A request for assistance from a South Korean Merchant Vessel in the Indian Ocean on Feb. 10 led to Combined Maritime Forces (CMF) warship HMS Cornwall securing and later releasing the Yemeni crew of a pirated dhow from their 17 Somali captors and returning the fishing vessel to its rightful owners, CMF reported on 15. February 2011. Items found with the dhow confirmed that it was acting as a ‘mother ship’ for Somali pirates who had captured it on Nov. 11, 2010.
The dhow, which was listed i.a. also by NATO as abducted or suspicious, is named FV JAISH (aka FV JEISH). 
HMS Cornwall is currently the Command Platform for Combined Task Force (CTF) 151, the counter-piracy mission of CMF. On Feb. 10 Cornwall’s Officer of the Watch observed a dhow acting suspiciously and received a distress call from the South Korean Merchant Vessel Yong Jin reporting a potential pirate threat. HMS Cornwall’s arrival on scene disrupted the attack, and the warship’s boarding teams, supported overhead by her Lynx helicopter, searched and secured the Yemeni-flagged dhow. An initial search found 22 people on board, three skiffs, powerful outboard motors and various items of equipment associated with pirates boarding merchant vessels, such as ladders, enabling the dhow to act as ‘mother ship’ for a group of pirates operating in the area.
Five of the people on the dhow were the original Yemeni crew who had been held hostage for 92 days.
HMS Cornwall’s commanding officer, Commander David Wilkinson, said
“Our presence in the area has had a hugely significant effect on the lives of five Yemeni fishermen, who have been freed from over three months of pirate captivity and can now return to their families. In addition we have restored a merchant vessel to legitimate use on the high seas and my highly trained team have conducted a very slick boarding operation which has ensured that this pirate vessel is no longer able to operate. This demonstrates the reassurance and security offered by the presence in these waters of HMS Cornwall and other warships from Combined Maritime Forces.“

International Maritime Organisation warns that ships are disregarding piracy threat by Guy (DefenceWeb)

Authorities misunderstand Somali piracy By Sanchay Jain (WSN/nyunews)

With all the turmoil in Northern African and Middle Eastern countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Jordan, it is very easy to forget about the chronically ravaged nation of Somalia — one that has been in a state of civil war for years.

But just when the international community seems ready to ignore its problems, Somalia's infamous and yet arguably most successful industry steps up to issue a firm reminder.
That industry, of course, is piracy.
The latest pirate raid came last Wednesday, 200 nautical miles east of Oman, when pirates captured the Greek-flagged Irene SL, a supertanker that was carrying approximately $150 million in oil to the Gulf of Mexico. The previous day, pirates hijacked an Italian-flagged tanker on its way to Malaysia.
Estimates suggest that Somali pirates currently have 29 ships and 660 hostages. These high numbers come after recent success in thwarting piracy and freeing hostages.
In the past two weeks, the Indian navy has embarked on a campaign to attack pirate "mother ships," which are larger, hijacked vessels that the pirates use as marine-based headquarters. This campaign led to the capture of 43 pirates and the rescue of 44 hostages.
Of course, attacks like these, while jeopardizing the lives of the hostages on board the "mother ships," still maintain a large degree of effectiveness. It seems likely that as the pirate attacks increase in frequency and distance from Somali territory, similar anti-piracy tactics will be employed with greater rapidity by the international community at-large.
But when a financial situation becomes as grim as it currently is in Somalia, piracy cannot be stopped.
Somalia's per capita income is approximately $600 dollars, a figure that must be questioned on the basis that Somalia's last official census took place in 1975, according to the CIA World Fact Book.
While the Transitional Federal Government is the officially recognized ruling body of the nation, it only controls portions of the capital, Mogadishu — a result of nearly 20 years of post-dictatorial (Siad Barre) warfare between the TFG and the Islamic Court Union, with its presumably al-Qaida affiliated splinter groups.
And of course, adding to chaos is the fact that there are three autonomous regions within the nation itself.
Considering the failed state of any central government since the Siad Barre dictatorship, piracy has become an important tool for the Somali people for two reasons.
First, it injects a substantial amount of money into an economy of which 70 percent is based on agriculture and that is often stalled by the pervasive violence. Pirates, spending ransom money within Somalia, have boosted local industries and shops, providing amenities such as generators and cars.
But more importantly, the nonexistent federal government has allowed major corporations to exploit the Somali coast. European companies have found the coast to be a cheap destination to dump over 10 million tons of toxic waste. Meanwhile, foreign fishing vessels have made away with $300 million worth of fish annually.
Piracy has served as an equalizer in Somalia, also scaring away corporations trying to continue the streak of exploitation. Proof has come from the research of marine biologists, who believe that the recent rise of local fishing stock stems from a lack of commercial-scale fishing.
Ultimately, piracy is a major problem for the international community, but not for the reasons it reports. Failure to stop this industry is merely proof that not much else is working in Somalia itself.

