The Mobility and Transport department of the European Commission - the executive body of the EU - has a seminar today in Bruxelles called 'Piracy and armed robbery at sea: How best to protect seafarers'.
Looking at the agenda it seems like the focus of the seminar is on how seafarers can protect themselves, the impact of piracy on their personal lives and the economic consequences for shipping and insurance companies.
While this is an interesting subject, it's not one I'd discus with the Commission and if I were a seafarer or a shipping company I'd have different questions for the Commission.
I think the Commission should be discussing 2 points:
1. What's the role of the EU in protecting seafarers?
2. How best to protect seafarers.
While EU NAVFOR is the first maritime EU operation that's reasonably planned and not some haphazard action by individual members you can't help but wonder where all the EU vessels are. Together the EU members have about 120 frigates and destroyers. And they are struggling to deploy around 6 frigates a time.
So the role of the EU is to make sure its individual members deploy more resources to protect seafarers.
And on the second question the answer is simple: stop the piracy from happening.
And while the recent decision to expand the mission of Operation Atalanta to include control of Somali ports where pirates are based, as well as catching pirate mother ships will help, it's battling the symptons and ingnores the root of the problem. Because the root of the problem, as has been said by Galrahn and others often enough, is on land.
But who is seriously thinking the EU will intervene on land?
No comments:
Post a Comment