 Thank you so much. It's a lovely introduction. And thanks very much for the invitation to come here. It's a real pleasure, and it's very nice to come back to Dublin for this. I should just say that these remarks... I'm currently unemployed at the moment so I haven't started working for Oxford yet. I no longer work for Chathamhys so these are my own personal remarks and they don't represent either of those institutions. Although hopefully I wouldn't say anything different when I am employed for the record. Mae'r pyrroedd yn, fel y gallwn gweld, y problemau gweld. Mae'n problemau lleolig yn ymddangos yn Somalia, ond yna'n mynd i'r problemau yn y Pyrroedd, oedd y West Coast yng Nghymru, yn Y Nidiau Delfwyr, yn Y Nidiaid. Mae'r problemau yn Y Pyrroedd yn y Cynllun Cynllun, yn y Stryd yng Nghymru, yn Y Mlaesiaid, yn Y Malachau Stryd. Mae Somalia yw'r problemau lleolig yn y pyrroedd, mae'n mynd i'w ddysgu cyfleidiaeth gyda'r pyrroedd. Mae'r problemau lleolig yn ddefnyddio'r ffunctunio yng Nghymru, yn y Pryfyrdd, mae'n ddigonol. Mae'r problemau lleolig yn gweld, rysg fawr ar gŵi'r rhesiw, yn y 4 yng nghymru Somalia, mae'r problemau lleolig yn y Pyrroedd, yn fydag. Mae'r problemau lleolig yn y Pyrroedd, mae'n ddweud o'r problemau lleolig, 10 ydych chi'n gweithio i'r ystyried, ychydig o'r cyffredinol cyllid yma yn y cyfnodol, yw'r 20 o 50 ydych chi'n cyffredinol, a ydych chi'n gweithio i'r cyffredinol yn 2007 o 2008. A yn y fwyaf, rydyn ni'n gweithio i'r gweithio i'r cyffredinol, wrth gwrs. Y pyrwyddoedd yn y bwysig, yn dweud o'r ddweud o ddweud o ddodolodol a'r gweithio i'r cyffredinol, ac yn y bwysig, mae'n dweud ei wneud ychydig o'r cyffredinol iawn. Yn 2007, 2008, bydd yw argynnu y gweithio'r ffordd ar gweithio gwahanol yn rhan o'r ffordd, yn rhan o'r ffordd ar y bydd y gweithio'r ffordd ar y bwysig, a'r $200,000, $300,000, $1,500,000, a'r adnod o'n ddod yn y cyffredinol Cotidgynدur, cyffredinol Cotidgyneddur, gyda gweithio'r adnod o'r adnod o'r adnod yn cyffredinol cyffredinol, ac yn ymwybod i'r gwirioneddau gweld i'r ffordd i gael a'r ffordd i'r Gweinidol i'r afryg, i'r Gweinidol i'r Weston, i'r Eurofyn, i'r Ajah. Felly, felly, ydych chi'n gwirionedd cymhwynt yma ac mae gennym i ddim yn gweithio i'r gweithio i'r gweithio i'r Yn Llyfriddor, ac yn gweithio'r probleme oherwydd mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r bach ar yr adael a'r byd yn gweithio'r bach er mwyn gweithio'r gweithio'r ymddangos, a hynny'n byw'r wyf yn ymwinellio'r ffordd cyfwyrrwyntau ar gyfer. Yn ymwinell ymddangos ymwinell ar gyfer 2011, ac hynny'n dweud ymwinell ar gyfer Semaelio yn gwybod, ac mae'n meddwl ar gyfer sicr o'r pyrsidio'r ffordd. Felly, nid oedd yn golygu'r ffordd o'r casgau. Ond mae'r ffordd yn gystafillol, ac yn ddigwisio, ond y ffordd yn gweithio'r ffordd iawn. Mae sy'n credu cerddolio cyflym pyrsidio erbyn. Nawr, mae'r ffordd wedi'u cerddolio cyflym o'r pyrsidio cerddolio. Mae yma yn ymddangos, mae'r ffordd yn gyffredinol. Mae'r ffordd o'r cyffredinol o'r cyffredinol o'r cyffredinol, Ie, oes i'r ymddangod yma i'r dyn nhw fyddwyr ymlaeniau, oes i'r ymdwyr sydd ymddangod yma, oes i'r ymddangod, oes i'r ymdwyr sydd ymddangod, a'r ymdwyr yma o 12 oes yn y prifio yma. Felly, mae'r ymddangod yma o'r ymddangod o'r twfyn ar gyfer y gwasanaeth ymddangod o'r ymddangod yma i'r pyrreid. Mae'r melbau yma, ymddangod ymddangod ymdangod yn ymdangod off the coast of Somalia, four captures down from 26 captures the previous year, and 52 failed attacks down from 68, so again a downward trajectory there. But actually this mass, this story of success close to Somalia masks the bigger picture and that is that pirates who have a very adaptable business model, if you like, they have very little regard for risk, as I'll talk about again in a minute, they've been able to change the range that they operate in and now we see, oh certainly in 2011 and I'm sure it will be different again in 2012, but the most number of attacks were up in the Arabian Sea up towards the entrance to the Persian Gulf and that was 19 successful captures there in 48 attempts and that's from a level of almost zero in both categories in the previous year and this really represents the dilemma for dealing with piracy from a naval perspective, is that this is not a fixed operation, pirates are highly adaptable and they're very able to move around this vast expanse of ocean and they've done that in a number of ways, one is that as I mentioned and I will keep mentioning they're not too worried about the risk of going out in a small boat in the ocean without great sea skills, but they've also been adapted, they've captured now fishing vessels or trading dows, some evidence that sometimes they even rent these from Yemeni fishing fishermen and that gives them a much greater range, so the small plastic skiffs that they use that you've probably seen on television or in the newspapers, those obviously have a limited range but if you're in a fishing trawler you can go right the way out towards the Maldives and towards India, so they've been able to do that to increase their range, they stock up, they take huge supplies of petrol and water and food allowing them to stay at sea now for months if necessary and if you have a