by Mark Weston | May 7, 2009 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
Two major cruise lines – Fred Olsen and MSC Cruises – have announced that they are dropping their Indian Ocean routes to avoid Somali pirates. From now on, their ships will go round the Horn of Africa and up the west coast, instead of crossing the Gulf of Aden and the Suez Canal. This will hurt the economies of stopping points like Dubai, Oman, Jeddah and Egypt, as they lose out on docking fees and cruise ship passengers are forced to divert their spending to West African ports (or, more likely given the absence of gleaming shopping malls on that coast, bypass the entire shore). It could be the cue for a more concerted response to piracy by Middle Eastern governments, which haven’t yet done much to tackle the piracy epidemic.
For the cruise liners, West Africa might appear a safer bet, but as I mentioned here a few months ago, going the other way round the continent is far from risk free. It may be that West African criminal networks, which are notorious for their protean nature, expand into piracy (piracy in the region has so far mostly been limited to attacks on oil tankers off Nigeria).
Antonio Mazzitelli of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime told me recently that West African criminal networks switch easily from one activity to another: “Networks are built purely for carrying out a specific business,” he said. “Someone might do one job and then move to a completely different job.” Law enforcement authorities, including those in the West, are not well adapted to such fluidity – “they are crime-specialised,” said Mazzitelli, “those who look at drugs don’t look at internet fraud, and the latter don’t look at stolen vehicles, for example.” The US navy has recently begun training Nigeria’s navy to fight off pirate attacks on oil tankers, but they may have to broaden their scope if West African criminals take a leaf out of their Somali brothers’ books and target cruise liners as well.
by Mark Weston | Feb 18, 2009 | Africa, Conflict and security
I gave a talk to senior civil servants at the Home Office last week, as part of Demos’s Leadership Masterclass on International Challenges and Counter-Terrorism. My talk was on West Africa, and particularly on how looming demographic changes there are likely to increase instability in a region that is already the world’s poorest and one of its most volatile. I argue that, at least in the long-term, Western security policy-makers would do well to keep an eye on the region. For an edited version of the talk, see after the jump.
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by Mark Weston | Jan 14, 2009 | Africa, Conflict and security
A few weeks back I interviewed John Robb, the military futurist and author of ‘Brave New War.’ We discussed the irruption of Latin American drug gangs into West Africa. Robb sees this as symptomatic of a broader push by “global guerrillas” – armed transnational criminal organisations – to take advantage of weaknesses in the global system:
We have a global market system that is subverting the nation state, so gaps where local control is lost are going to spring up all over the place, even in relatively developed states. There will be lapses where non-state groups like global guerrillas take control. If they’ve found a hole in West Africa, there are no barriers to their expansion.
Although they are drawn to “hollow states” like Guinea-Bissau, however, contrary to dire warnings of instability from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime the South Americans are unlikely to want to shake up the status quo too much. According to John Robb:
They don’t want warfare in West Africa – they want the maximum level of corruption and to be left alone, with bureaucratic apparatus geared towards helping them to do business. Almost across the board you’ll see that non-state groups are not trying to take over the national government. They don’t want that burden – it raises the profile, puts you on the international radar screen and leads to economic blockades. If there’s a nominal government in place they’ll keep the infrastructure up – they’re parasites off the infrastructure.
I asked Robb how Africa might deal with the problem, which got him talking about resilient communities: (more…)
by Mark Weston | Dec 1, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security
The piracy fad may be spreading around the African coast. Last week a Chinese fishing boat was attacked off the coast of Sierra Leone in West Africa. The pirates, all from neighbouring Guinea, took off with money and a boatload of fish. Unfortunately, the heavy cargo slowed down the pirates’ vessel, allowing the Sierra Leone navy to catch up with it and, after a scuffle which left four pirates dead, arrest those remaining.
The West African coast has many of the elements that make Somalia a good spot for a bit of buccaneering – rank poverty, lots of underemployed young men, unstable governments, endemic corruption and favourable geography. If ships start avoiding Suez and going the long way round the Horn of Africa instead, they might be in for a nasty surprise when they reach the opposite side of the continent.