MAKING THE GOATS THE GARDENERS
Germany: NATO To Consult Lloyd's On Horn Of Africa Mission
Nato to consult Lloyd's on piracy by Mairi MacDonald Post Online
The Lloyd’s Market Association is to discuss anti-piracy issues in Germany with officers from Nato.
Neil Smith, LMA head of underwriting, will offer Nato officers an insight into the London insurance market’s perspective on piracy and explain how the market handles this risk.
Mr Smith said: “Nato is keen to get a broader, non-military perspective on piracy. They particularly want to understand its impact on insurers, both operational and financial.
“The LMA believes this is a very positive initiative and I’m delighted to have been asked to talk to these officers.”
EU NAVFOR is the European Union’s naval force combating piracy in the waters off Somalia. Nato personnel make up a major part of the force. The anti-piracy workshop takes place at the Nato School in Oberammergau, Germany next week.

Swashbuckling
He expresses his frustration at what he claims is the international community’s lily-livered approach to the Somali pirates, where they are captured, released, or tried in an international court, saying, “the only language these pirates understand is force.”
“Sinking their ship will all hands aboard is the way to solve the problem.”
So far, the company is the only one who admits having armed guards on board, paying approximately one million dollars per month for its some 150 ships for the facility.
CEO Niels G. Stolt Nielsen has inherited his father’s uncompromising attitude, telling DN a few weeks ago that they have also used barbed wire and hot water to repel the pirates.
Last week saw two hijackings.  On Tuesday, Somali pirates seized Italian tanker Savina Caylyn in the Indian Ocean some 800 kilometres (500 miles) west of India, with approximately 60 million dollars worth of crude onboard.
Just one day later, another band hijacked US-bound tanker “Irene SL” off the coast of Oman with her cargo of crude to the value of approximately 200 million. This was one of the largest hijackings in the area to date.
High price
Despite the total of over 700 crew and some 30 vessels taken hostage to date, Jacob Stolt-Nielsen believes eliminating the pirates is worth the risk.
“It is conceivable the pirates would take revenge on the crews they are already holding hostage, one must realise this. However, this is war, and wars cost lives,” he says.
To justify his suggestion further, Mr Stolt-Nielsen draws parallels with history.
“Pirates captured in international waters have always been punished with death, often carried out there and then. The Romans had problems in northern Africa, the Vikings were pirates, and North African so-called ‘Barbary Corsair’ pirates controlled the Strait of Gibraltar for hundreds of years. The business will only stop when it starts costing the pirates too high a price.

Pirates are ‘masters of the ocean’ – and what to do about it By Guy (DefenceWeb)

US expresses concern about maritime piracy By Allan Jacob (KT Exclusive)

