Piracy and the EU

[bamboo]

My 15 year old son brought this snippet to my attention which was on the BBC news website he was going over as part of some sort of 'personal development' lesson.

It concerns the removal of Nato flagged warships in the pirate controlled seaways off Aden and replacing them with EU flagged warships.

The bit neither he nor I can understand is right at the bottom of the article.

"I'd be the first to admit that a naval force itself cannot eradicate piracy... but we can still make a significant contribution to combating piracy," he said.

The task force - codenamed operation Atalanta and working under a UN mandate - is not allowed to board seized ships or to free crews held hostage.

The question has how can these ships make any contribution whatsoever to combating privacy?

Surely a policy of shoot first ask questions afterwards would make a significant contribution to combating piracy.
Why is it that anything that the EU or the UN involves themselves in end up in fence sitting?

[guccij]

Who cares what the flag is. You've misinterpreted the information.

The rules of engagement are simple: the warship orders the pirate vessel to stop. If the pirate vessel doesn't stop, the warship can take appropriate action. In other words, blow it to smithereens. The Royal Navy has killed pirates doing this and if you check out this link http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7768204.stm you will see other nations are also engaged.

Don't let your jaded view of the world's institutions cloud your ability to interpret the facts.

[bamboo]

Surely if the Rules of Engagement allow warships and their crews to fire back once fired upon it should follow that the ships crews or special forces should be allowed to board captured vessels and free the hostages and ships from the pirates control?

It seems that once the pirates board a ship it's game over unless that ship happens to be French in which case they will be killed or captured but they won't be allowed to get away with it.

Clearly the EU/UN/UK rules of engagement are different to the French!

[chris ashdown]

As with terrorists its easy to shoot and kill but not that easy to prove you killed the right people after the event.

Whilst RN ships can board British ships worldwide they are not able to just board others outside UK waters

Whilst no hostages have been killed sofar, it makes sense tonot risk freeing hostages in a very difficult environment

[NormanRouxel]

The Register has a good article - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11...aha_discussed/ - which says that unless there are Marines onboard, most RN ships can only board compliant foreign vessels. The Danish ship that recently sunk a small boat was able to do this as it had Special Forces aboard.

And as for "Mandate" that word sticks in my mind as an obscenity after its use in the Balkans where our troops were "Mandated" not to protect people fleeing certain death at the hands of Serb militias. Reason: in politicians twisted minds, escorting them to safety would have been seen as assisting the Serbs in ethnic cleansing. Result - thousands not ethnically cleansed - just murdered. And, of course, not refugees within the EU either.

[bamboo]

Norman
An excellent article written by someone in the know as it were. Thank you.
Clearly the real problem lies with political control and by implication the vested interests of the politicians in control.
I live in a town that may be building one third of a two carrier contract which will carry American planes that have nothing to fight except other American planes. I say may because the current financial situation may put the deal on the shelf indefinitely.

Even someone as 'jaded' with the world as I apparently am can see that a greater number of smaller carriers armed with planes/boats/marines is a more effective option for a flexible response to any sort of aggression at sea.
Trouble is our short sighted and inflexible politicians didn't plan for the end of the Harriers life even though they knew when the airframe would be beyond it so we had to buy the American replacement which being American are bigger and more expensive and can only land on massive aircraft carriers!

However politicians in the Admiralty and Westminster deem it necessary to build ever bigger & more expensive ships to 'project power'.
We used to send a squadron of ships into places to project power when we had an Empire and the difference was those ships rules of engagement were vastly different to today's and were therefore more effective.