chart or ever map where pirate attacks have you'll often see a sort of crescent shape and essentially this is because there's a pirate mothership, a dow or a fishing vessel and they're launching attacks and they keep launching attacks until they have a successful one, once they've got a successful one they can go back to Somalia and begin the ransom negotiation, but I think if we're thinking about how you deal with this perhaps this points that actually enable response to piracy is going to run into some very serious problems dealing with what is a very slippery operation to deal with. The other element in sort of the broad picture of what's happening to piracy is the cost of piracy, so as I mentioned before if you go back to the mid-2000s you're looking at tens of thousands of dollars to pay for a ransom to have a ship released that's rising to sort of 200, 400,000 by 2007, 2008, the estimates for the last year and again these are even less accurate than the number of attack because they're obviously commercially sensitive for shipping companies, you're looking at an average ransom close to five million US dollars for each successful attack and that means two things, one it's obviously costing us a much greater deal and more likely to have some kind of knock-on impact in terms of the economy, but also it means that for all the success of naval operations and some of them have been very successful piracy is a more profitable enterprise in the last year than it was the year before and the trend seems to be upwards for ransom payments, the highest payment so far is about nine and a half million dollars paid for the release of the Semhau Dream, a Korean vessel, so there is a an upward trajectory in terms of ransom payments and that means that the motivation for getting involved in piracy whether you're a financier of piracy attacks or just an ordinary foot soldier or foot sailor of piracy remains incredibly strong, the other thing just to mention in cost and these are very very difficult numbers to estimate accurately, but for a five million ransom you're looking at least probably another five million dollars in terms of associated costs in terms of your lawyer's fees, in terms of your increased insurance fees, in terms of compensation staff, in terms of missed deadlines for the delivery of your goods and so on, so the overall cost of ransoms is probably something in the region of 200-ish million dollars, highly accurate the ish, but you can double that, treble that, quadruple that even to look at the cost for industry as a whole and if you add into that things which are much harder to quantify like for example you know delays in delivery and changing employment patterns for seafarers and so on, some estimates although I think they're slightly overblown but some estimates put the annual cost of piracy at seven to twelve billion US dollars for the global economy which is not insignificant at all, so this is a growing problem and then just to map out very briefly what the response has been so far to the problem of Somali piracy and we can split that into three areas, naval, the legal and then military and political, in naval terms there has been some good successes, so in 2008-2009 piracy was mainly concentrated in the Gulf of Aden and what the navies did they established a transit corridor which they patrol, it's not a convoy system but there are naval ships patrolling different areas along there and they've really been very successful at cutting down attacks in the Gulf of Aden so that is actually now a relatively safe seaway for ships to pass through. In the Indian Ocean, the wider Indian Ocean obviously it's much much harder to set up that kind of zone patrol, that kind of close protection and you're seeing a much more random, sorry not random that's unfair on the navies but they are having to respond to situations as they occur they're not able to anticipate in quite the same way that they are in the Gulf of Aden. There are some things which navies have been able to do to deal with these wider problems, one is over the last year NATO and the EU have been doing some close work on the beaches in Somalia, so identifying places where pirates have stashes of boats and stashes of fuel and putting a naval vessel just over the horizon so that when those ships or those boats leave the coast they're able to pick them up immediately and either arrest the pirates or often just take their guns and send them back to the coast and that disrupts and has disrupted quite effectively a lot of pirate operations, the problem is once they get through that if they can break that cordon and there is a limited capacity for the navy to blockade the coast of Somalia then it's very hard to find them, it is literally looking for a needle in the haystack and there's a nice example which a former commander of the EU naval force uses to explain the difficulty of patrolling this huge area, it's a bit like having your wallet stolen in Sweden and calling a policeman in Spain to come and help you, it's very unlikely he's going to be able to get there in time to help you so and I think that's that really shows this is an enormous area much bigger than western Europe, so those are some of the things