PoliGazette’s Vicki No-Veil reports that the situation at the Horn of Africa is running out of hand; pirates have taken over.

Note by MvdG: this is Vicki No-Veil’s first post for PoliGazette. An introductory post will be published by me later today.

Imagine the scene: a German family sailing in the Gulf of Aden, off the coast of Yemen, looks on in horror as their yacht is approached and boarded by a gang of ten pirates, guns blazing. The family and their captain are herded into small speedboats, which race to the shore of nearby Somalia, coastguards in hot pursuit. The pirates abandon their boats on the shore, and haul their human cargo up into the mountains between the regions of Somaliland and Puntland, there to await rescue or ransom or death.

Welcome to the world of modern piracy. The above incident, which occurred June 24, is only the latest in a worldwide resurgence of maritime terrorism. The Somali pirates, however, are notorious even among their bloodthirsty brethren for the frequency and brazenness of their attacks. In 2007 alone, more than 25 ships were seized off the coast of Somalia, and this year is on pace to meet or exceed that benchmark.

What is behind this piracy boom? Toss together a mixture of favorable geography, chaotic political conditions, and international reluctance to act, and you have the ingredients for a flourishing trade in ships and their human as well as physical cargo.

Somalia occupies the piece of land known as the Horn of Africa, with its strategic access to the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Indian Ocean. The Somali pirates have been getting bolder and venturing further from their shores; the International Maritime Bureau notes the use of Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs) against ships and advises mariners to keep at least 200 miles out to sea.

The nation of Somalia, however, is mostly a polite fiction. It has not had a working government in 17 years, and the present transitional government is struggling with the task of holding together the assorted breakaway and autonomous regions in the face of tribal and clan warfare, as well as an al-Qaeda-inspired Islamic insurgency.

The first break came in 1991, with the establishment of the independent Republic of Somaliland, in an attempt to keep the northern region distanced from the tribal fighting farther south. Although this claim has not been recognized by any country or the United Nations, it remains a haven of relative peace and prosperity within the chaos of present-day Somalia.

Following the civil war of the 1990s, which included the disastrous US-led intervention that ended with the Black Hawk Down incident, the regions of Puntland, Juba, Southwestern Somalia, and Galmudug declared themselves to be autonomous, though not independent, states. Various attempts at national reconciliation failed, and the present Transitional Federal Government has had to contend not only with inter-tribal conflicts but with the Islamic Courts Union insurgency that led to a 2006 Ethiopian invasion in an attempt to wipe out the jihadists.

Out of all this mess emerged a group of entrepreneurs who managed to turn chaos into a tidy profit: the pirates. One of the more memorable incidents last year was the hijacking of the Danish cargo ship the Danica White as it sailed from Dubai to Kenya. The crew was eventually released after 80 days of captivity when the ship’s owner paid an undisclosed ransom. The pirates had demanded $1.5 million.

The United Nations passed a special resolution last year authorizing international patrols in Somali waters and allowing foreign warships and aircraft to enter Somalian territory in pursuit of pirates. So far, however, most governments have been reluctant to intervene, preferring to let ship owners quietly pay off the hijackers.

One exception was the seizure of the French yacht the Ponant in April of this year. The owner of the Ponant paid a ransom to obtain the release of the 30 crew members held captive. But as the hostages were led away to safety, French commandos swooped down on the escaping pirates with helicopter gunships, capturing 6 of them and recovering about half of the ransom money. Five more were reportedly killed on the ground, although some managed to escape. The French commander of the operation modestly denied claims that the pirates had been slaughtered en masse. “It was an intervention, not a pulverisation,” General Jean-Louis Georgelin told a Paris news conference.

Germany, however, has been reluctant to use its warships deployed off the coast of Somalia to rescue the family kidnapped last month. As health concerns mount for the hostages and the kidnappers demand a $2 million ransom, the Germans appear paralyzed by fear of a constitutional crisis provoked by the use of force. The Deputy Defense Minister, a Christian Democrat, says that a constitutional amendment would be necessary to authorize a rescue attempt, while his Social Democrat counterpart in the Foreign Ministry says that only a resolution creating a crisis group would be needed.

So what can be done? Short of a miraculous intervention that would knit the fragmented segments of Somali society into a cohesive whole, it is not realistic to expect much help from the Somalian government, though it should certainly be encouraged to take more responsibility for patrolling its own waters and enforcing its own laws. The brunt of the work is going to have to be done by the countries whose ships need access to the Indian Ocean. It will also require moving beyond the traditional cliches of “not negotiating with terrorists” and that “paying ransom only encourages more piracy.”

The problem with paying ransom, as I see it, is not the money itself, which could be recouped through insurance or written off as a cost of doing business in a hazardous area. The problem is letting the pirates use the money to buy more and better arms or to finance insurgencies. Dead pirates, however, cannot enjoy their ill-gotten gains. A steady application of force, as exemplified by the Ponant raid, might be enough to persuade the surviving pirates to turn their entrepreneurial skills to much better use.