Who wants to break this bridge? On October 25, 2010 an al-Qaida affiliated militant group turned a majestic Sufi shrine into a bloodbath in the Punjab province of Pakistan, by detonating bombs hidden in milk cans, killing and wounding scores of innocent people. This was the latest of a spate of gruesome attacks on Sufism and dead Sufi saints this year alone, leaving hundreds of innocent people killed or wounded.  Such violence has brought a new upheaval to Islam, shaking its ethical and moral foundations and reducing it to a merely a radical political ideology.
The ideological driving force behind this violence is religious extremism which considers everyone outside its ideological league, Muslim or non Muslim, dead or alive, as an enemy and an infidel deserving to be killed.  The fanatics blow up ancient relics, Sufi heritage, Sufi shrines and the Sufi way of life everywhere they can.  They want to micromanage social, cultural and individual life. They condemn gatherings and ceremonies in Sufi saints’ graves, shaving beards, wearing charms, music and painting as heresy.  All this is like the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
The history of Islam is not alien to violence against Sufism.  The root of the current upheaval lies in Wahhabism, which has been gradually institutionalised from a tiny band of theologians into a political ideology by the Saudi ruling dynasty.  The Wahhabi religious movement was originated by Mohammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab (1703-1792), essentially to challenge the influence of the Ottoman Empire in the Arabian Peninsula.    The Saudi petrodollars and Pakistani military ruling elite have helped the spread of this fanatical form of Islam.
In addition, the vision of this ideology was empowered in the Middle East and South Asia by another extremist movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood which originally emerged in Egypt in the 1920s.  
The Brotherhood copied much of its ideological agenda, political structure, revolutionary features and a violent persuasion from Marxism.  Like the latter during the Cold War era, the Brotherhood’s ultimate objective has been to topple the state by violent means and extend a radical ideology to the West.  The Iranian revolution of late 1970s gave further impetus to this ideology, which began to justify the export of Islamic revolution as an Islamic obligation everywhere in the world.
Like Saudi rulers, the secular Pakistani cunning and sly generals began to use the most lethal religious radicals for domestic security and as a tool to promote its foreign policy in Afghanistan and India.  Pakistan served also as a gateway for the spread of Wahhabism in the region.  At present they are pinching American coins in return for carrying out the Pashtun genocide.
As it was hinted, war on Sufism is not a new phenomenon.  Hussein Al-Halaj, a great Sufi poet and teacher was condemned for heresy when in a state of mystical trance he exclaimed, “I am the Truth”.  He was cut to pieces and his remains were burnt by a mob in Baghdad in 922 AD.  He was the first Sufi martyr.
During the 17th-century Persian Safavid Empire, Sufis were suppressed, during the Indian Moguls, it flourished but in the twentieth-century the die-hard Turkish secular leader Kamal Atatürk banned Sufi monasteries and Sufi rituals in Turkey.
Sufism (comes from Arabic noun, suf, literary meaning course wool and the Sufi is the one wearing woolen garments) is the name of Islamic mysticism.  The word Sufism was coined in the West for the first time by the German scholar August Tholuck in 1821.  It has been divided into two practical and theoretical parts:  To those who practice it, Sufism means a quick spiritual foray into a space where the presence of the divine could be experienced.  To those who are concerned with its theory, it is a mystical and spiritual theology, a body of knowledge and an epistemology interwoven with Islamic metaphysical texts.
The Sufi philosophy was developed and promoted by the medieval Muslim philosophers such as Ibn-Arabi, Averroës (known in Islamic world as Ibn-i-Rushd), Avicenna and Farabi, who, for their Islamic Aristotelianism, were often referred to as the Oriental Peripatetics. This school of thought was greatly saturated with Plato and Aristotelian metaphysics.  The Sufis also have created a vast body of a literary and poetic heritage.
As an elixir of wisdom and an intellectual Yoga, Sufism has been known, cherished and even practised in the West since time immemorial.  It is hard to find a single great Western poet or thinker who has not been inspired by Sufism. Dr Johnson loved Sufi Oneness and pantheism; Voltaire in Candid saw Sufi philosophy as an antidote to religious extremism of his time.  Goethe loved Sufi poetry, Richard Burton and Robert Graves were keen on practicing Sufism.  Sufism was cherished by Australia's greatest poet professor Alec Derwent Hope.  Hegel draws on Sufi thought in his works.  Danish fairy-tale writer Hans Christian Andersen was the first who brought the news about the Sufi music and dance known as “Whirling Dervishes” to Europe.
Nobel laureate, Doris Lessing is the doyen of contemporary Sufis in the West.  She identifies Western admiration of Sufism since the 1960s as ‘a Sufi craze,’ and ‘Sufi bandwagon’.  For Lessing, Sufism was a kind of universal feeling, emotion, a quick fix and an access with no intermediary.  “Sufism is something one experiences on one's own,” she would say. In my own lectures in Australia and Europe, I came across with an enormous interest in Sufi philosophy and literature.
The al-Qaida zealots and the Pakistani militants will never win over Sufism.  They might destroy their tombs on earth but cannot steal away Sufism from the hearts of people in the East and the West.
The 13th-century great Sufi poet and the founder of the Whirling Dervishes, Rumi knew this.  He believed that fanatics will never extinguish the Sufi torch or destroy Sufi tombs as he says “when we are dead, see not our tombs in the earth, but find it in the hearts of the people.”  And the 17th-century Pashtun Sufi poet Rahman Baba, known in the West as the Nightingale-of-Peshawar to the vandals:
We are all one body,  whoever tortures another, wounds himself.
Last spring (2010), his mausoleum was bombed by the Punjabi Taliban.
Rumi declared the Sufi manifesto of universal love, tolerance of nonbelievers, pluralism and interfaith harmony in one of his quatrains:
Come, come whoever you are,  An unbeliever, a fire or idol-worshiper, come, Our convent is not of desperation,  Even if you have broken your vows a hundred time, Come, come again.
(*) Dr Ehsan Azari Stanizai is an Adjunct Fellow with Writing & Society Research Group, University of Western Sydney. The article was first published on www.international.to