that they've been doing, there has been a really a proliferation of international efforts to deal with this from a naval perspective, of course NATO have been involved in this, there's the European Union's first naval mission EU NAB4 operational at Atlanta, there is a United States led coalition CTF 151 part of the coalition of the willing the war in Afghanistan and in Iraq which has been sort of cyber diverted to deal with the problem of piracy but you also see actors from China, from India, from Malaysia, from Korea, from Pakistan getting involved in anti-piracy patrols and what's one of the perhaps unintended consequences of piracy is forced these very diverse nations and organisations to work together in a way that they don't really do militarily at least in other areas of the world so if nothing else that's perhaps a useful thing for the world that these people have worked together and there may be some some positives from that but it's a very expensive way of doing that so that's the naval response and as we've seen in some areas like the Gulf of Aden it's been quite successful at times it's been quite good in the wider Indian ocean but the reality is this is not something this is not a nut you can crack with a warship, also navies are built for fighting wars not for what is essentially police work the legal response to Somali piracy and this is again is something which you may have read about and has been quite controversial often navies have a problem when they find pirates and pick them up they can arrest them but often they can't hold them very long because nobody wants to receive them so if a british warship arrests pirates the british government is completely uninterested in repatriating those pirates to the united kingdom in order to stand trial in the UK for many reasons the cost of it the worry of once they've served prison sentences for five 10 years that you then can't send them back to Somalia because of obviously the human rights situation there and then worries about asylum seeking and so on so the only time actually that western countries have tended to take pirates home is when their own citizens have been directly involved so when uh some americans were killed the US have taken pirates back to America to stand trial the same has happened in France in Germany and in Holland and there are a few pirates but it's really just a handful what's tended to happen has been the more preferred choice has been to hand those pirates over to Kenya or to the seychelles in order that they can stand trial there again there's a problem with that there's only so much space in kenyan prisons um and there's actually a very good case to say why should kenya uh have to take responsibility for uh incarcerating all of these pirates so most pirates actually are picked up their guns are taken away and they're released but there are over a thousand there's over a thousand pirates either in prison or waiting trial at the moment so quite a lot of pirates have been taken out of the system and if you bear in mind that there were probably something in the region of 3 000 active pirates at any one time that's significant but remember this has had really negligible impact on pirate attacks so i would argue that this legal response although important because crime shouldn't go unpunished is not probably uh the answer to this then the military and political side of this and i i'm just going to take one step back here um to talk about Somalia more generally before I get into the military and political side because one of the arguments I've always tried to make is that you cannot look at piracy in isolation from the political situation in Somalia this is a problem of Somalia this is a problem of state collapse it's not just a problem of piracy so in Somalia very very briefly you have four main areas or four Somali actors in the northwest you have Somaliland which is the uh a former the former British protector of Somaliland which declared independence in 1991 it remains unrecognised but this is I think it's fair to say the most uh successful part of Somalia and actually uh held a very successful uh democratic election last year with the transfer of power from one party to another um something that some of its neighbors uh not just in Somalia but in the wider east africa has have had trouble doing uh in the last few years so really a success story and quite an achievement in the northeast the area where most of the pirates come from you have a a slightly different situation of an area called punt land uh this is relatively successful in terms of security and its economy and so on but it is not uh as as in control of its territory as in control of what goes on as as Somaliland is and punt land actually operates off as a perfect environment for piracy it's stable enough to keep the endemic violence of southern Somalia out so you're not having to operate a business in an environment where there's constantly changing uh control of territory and constantly fighting going on but it's not quite a strong enough government to be able to take on um organized criminals so punt land is a is a nice environment for criminals to operate in and then in the sort of southern half of Somalia you