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Malaysia said Tuesday that it is ready to study ways
to boost security in the piracy-prone Malacca Strait, including
conducting sensitive joint maritime patrols with Indonesia and
Singapore.
Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak
said there were “regional sensitivities” to overcome—since
joint patrols could allow warships from one country to enter
another’s territorial waters—but flagged Malaysia could warm to
the plan.
“We can examine them. Hopefully
we can make it [the strait] more secure in the future,” Najib told
reporters on the sidelines of a five-day maritime security
conference organized by the US Pacific Command.
“Of course, we have to overcome
some of the sensitivities,” Najib added, without elaborating.
Maintaining and securing the
waterway has always been regarded as the responsibility of the
littoral states who border the sea lane—Singapore, Malaysia and
Indonesia.
The three Southeast Asian
countries have implemented several security measures, including
coordinated air and sea patrols, to secure the Malacca Strait,
regarded as one of the world’s most important waterways.
Najib said the challenge for the
maritime forces now was to look at some of the procedures and issues
related to questions of jurisdiction in the strait to keep it
secure.
“Perhaps there is a need to
think outside the box and identify ways and means to forge greater
cooperation, thus reducing the opportunities for undesirable
elements to continue to exploit the loopholes,” he said in a
speech to the conference.
More than 30 percent of world
trade passes through the strait, and Najib had said that the volume
of traffic had increased dramatically, with more than 62,600 ships
using the strait in 2005, up 42 percent from 44,000 ships in 1999.
Half of the world’s oil
shipments travel through the waterway, including 70 percent of
Japan’s and 80 percent of China’s oil imports from the Middle
East.
 --AFP
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