Piracy: Operation Atalanta (EUC Report)

Lord Hamilton of Epsom Excerpts

Wednesday 10th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My Lords, before I left Sub-Committee C, I was very concerned that this report was going to be both inconsequential and thoroughly wet; I am afraid that that is what it has turned out to be. It is inconsequential because its main findings are that everything should carry on as it has been over the past few months. As my noble friend Lord Teverson pointed out, things are not improving in any way whatever. I would have been much happier if this report had shown courage in trying to change the way that we are dealing with this very serious problem.

The report, as my noble friend Lord Teverson has indicated, called for additional resources—as all reports like this are liable to do—but that is flying in the face of the fact that certainly the Europeans are cutting their defence budgets in every direction. UAVs are in very short supply. Certainly, the British could not produce them, because if we have any we want to use them in Afghanistan. I do not know whether any other European countries have spare UAVs. Everybody wants helicopters, and our strategic defence review has cut the number of capital ships that the Royal Navy will have, so we would ask for more resources more in hope than reality.

My noble friend Lord Teverson referred to the risk/reward ratio for Somali pirates that was mentioned in the report. It is extraordinary that it is almost impossible to catch any of these pirates. You have to catch them in the act of committing piracy, which is extremely difficult. It is not legitimate, if you catch a small boat with ladders and grappling hooks and God knows what else, to say that this indicates that these people are pirates. All that you can do in those circumstances is confiscate the ladders and grappling hooks, if they have not already been thrown overboard before you capture the boat. The risks that Somali pirates run of being caught are very small. We will have to see whether the 400 who are awaiting trial receive any significant punishments. We should make no mistake: the law enforcement going on is not much of a disincentive to these pirates.

The rewards—the millions paid in ransoms—amount to multiples of lifetime earnings for Somali fishermen. The rewards are extremely high for these people, and the risks have not been developed nearly enough. The stakes must be raised. It was extraordinary that the report said it was a very good idea if uniformed military people went on cargo ships, presumably so that if they were attacked by pirates, they could shoot at them; but that it was not a good idea to use civilian security guards to do the same thing—although, as we know, civilian security guards in these circumstances might have been people in uniform a few months earlier, and just as well trained as any of the military. There is a hang-up about this. The International Maritime Organisation and the shipping industry do not like the idea of using armed security guards, but we must do this. There is a moment when pirates approach a ship to attack it when they are extremely vulnerable. At that point, a guard with a machine-gun can create appalling havoc in that boat. We must start raising the stakes, otherwise we will get absolutely nowhere.

My noble friend Lord Teverson referred to the fact that the violence is now increasing. This blows away the idea that somehow, if we use violence against pirates, they will increase the violence that they use against us. We are at the moment collapsing under every threat from the pirates, yet still the violence is increasing. In the evidence given in the back of the report, I mentioned that I had listened to a programme about a merchant captain who had been attacked by pirates. He was sprayed with AK-47 machine-gun bullets on his ship, and two rocket-propelled grenades were fired. One of them missed the bridge and the other went into a fuel tank. The tank was empty, which I said at the time was probably a good thing. As noble Lords will know, if you have a fuel tank with a lot of fumes in it, you can end up with an explosive mixture which can blow apart a ship. If the tank had been half-filled with fuel, that probably would have been the most likely thing to have blown up the ship completely. These people are not mucking about. They are playing a very dangerous game and we are treating them with kid gloves. I fail to understand why.

I also thought that the whole attitude of the report to paying ransoms was unbelievable. We said that we should go off and employ professional ransom negotiators. Has it not occurred to members of the committee that if you do this, you are merely feeding the dragon? You are encouraging more people to go out and kidnap people on ships and ask for ransoms. It would have been better if the committee had shown a bit of courage and said that we should stop paying ransoms because, until we do, this piracy will go on indefinitely. Why do we recommend that armed military personnel should go on merchant ships but not private security guards who carry out precisely the same operation?

This is a disappointing report. It will do nothing to reduce the amount of piracy in the Red Sea and I regret that I came off the committee and could not express my views more forcefully there.