Brussels, 16/07/2013 (Agence Europe) - After spending around €1 billion in five years, the EU today congratulated itself on a concrete result of its support action in Somalia. The activity of Somali pirates is indeed lower. It is not perhaps non-existent but, in over 12 months, only one merchant ship has been hijacked. Officials from the European External Action Service (EEAS), alongside the commander of the Eunavfor naval operation Atalanta, Rear Admiral Bob Tarrant, were thus able to assert on Tuesday 16 July that this operation is a real “success story” - even if pirates are still a threat.
Six ships and two surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft. This is the staff currently deployed off the Somali coast as part of the European operation to fight against piracy. However, the EU is not alone. NATO has a similar operation and China, the Russian Federation and other countries also have frigates to discourage pirates from venturing into the sea.
The temptation for some Somalis is great and has not diminished in the slightest, Tarrant nevertheless stated at a press conference in Brussels. Piracy is above all a criminal activity. It is sustained by ransoms often paid to free hostages from merchant ships, which have been captured in a maritime area that has continued to expand - starting from the Gulf of Aden and finishing in the vast Indian Ocean. The European operation therefore needs to continue, in Tarrant's opinion, for as long as the conditions persist that favour the activity of the three main groups of pirates in Somalia.
This naval operation is just one piece in the vast puzzle of the EU's strategy for Somalia, recalled Nick Westcott, the EEAS director for Africa. The puzzle nevertheless is a moving picture as its other pieces take new shapes with time. The European Union training mission in Somalia (EUTM Somalia) - the principle activity of which is located in Uganda for security reasons - will thus soon open a new chapter, this time in the centre of the turbulent town of Mogadishu where sporadic fighting is always taking place.
Kicking off this new chapter, the EU wants to achieve a twofold objective - to prove symbolically that that situation on the ground has improved to the extent that a European presence can be fixed, and to begin to advise the new federal government of Somalia, on the security level, to help it extend its empire across all the territory of the country. Once the control of a legitimate authority is assured in the most isolated places, often used to organise the pirate expeditions, the phenomenon of Somali piracy will be doomed to a definitive end, Tarrant believes. (JK/transl.fl)