the coast of Yemen. The Turkish Maritime Affairs Directorate confirmed the ship has a crew of 14 Turkish nationals and was on passage to India. MT KARAGOL is listed to belong to YDC Denizcilik ve Ticaret Ltd in Turkey and is managed by AYDER TANKERS AS. The 2007 built tanker with a gross tonnage of 3,974 is insured by the American Steamship Owner P&I association. Kemal Yardımcı stated : "This is the first Turkish flagged ship to be hijacked. We must stand up for our flag", and urged Turkish Minster of Transportation, Binali Yıldırım as well as the Minister of Foreign Affairs Ali Babacan to take action. The crew of the MV GENIOUS, who were captured by Somali pirates on 25th September, will be released on 25th November, according to sources from Azerbaijan. The company owning the ship will transmit the ransom to the pirates on 19-20 November and the ship will arrive in Dubai on 25th November where the captives, including six Georgian citizens, will be relieved, the head of the consulate department of Georgian Foreign Ministry Tamar Kamarauli said at a news conference on 13th November. According to Kamarauli, Georgian Consul to Greece Konstantin Sabiashvili participated in the yet to materialise release of the captives. Negotiations to release other captured vessels MV ACTION and CEC FUTURE are underway. Reports from Somalia indicate that a Chinese tanker has been abducted already two or three days ago, while no official report has confirmed this yet. The vessel is said to be held now somewhere between Ras Hafun and Hawo on the Somali coast.
The crew on MT STOLT VALOR is hopeful that the closing agreement between the abductors and the negotiator from the company will lead now to a fast resolution, though certain disagreements among the pirates themselves seem to persist.
13. Nov. 2008
Though observer had noted the incident earlier, the Russian navy only yesterday confirmed that Russian and British naval ships had repelled a pirate attack on Tuesday in the Gulf of Aden. The Russian navy press service stated yesterday that the Russian frigate Neustrashimy and the British frigate Cumberland had foiled pirates who fired automatic weapons toward a Danish ship under Panama flag, the MV POWERFUL with Greek and Filipino crew and managed by Maryville Manila Inc. The attackers allegedly tried twice to seize it. A spokesman revealed that both war ships had sent out helicopters, a Russian Ka-27 and a British Lynx after having received the distress signal. The Russian statement first provided few other details about the confrontation, including the day it occurred, and what later turned out to be a fatal shooting at another location involving British troops. The Russian navy spokesman released his information on Wednesday on condition of anonymity, citing navy policy.
Diplomatic relations between Britain and Russia have been strained following the murder of Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko, who was killed with a radioactive substance in London two years ago. Moscow sent the Neustrashimy to the area in September and said at the time its ships would regularly go to zones where pirates were active. Some observers say the Kremlin is increasingly using the Russian navy to project its renewed power.
Shortly thereafter the British Navy then had to issue a statement confirming the incident and stated that later actually British marine commandos launched from HSM Cumberland in powerful attack-boats with machine guns and SA80 assault rifles had tried to encircle and stop a Yemen-flagged Dhow (traditional wooden ship) in the Gulf of Aden. "As they approached, however, several of the pirates, a mixed crew of Somalis and Yemenis, swung their assault rifles in their direction and opened fire. The MoD said the Royal Marines returned fire “in self defence”, and then boarded the dhow.", the statement reads.
While seafarers suffer at the hands of criminal Somali gangs hi-jacking merchant vessels as well as at the mercy of the negotiations-delaying ship-owners and their insurances, only the killings make it into media headlines. In what ECOTERRA’s observatory had reported already on Tuesday and the Russian media then leaked on Wednesday forced only thereafter the Royal British Navy to issue a statement and allowed the world media to get their story today, while a direct request to NATO sent already on Tuesday for a clear incident report remains unanswered.
But what the British gutter-press and a group of their mentally less fortunate readers, which regularly express themselves horribly on their comment sections, celebrate as a glorious victory of their Royal Navy over Somali pirates must be seen with a very critical eye.
Sure, if everything was like the British navy spokesman stated it can be seen in the light of a legitimate response by a protective naval force sanctioned by United Nations Security Council resolutions and British self-made rules of engagement against an armed aggressor trying to sea-jack a merchant vessel. But was it like that ? Many questions remain and the outcome of a full investigation instigated now by the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) first will have to be seen. An MoD spokesman stated that an incident investigation especially into the fatal shooting and the killing of three people is being conducted, but such is more like an internal report and not an independent investigation.
"It is believed to be the first time the [British Royal] Navy has taken lives at sea since the Falklands War and possibly the first pirates it has killed in centuries.", the Daily Telegraph remarked. However, one earlier incident involving HSM Cumberland has apparently gone completely unreported by the navy or the media, while it is known locally.