EGYPTIAN VIEWS ON COUNTER PIRACY, SOMALIA AND SUDAN

Passed to the Telegraph by WikiLeaks 8:21PM GMT 15 Feb 2011

Ref ID: 09CAIRO218

Date: 2/5/2009 15:09

Origin: Embassy Cairo

Classification: CONFIDENTIAL

Destination: 09KHARTOUM51|09KHARTOUM75

Header: VZCZCXRO3880PP RUEHDE RUEHROV RUEHTRODE RUEHEG #0218/01 0361509ZNY CCCCC ZZHP 051509Z FEB 09FM AMEMBASSY CAIROTO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC PRIORITY 1571INFO RUCNFUR/DARFUR COLLECTIVERUCNIAD/IGAD COLLECTIVERUCNSOM/SOMALIA COLLECTIVERUEHGG/UN SECURITY COUNCIL COLLECTIVERUEHDJ/AMEMBASSY DJIBOUTI 0003RUEHKH/AMEMBASSY KHARTOUM 1245RUEHNR/AMEMBASSY NAIROBI 0411RUCNDT/USMISSION USUN NEW YORK 0259
Tags: PREL,PTER,KCRM,EWWT,SO,SU,EG
C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 02 CAIRO 000218 SIPDIS DEPARTMENT FOR NEA/ELA, AF/SPG, AF/E, NAIROBI FOR TRIMBLE E.O. 12958: DECL: 02/05/2019 TAGS: PREL, PTER, KCRM, EWWT, SO, SU, EG SUBJECT: EGYPTIAN VIEWS ON COUNTER PIRACY, SOMALIA AND SUDAN REF: A. KHARTOUM 51 B. KHARTOUM 75 Classified By: Minister Counselor for Economic and Political Affairs William R. Stewart for reasons 1.4 (b) and (d).
1.(C) Summary: The Egyptian MFA's Cabinet Advisor on African Affairs told us February 5 that Egypt believes "substantial progress" on Somalia was made in Djibouti over the past two weeks. The Government of Egypt (GOE) supports the election of Shaykh Sharif Shaykh Ahmed as President of Somalia. The GOE also advocates for international support for the new Somali Government to help provide security. Egypt will host, in March, both the plenary session and working Group 4 of the Contact Group on Piracy of the Coast of Somalia (CGPCS). Egypt is concerned that Qatari and UN efforts to bring Darfur rebel groups to the negotiating table are undermining Minni Minawi and the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA). Egypt also feels that a recent report, released by the UN SYG, reflect international acceptance of the eventual partition of Sudan and does not promote the unity of the country. End Summary.
------------------------------- Egypt Cautiously Optimistic on Somalia --------------------------------------
2.(C) Ahmed Abu Zeid, the Egyptian MFA's Cabinet Advisor on African Affairs, told us on February 4 that the GOE feels the new Somali Government made "substantial progress" during meeting in Djibouti over the last two weeks. He said new Somali President Shaykh Sharif Shaykh Ahmed is the "choice of the Somali people," and the GOE has confidence in his abilities to reach out to all parties in Somalia. However, Abu Zeid stated that there are many challenges ahead including challenges to Shaykh Sharif, AMISOM, and the Djibouti process. He said the GOE wanted to wait and see how Shaykh Sharif dealt with these challenges. Abu Zeid advocated for international financial, logistical and training support to legitimize Shaykh Sharif and the new Somali Government. He stressed the need to facilitate the development of the Somali joint forces to provide much needed security.
------------------------ Egypt's Plans for Hosting Piracy Contact Group Meetings ----------------------------------
3.(C) Abu Zeid told us that Egypt accepted the offer by then-P/M A/S Kimmitt to host the next plenary session of the CGPCS in March. He said Egypt will host Working Group 4 (WG4), on improving diplomatic and public information on piracy, of the CGPCS and the plenary session "back-to-back" so as to minimize participant travel. Abu Zeid stated that Egypt is working on a concept paper for WG4 and will disseminate it to the participants. He said there was a need for a central point for all information on t...

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