Transcript of video

Operation SEXTANT

Counter Piracy Operations and Canada's Contribution to Standing NATO Maritime Group 1

HMCS Winnipeg
Gulf of Aden, April 2009

Commander Craig Baines
Commanding Officer, HMCS Winnipeg

HMCS Winnipeg is Canada’s contribution to the Standing NATO Maritime Group 1.  We’re one of four ships that are presently part of that group, and our role is to both support NATO, and provide a Maritime presence here in the Gulf of Aden, doing counter-piracy.

NATO, through the Standing NATO Maritime Group 1, developed a mission to directly go against piracy, to deter it, detect it and disrupt it before it actually occurs so that we can actually reduce the amount of piracy going on, and now it is the primary mission to bring more stability and security to this part of the world.

Rear-Admiral Jose Dumingos Pereira da Cunha
Commander, Standing NATO Maritime Group 1 (SNMG1)

This is one of the most important points of the world, where ninety percent of our trades are running, so if we don’t make an effort to do that, the prices are going to increase and this will be a bad situation for our countries.

One of the big problems in this area is the surface, the space that we need to cover.  NATO is not a solution for all the problems, and we are here only to participate and contibute with our effort, but this is a large area that needs a lot of assets, and a lot of contributions.  So, that is a long-term campaign, and we need all the contributions in order to cover those areas.

Commmander Craig Baines

Basically speaking, there’s two different areas that need to be looked at.  One is at sea, on the ocean, where the ships are which is perhaps the  short term solution, in that we need to deal with what’s going on today; and the  best way to deal with what’s going on today is to have a naval coalition presence to deter piracy.  The longer term solution, though, is that because it’s essentially organized crime, the conditions that allow them to operate from ashore need to be dealt with.  So, bringing the rule of law to Somalia itself, and to other areas so that the pirates don’t have any freedom to operate, either on land or ashore.

NATO and all the coalitions that are operating here basically face the same challenges, and that is that we’re dealing with an extremely large geographic area, we’re dealing with a large number of ships that pass through here every year, and the situation is very complex because there’s a lot of legitimate fishermen that are out here that use the same types of vessels as the pirates.  So, what is particularly difficult is to figure out who the bad guys are, who the legitimate fishermen are, and to be able to determine that before acts of piracy occur.  In addition to try and detect pirates we also try and deter them by conducting escort operations, patrolling different geographic areas and trying to, basically through presence to make it extremely difficult for the pirates achieve their goals.

One of the things we do, because a lot of the fishermen in this area operate close to the shipping lanes, is that we investigate all the vessels we come across because, again, they’re identical to the pirate vessels.  The ship Winnipeg has excellent boarding team capability, so when we do come across a suspected vessell, we’re able to send that team over to conduct a search, and if there is a problem we’re able to deal with it.

Our helicopter was conducting surveillance, looking for pirates when it came across an approximately thirty foot skiff with about fifty one people on board.  We wanted to investigate to make sure that everyone was safe and that everybody on board wanted to be there because we’re also concerned about human smuggling in the area.  We quickly established that everyone did want to be there and we were able to provide them with food and water; we made sure that their vessel was in fact safe to carry on, and then we were able to identify them to the Yemeni Coast Guard that they were on their way so that nothing further should happen to them.

(insert: The helicopter warned the skiff to stop...)

Winnipeg was escorting the Motor Vessel Abdul Raman, which is a World Food Program ship and we were about twenty miles off the coast of Somalia.  A vessel about sixty miles away reported that they were being attacked by a pirate skiff with seven pirates with assault rifles.  The nearby Royal Fleet Auxiliary Ship Wave Night went to stop the attack and chase the pirates away.  At that point, we launched our helicopter to join Wave Night in pursuing the pirates.  It got to the point where the helicopter needed to fire warning shots which the pirates ignored thinking that they could escape to the Somali coast; so, as night fell we were able to transfer our escort tot the US Ship USS Haliburton, turn off our navigation lights, and close the pirates at top speed.  We got to about five hundred yards of them before they knew we were there, at which point we tried to stop them.  During that process they tossed weapons over the side and a ladder that they were going to use in the attack; we needed to fire warning shots to get them to comply, which they eventually did.  We were then able to send our boarding team over to conduct a search.  The boarding team then confiscated the piracy related material and we then proceeded back to join the World Food Program escort.

That event was a fantastic tribute to a number of different nations working together toward solving this problem.  And to be able to bring that to a successful conclusion was extremely rewarding in that it went absolutely according to textbook, according to all the training we had done.  So, it was a tremendous feeling to be in that very complex situation and have it turn out the way we wanted it to.