The UK is still in the process of drawing up a memorandum of understanding concerning their engagement in anti-piracy operations with the Somali government and so far does not have any such agreement. The Russians have a kind of a permission, expressed by the Somali Ambassador to Russia in a verbal note, but no such permission has been ratified by the Somali Parliament, which is in the process to be dissolved. If the British or the Russian navies have a legitimate agreement covering such cases with the Government of Yemen has not been revealed. The Indian Navy having also successfully, but bloodlessly averted pirate attacks against merchant ships in the Gulf of Aden has a clear policy and stated that it will not venture into the uncertain legal waters by entering into the territorial waters, killing presumed pirates unless during a direct pirate attack or take prisoners.
The actual incident itself was reported now by the British navy to have taken place already on Tuesday in the Gulf of Aden around 60 nautical miles south of the Yemeni coast. Such area description is much to vage in a sea, where there are no more ungoverned "international waters" since the 200 nm EEZ territories of both countries - Somalia and Yemen - are equally reduced where the distance between the two shores is less than 400 nm. In most areas of the Gulf of Aden the EEZs as delineated by the provisions of UNCLOS are less than 75 to 100 nm for each country. The so called protected shipping corridor through the Gulf of Aden is staked out mainly inside the Yemeni EEZ. If it therefore is presumed that the incident took place inside the EEZ of Yemen, it should be known, which agreement the British Navy has with the Government of Yemen and if the British navy has filed a report with the Yemeni authorities. A clear position of the location of an incident would certainly also help to assess the factual and legal situation, but regularly such is either not provided or even forged by fishing-, merchant- or other vessels, which venture - for whatever reason - into the Somali waters and usually after something happens report false positions. Even the Anti-Piracy Centre in Kuala-Lumpur has no direct possibility to verify positions relayed to them, though the true position is known, at least when an automated distress signal is sent out via its satellite connection. But the true coordinates are often enough kept secret by the owners of the ship and their crew.
It is obvious in this case, that many media - maybe intentionally mislead by the British navy statement - also mix two separate incidences, one being the attack of "Somali pirates" in small, fast skiffs with outboard engines against the Danish freighter MV POWERFUL, which was repulsed allegedly by a joint operation launching helicopters from a Russian and the British warship and secondly an attack much later in the day by British commandos in semi-rigid inflatables launched from HMS Cumberland against a slow motorized Dhow under Yemen flag, having one skiff in tow. The two incidences might very well be connected, but so far the British Navy has failed to provide evidence which would proof that the people on the Dhow were connected in any way to the earlier attack against the merchant vessel. The British troops killed two Somali and one Yemeni National on the Dhow, allegedly in "self-defence" after having been fired upon from the Dhow, whose people on board didn’t want the troopers to stop or board the vessel..
What becomes apparent is the fact that so far the navies operating now in the anti-piracy operations do not report to the Somali or Yemeni Governments nor ultimately to the United Nations on whose resolutions they base their actions. Together with the respective states the United Nations therefore must be held responsible for unleashing naval powers but not controlling them, if in any case innocent people would be killed.
It also will be interesting to further investigate the Yemen, Dubai and Kenya connections in the whole piracy picture around the Horn of Africa. Regularly business people from Aden seem to be acting as investors for the pirate-gangs and even the re-fuelling for hi-jacked ships, which have run out of the commodity for their generators, is directly supplied by Dhows from Yemen and not from Somalia. Likewise the direct handling to manage the release-operations for the sea-jacked ships comes often from Yemen, Dubai or Kenya - some certainly genuine, but many obviously very questionable.
Even Roger Middleton, author of recent report on Somalia for the influential Chatham House foreign affairs think tank, said that despite sustaining casualties, he did not expect pirates to cease or even cut back on attempts to hijack merchant ships. "I don’t think it will scare them off,” he said.
Another regional analyst observes that the latest incident could easily trigger a more hostile, violent and even deadly response from Somali pirates toward British seamen abducted or stranded in Somalia and believes that there would have been other possibilities for the Type-22 frigate, HMS Cumberland, to get the people on the lame Dhow to surrender without firing a single shot. Even if that Dhow was one of the much wanted motherships of the pirates it would have been much better to apprehend it and all people on board properly without any killing also in order for an independent body to get more details about the network and modus operandi of the pirates. Russian analysts already wonder, why no British or US merchant vessels are sea-jacked. But with such operations as reported most likely a further escalation will be the outcome, observers believe and hope that an independent tribunal could interrogate the people arrested from that Dhow.
Since North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, according to a statement read by one of his staff today, was quick to praise the U.K.’s Royal Navy for its actions during a patrol in the Gulf of Aden, which resulted in two suspected Somali pirates and a Yemeni being killed, it is presumed that NATO has taken responsibility for the incident involving the British warship and the Yemeni Dhow and therefore NATO must also thoroughly investigate and present a final report on the true happenings.
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