Page 2 of 2 Japan adrift in the Indian Ocean
By Richard Tanter
weekly maritime safety report the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
summarized the attack on the Takayama as follows:
VLCC [Very Large
Crude Carrier] tanker (TAKAYAMA) fired upon 21 Apr 08 at 0110 UTC (reported by
IMB), 0230 UTC (reported by operator), while underway in position
13:00N-049:07E, approximately 240NM east of Port of Aden, Yemen. Five
speedboats chased and opened fire at the vessel, in ballast, proceeding to
Yanbo, Saudi Arabia. The vessel increased its speed and enforced anti-piracy
preventative measures. A rocket was shot at the vessel, damaging its hull. Crew
members on board have confirmed the existence of a 20-millimeter hole on the
port side near the stern of the ship. The master sent out a radio distress call
and was received by the German warship (EMDEN) who headed straight to the scene
with a helicopter to intercept the pirates. By the time the helicopter arrived,
the pirates had fled in their speedboats. Yemeni coast guard forces also
claimed a role in helping.
For the Japanese security
establishment, these attacks
amounted to a major security threat justifying a military response. Minister of
Defense Hayashi Yoshimasa quoted the piracy threat to Japanese oil tankers as
something that is included in "the fight against terror", and said that his
staff was considering whether the extension of the Replenishment Support
Special Measures Law should include measures such as destroyer escorts for
Japanese tankers in areas of danger should be proposed as a new element in the
bill. Taro Aso proposed having MSDF destroyers escort tankers carrying oil from
the Middle East to Japan - some 90 of which are at sea at any one time plying
the route to regional oil terminals. The Yomiuri and LDP supporters of the
proposal pointed out the legal limitations on both Japan Coast Guard and MSDF
actions to support vessels under criminal attack, or even for the MSDF to
escort non-Japanese-registered vessels. The Yomiuri and LDP supporters of the
proposal pointed out that such legislation could overcome the longstanding
domestic legal limitations on both Japan Coast Guard and MSDF actions to
support vessels under criminal attack, or even for the MSDF to escort
non-Japanese-registered vessels).
Supporters of the proposal pointed to Security Council Resolution 1816 (2008),
passed unanimously on June 2 with the acquiescence of the Transitional Federal
Government of Somalia, under which, for the following six months, member states
may
Enter the territorial waters of Somalia for the purpose of repressing acts of
piracy and armed robbery at sea, in a manner consistent with such action
permitted on the high seas with respect to piracy under relevant international
law.
Use, within the territorial waters of Somalia, in a manner consistent with
action permitted on the high seas with respect to piracy under relevant
international law, all necessary means to repress acts of piracy and armed
robbery.
Following on from the Security Council resolution, the United States Naval
Central Command established a Maritime Security Patrol Area in the Gulf of Aden
in mid-August. The MSPA is patrolled by ships and aircraft from the
Djibouti-based multinational coalition Combined Task Force 150 (CTF-150).
Operations by Combined Task Force 150 (CTF-150, a multinational coalition naval
force headquartered at Djibouti since 2002) have helped quell terrorist
activity in the Red and Arabian Seas. The CTF-150 flotilla patrols from the Red
Sea to the Gulf of Oman and comprises 14-15 vessels. A native Arab speaker
accompanies CTF-150 boarding teams to talk with boat crews before intelligence
is passed to the US Navy regional command center in Bahrain.
Presumably, to be at all effective these MSDF elements would be made part of
CTF-150. The Yomiuri reported that the MSDF Staff Office had begun preparations
for legislative change on the basis of dispatching two more destroyers to the
Indian Ocean and sending two or more of its 110 MSDF P-3C surveillance and
reconnaissance aircraft to be based in Djibouti or Aden, together with up to
200 support personnel.
However, while the threat to shipping from pirates off Somalia and Yemen is
serious and urgent both for those aboard ships passing through the region and
their owners and insurers, there are doubts about whether the attacks should be
regard as a serious military threat or just an irritant - especially given the
small number of attacks compared with the huge volume of traffic. In turn, it
is doubtful whether a purely - or even largely - military response is either
appropriate or effective. Certainly multilateral cooperation for protection of
ships and their crews and cargoes is a key step, especially in a region where
the capacity of littoral states to regulate their waters is limited, to say the
least. But as the Director of the International Maritime Bureau, Pottengal
Mukundan, put it:
Whilst the intervention of coalition navies has
helped in isolated cases, it is by no means a long-term solution. It is clear
that the threat or presence of coalition navies has done little to stem the
tide of attacks in this region.
This perhaps surprising
conclusion by a representative of the global shipping industry is in part due
to doubt that military or police actions will address what are now reasonably
well-understood root causes of the rise of piracy - both in the form of
sophisticated criminal groups operating in transnational networks and more
simple opportunistic "sea-robbers". Carolin Liss argues that in the Southeast
Asian case the causes of the sudden eruption of attacks from both must shape
the policy response:
Lax maritime rules and regulations, poverty, the
impact of ecological degradation and over-fishing, and the existence of
organized crime groups and radical politically motivated organizations in the
region are conducive to the occurrence of pirate attacks in Southeast Asia and
shape the nature of such attacks. In order to be successful, responses to
piracy have to address most, if not all, of these problems and issues.
Combating piracy is consequently a difficult and complex task, requiring more
than the patrolling of piracy-prone waters.
Each of these
factors Liss presents as shaping the Southeast Asian piracy environment are
also present in the Horn of Africa with a vengeance, compounded by the
political chaos of the region, especially in Somalia itself. The proposed
Japanese response follows the path that, as Liss argues, has not been
successful elsewhere.
