And we sailed the seas of green in a yellow submarine

The Somali government says the rampant piracy along its coasts can be suppressed, if it is given the money to do so. The VOA reports:

Somalia’s new government says it would be able to deal decisively with the piracy problems off its shores if the international community would provide logistical support and supervision to its navy. This comes after Somali pirates defied international naval powers and are holding hostage the capital of an American ship on a lifeboat in the Indian Ocean. The pirates tried to hijack U.S ship Maersk Alabama Wednesday, but Captain Phillips thwarted the takeover by offering himself as a hostage.

Abdulrahman Haji Ibbi is the Somali minister for Fisheries. He tells reporter Peter Clottey that if such support had been forthcoming, the pirates would not have posed the problems they now causing off the Somali coast.

All this this time, and the problem was a failure to communicate. And nothing communicates better than money.

“What they could have done, which we have told them many times is that the Somali new government wants to solve once and for all the problem of the piracy of the Somali seawaters. That the international community could help us in a very simple manner giving us the kind of support that our Somali coast guards will like to actually tackle all these problems and we will do it. We use to do it and we have been doing it during the Islamic Courts of Union we knew each other and the problem is not the water. The problem is land so and we don’t want the problems happening now to continue,” he said.

Haji Ibbi said the international community has been reluctant to help with the new government’s effort to resolve the piracy menace.

“We have presented requests to all of them, all of them. There is not a single member of the international community that my president or prime minister has not mentioned this problem to. They mention the problem of piracy to all the people of foreign governments that they have met since the new government was formed and none has actually given us the kind of response that we have expected from them. We are not actually complaining, but what we are saying is to help the community to help the people and we are saying please help us because we can actually do this job in a very secure manner. And they know very well that we can do it,” Haji Ibbi noted.

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