Turkey Moves to Deploy Warship Off Somalia

Turkey will deploy a warship as part of a UN-led force off the Somali coast to prevent pirates from hijacking foreign ships, Foreign Minister Ali Babacan said on Friday.

The government presented a motion to Parliament on Thursday to allow Turkey to deploy naval forces in the region, where more than a dozen commercial vessels have been hijacked by pirates. There have been various exercises to decide on the precautions against piracy, Babacan said. The first option for Turkey was for every nation to send its own naval vessels; the second was to join an EU taskforce codenamed Operation Atalanta; and the third option was joining the UN-led force.

"We have selected the third one. We have assessed this issue in every detail with all of our related institutions," Babacan told reporters at a press conference ahead of his departure for Germany to participate in the 45th Munich Security Conference, which gathered a dozen world leaders and 50 top diplomats and defense officials.

"This is an important and positive step for finding a solution to problems. But the final decision is up to the Turkish Parliament," Babacan added.

The motion envisaged a one-year limit for the deployment in the Gulf of Aden and off the Somali coast.

Brig. Gen. Metin Gürak, head of the General Staff's communications department, said yesterday at a press briefing in Ankara that the General Staff has been involved in efforts related to the motion from the beginning.

The naval forces have been working on sending the warship TCG Giresun to Somalia within the month, Gürak added.

"The threat to our commercial vessels has reached a dimension where it negatively affects our country's trade and economic interests," the motion said.

In a photo released by the Navy Visual News Service on Friday, the US Navy Fleet Ocean Tug USNS Catawba provides fuel and fresh water to motor vessel Faina following its release by Somali pirates on Feb. 5, after holding it for more than four months.

It noted that there have been nearly 500 incidents of piracy and armed robbery in the region. As of the end of 2008, some 15 ships, three of which have links to Turkey, have been hijacked, along with more than 300 crew members, 37 of whom were Turkish, it added.

"Although two of those ships were released in January, one of them is still being held; furthermore, some of our commercial ships which sailed in the region have been narrowly saved from attacks at the last minute, and the risk of similar incidents is very high," it stressed.

"The gravity and complexity of the problem requires that the international community act together with a comprehensive approach," the motion said, underlining that none of the naval forces which will be deployed in the region by Turkey will get involved in any kind of land operation in Somali territory against piracy.

It said Turkey was cooperating actively with the work of the UN, NATO and the EU on the issue. It was not clear when Parliament will consider the motion.

Piracy in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean shipping lanes has sent insurance prices soaring, forced some owners to decide to go around South Africa instead of through the Suez Canal and brought an unprecedented deployment of foreign warships to the region.

Piracy is big business off the coast of war-ravaged Somalia, which has not had a functioning government for 18 years. Pirates made off with up to $80 million in ransom in the past year, seizing 42 vessels off the country's 3,057-kilometer-long coastline along the Horn of Africa.

The high ransom payments mean pirates are unlikely to stop attacking. Still, London-based analyst Roger Middleton told The Associated Press yesterday that the international anti-piracy campaign has reduced the success rate of attacks to about 20 percent. Last year, pirates took 42 of the 111 ships they attacked.

Most of the 16 attempted hijackings in 2009 occurred in the first two weeks of January, when the weather was good. Three of those ships were captured. But pirates are showing a worrying new sophistication in their attacks, several experts told the AP, including greater use of global positioning systems that allow them to extend their range. Identification systems designed to stop ships from colliding can also lead pirates to potential prey because of the radio signals they emit.

The pirates may be trying to buy magnetic mines and heat-seeking missiles that can be fired from the sea, according to a recent report in Jane's Intelligence Review.

Graeme Gibbon Brooks, managing director of the British company Dryad Maritime Intelligence Service Ltd., said pirates also were jamming emergency frequencies with Arabic music or sending out false distress calls to lure warships in the wrong direction.

He warned that pirates have begun to mount diversionary assaults or attacks on several vessels at the same time. "We've gone from a pattern of sporadic attacks to a situation where the pirates coordinate," he said.

Zaman