have a number of international actors i'll come to in a moment but you have al-Shabaab who is a uh sometimes al-Qaida affiliated or characterized as an al-Qaida affiliated organization characterized as a terrorist by by many governments that controls the majority of southern Somalia you have a transitional federal government which is internationally recognized internationally supported and paid for that um by the grace of an african union uh peacekeeping force controls most of mogad issue but not much the rest of the country and is engaged in um well engaged in a lot of infighting and bickering international support to Somalia and focus has primarily been on bolstering that transitional federal government on the entity of central government it's a process that was designed abroad uh the charter for the TFG was written in Nairobi um in 2004 with huge support from external donors and supporters it took Somali politicians out of Somalia and designed a process there and this is the difference perhaps from Somalia land and from punt land Somalia land and punt land were designed by Somalis in Somalia in response to the situations that they saw around them and those have been relatively successful but a number of uh internationally sanctioned processes over the last 20 years designed outside Somalia have really achieved very little in terms of helping to build stability uh in Somalia more broadly and perhaps there's a lesson there as we look to the future um you know future involvement of international uh uh actors in Somalia we can draw some conclusions from that in terms of military support military support has there is some subtle military support from the united states and others two security forces in punt land and in Somalia land but the most support has gone towards the african union mission uh in um in in in in mogad issue there's a lot of EU money that goes to them to help them to do their work there's Ugandan and Burundian troops there and they've been relatively successful in terms of securing mogad issue but the wider program of building stability in Somalia is still elusive there is a EU trading mission for transitional federal government troops that's based in Uganda I think there may even correctly there may have been some Irish involvement in that yeah Irish under that um and that's uh well it's only had some teething problems at the beginning I think there were a lot of reports of troops that have been trained in Uganda going back to mogad issue selling their weapons or defecting to uh to people who would pay them more regularly uh than the transitional federal government or they understand that situation has improved recently but again this shows the problems of providing a military force for a government that doesn't control a country and that doesn't have popular legitimacy it's very hard to see um how that might work out there are of course some drone strikes and some uh special forces operations as well politically there is uh one solution that is accepted by the international community and that's the the the success of the transitional federal government and I think it's interesting when we look to Afghanistan for a moment where there are beginning to be a softening of the idea of engaging with the Taliban engaging with various actors in Afghanistan that in Somalia the position is still very much against any kind of broader engagement and I think the reality in Somalia is that there isn't uh the level of support um for external interventions external meddling that you see in a country like Afghanistan yet there is also an insistence that the solution must be a solution that we are comfortable with and there are some disparities and contradictions in the international community's approach towards Somalia that don't make sense and that's um you know well either we accept another 20 years of state collapse or perhaps we have to address you know with the the limited engagement that the international community is prepared to make in Somalia how best can you then end up at a stable country because bear in mind we have problems with piracy Somalis have problems far greater than that they're problems of of roadblocks of famine of of really really terrible um infant mortality terrible uh life expectancy so that this is a big problem so why do these uh political problems I've been talking about why do they matter for piracy well I think it is quite clear that actually without a functioning government uh it's very hard to stop piracy you look at Somaliland has no problem with piracy that's a functioning government that's what you want for the rest of Somalia but the tendency to treat piracy is one problem and as a problem that can be solved by military means and these political problems on the other side that can be solved in a different way has meant that actually we're not making as much headway on piracy and the other problems of Somalia as we could have done I would have argued that actually piracy was a good way to engage with western governments to show them and demonstrate the importance of a sustainable political solution to the problem uh of Somalia that actually these political problems in Somalia and these humanitarian problems in Somalia