More than just continuous military force and/or operations by law enforcement
agencies are needed to successfully combat organized crime and to "pacify" and
integrate areas in which separatists, guerrillas, or terrorists operate. In
fact, it is crucial to address the root causes of such violence, which include
poverty, the marginalization of certain geographic areas or ethnic groups, and
government efforts in the form of military violence that exacerbate, rather
than solve, existing problems and tensions.
In such circumstances, not only would piracy appear to be a pretext for
attempting to implement long-running plans to extend the mission of the MSDF
and the Japan Coast Guard, but it would almost certainly result in an
ineffective policy, especially given the state-destroying consequences of US
policy towards Somalia.
Whaling protest as piracy?
Moreover, the suspicion that reports of piracy may be providing a much longed
for pretext for MSDF mission creep are confirmed by another aspect of the
planned legislative changes. According to newspaper reports on Japanese
government intentions in proposing such "anti-piracy legislation", it is clear
that targets other than sophisticated armed criminal gangs in the Horn of
Africa are also on the mind of the Japanese government. The Yomiuri reported
that the government's definition of actions to be considered criminal under the
extension of the Replenishment Support Special Measures Law will at least in
part target environmental activist groups such as Sea Shepherd or Greenpeace
that have interfered with Japanese "scientific" whaling in the Antarctic:
The
envisaged legislation, however, likely will enable authorities to arrest the
captain of a vessel concerned, even if those who have carried out illegal
activities are not identified.
This came several days after
Chief Cabinet Secretary Machimura Nobutaka announced that Japanese prosecutors
will seek international arrest warrants through Interpol for three Sea Shepherd
members for their activities against Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean in
2007.
In fact, the proposed anti-piracy rationale for an extended MSDF mission is a
matter of policy on the run, aimed less at contributing to a solution to a
serious international criminal problem in which Japan certainly has an interest
than at diverting public opinion increasingly hostile to the Indian Ocean
mission, keeping open the door to future participation in the ground war in
Afghanistan, and along the way providing a domestic legal basis for
criminalizing opposition to scientific whaling in international waters. The
Yomiuri strongly supported the tanker escort proposal, but even it described
the plan as "nothing more than a makeshift measure that is a product of
domestic political circumstances".
Afghanistan, NATO and deepening militarization
There is, however, a wider and more serious context to the attempts to extend
and widen the SDF mission in the Indian Ocean and Afghanistan. The American-led
war in Afghanistan - or as it is more correctly termed by the most
authoritative strategic analyst of the war, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, the Afghanistan-Pakistan War - has reached
a near-terminal point. Whoever wins the US presidential election, US troops
will be shifted from Iraq to the Afghanistan theater, but with neither a
serious chance of reversing the collapse of support for the Karzai government
in Kabul nor limiting the expansion of the war into Pakistan.
Apart from applying pressure on allied countries to increase and deepen their
military commitments in Afghanistan, the United States has come to emphasize
the role of NATO in the Afghanistan conflict - though somewhat belatedly. Two
awkwardly coordinated coalition military-political deployments are in place in
Afghanistan. US forces have been engaged in "Operation Enduring Freedom" since
November 2001, and are coordinated primarily through US Central Command. At the
same time, the International Security Assistance Force, coordinated by NATO,
has had responsibility for security in much of the country since 2006. This
assumption of responsibility for security in most of Afghanistan by NATO has a
two-fold purpose: relieving the US burden, and providing a rationale for NATO
after the end of the Cold War.
Countries like Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand have been targeted by
NATO as "Contact Countries" with which it intends to build partnership
arrangements. New Zealand, Australia and Korea all have (or have had)
substantial troop deployments in Afghanistan under ISAF/NATO auspices. A key
goal of both US and Japanese government supporters of deeper Japanese
militarization of foreign policy is to link Japan in a close partnership with
NATO, and thereby to provide one arm of an incipient global military alliance.
"High-level policy dialogues" under former prime minister Shinzo Abe and
continuing under Fukuda have led to the appointment of a Japanese liaison
officer to the Office of the NATO Senior Civilian Representative in Kabul, an
agreement for civil aid cooperation with NATO/ISAF Provincial Reconstruction
Teams, and SDF/MOD participation in NATO exercises and dialogues.
Even without Ground Self Defense Force deployments to Afghanistan, for NATO and
the United States, these small institutional moves amount to substantial
progress in the project of globalizing NATO and rescuing the organization from
the threat of widely perceived anachronism after the Cold War. Yet with the
real possibility of coalition defeat in Afghanistan, US pressure on the Fukuda
administration and its successors to "shoulder its responsibilities" and clear
away political and legal obstacles to full participation in the widening war
will be unrelenting.
The twin sources of Japanese remilitarization in the Heisei era - US pressure
and the preferences of those streams of elite Japanese political and
bureaucratic opinion favoring nationalist and great power solutions to foreign
policy problems - remain ascendant, despite occasional blockages. One of those
blockages has led to the need to try to redefine the Indian Ocean MSDF mission
in terms of an anti-piracy initiative. As a contribution to solving the problem
of piracy in Somali waters, this is clearly a rushed, ill-conceived policy, the
real aims of which are to find new justifications for continuing the expansion
of the most advanced naval force in Northeast Asia, and along the way,
increasing the resources of the nationalist whaling agenda. Both are likely to
be highly counter-productive. Both are deeply anachronistic responses to the
real threats faced by Japan.
Richard Tanter is senior research associate at Nautilus Institute for
Security and Sustainability, director of the Nautilus Institute at RMIT and a
Japan Focus associate.
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