Six international shipping organizations including the International Chamber of Shipping [ICS] said from the start of next year the Indian Ocean would no longer be considered high risk as there had been no attacks on merchant's vessels off Somalia since 2018.
"This announcement is a testament to nearly 15 years of dedicated collaboration to reduce the threat of piracy in the Indian Ocean," it said in a statement.
For decades, the coast of Somalia was deemed dangerous given endless attacks waged on shipping companies by al-Shabaab
...... the personification of Somali state failure...gunnies and at times local pirates who had cornered a militia. al-Shabaab mostly depended on piracy to finance her operations.
In 2009, in one of the most high-profile cases, later turned into the Hollywood film Captain Phillips, a US-flagged ship, the Maersk Alabama, was hijacked by
Somali pirates. The crew was eventually rescued by the US Navy, The Financial Times reports.John Stawpert, senior manager of environment and trade at ICS said removing Somalia’s designation as a high-risk area would probably reduce the number of private armed guards — who are often former servicemen — deployed on ships traveling through the region.
"It’s very strange to be standing here saying piracy is suppressed when we went through so many years of them being able to operate indiscriminately," he said.
Dimitris Maniatis, chief commercial officer at Seagull Maritime, a private maritime security firm, said that private guards together with naval deployments had helped to reduce piracy.
Somalia has a 3,333 km coastline and the absence of a robust security team including the Navy has often made it difficult to tackle pirates. For almost a decade, the pirates controlled Somalia's coastline, at times making other countries deploy security forces to international waters near the coastline.
The new government under the administration of Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has also pledged to work closely with stakeholders to completely vanquish pirates. The scale of activities waged by the pirates has, however, substantially reduced.