obviously have a huge impact for Somalis but actually also have an impact for us here in the west so there is is a problem there increasingly the rhetoric out of western governments including in London has been about a military solution a security solution for the situation in Somalia and that includes for the political situation the increased use of drone attacks talk about sending well giving more military capacity to amazon talk about helicopter attacks on pirate bases and so on all of these may have a role to play let us be frank in the solution for Somalia but they tend to continue to make this a problem which we think we can solve through force of arms and through weaponry actually if you look at why people are engaged in piracy for a moment you can make ten thousand dollars as a pirate at the at the most basic level at the lowest level for one successful hijacking if you do three of those in the year you're doing very very well by any standards anywhere in the world you put in mind that the sort of estimate for Somali GDP per head is about six hundred dollars per year and for many people will be much much lower than that and the economic incentive is absolute clear piracy is the best career you can have for a young man in Somalia even being in the transitional federal government military forces you get paid i think a hundred dollars a month so you know it's very clear where the where the money is look at punt land the government of punt land they have an annual budget of about 19 to 20 million us dollars if pirates pull in a conservative let's be conserved let's say pirates pull in 80 million us dollars a year clearly the government is then having to take on a very very significant economic interest in its own area and so what is the advantage for punt land in taking on pirates most likely if they take on pirates without adequate support without adequate backing they are going to find people funding opposition groups funding other armed groups in Somalia so there's a real danger there also if you look at punt land just for a moment a very interesting paper that chathamhaith has brought out very recently uses satellites imagery and tracking of food prices and so on to demonstrate that there is a clear more broad economic impact for people in northeastern Somalia a positive economic impact of piracy which is not seen in the rest of the country so again for a government like punt land what is in it for them to tackle piracy and that is why i think if we want to approach this issue of piracy we need to do it two things one is to consider it in the broader situation of Somali politics and the politics of Somalia and secondly we need approaches to dealing with piracy which are not purely military we need to look at how do you make it less attractive to take the risk of going out in a small boat in the ocean and maybe getting shot by the navy than staying at home in your job at the moment if it's $600 at home versus $10,000 on the ocean it's very clear which choice people make if however careful investment and large-scale investment uh or is actually um some people have argued just paying people um to stay at home uh makes a much more attractive solution and a more cost effective solution uh for the rest of us around the world it's not impossible to stop piracy there's a small time called ale which used to be the hotbed of pirate launches but it's where the president of punt land came from and when he became president it was very embarrassing for him so he was able to put a lot of pressure on the community in that area use his security forces and stop piracy from there of course it didn't stop piracy at all it just displaced it to other areas but if you keep displacing them obviously it becomes more difficult for them so i would argue that although there have been some very significant successes for the naval approach to piracy we need something broader than just a security response and that's important because we need political space for Somalia actors to engage with this you need flexibility in what that solution is going to be look going to look like and i would argue for Somalia's neighbors for Somalia's partners around the world uh we shouldn't be too prescriptive about the kind of government or perhaps more realistically the kind of governments that emerge in Somalia it's better to have governments that you don't necessarily agree with but that are in fact actually governments um who can actually do things then have what we have at the moment which is a government which agrees with everything that we say and does says it will do exactly what we want it to do but in reality um it's unable to do very much um so we talk about a land-based solution to Somalia pirates and that's the buzzword at the moment uh in the run up to this conference in London that's happening in February on uh on Somalia it's all about land-based solutions land-based solutions but those land-based solutions i would argue quite strongly need to not be the kind of land-based solutions which involve militaries but land-based solutions that involve development that involve political engagement and then involve um a sort of longer term uh solution to the Somali crisis thank you very much indeed