The United States and Japan will play a bigger role in protecting the Malacca Strait amid gathering momentum for greater international co-operation in securing the region's waters, Malaysian Defence Minister Najib Razak said Sunday. Najib told a regional security conference in Singapore that the primary responsibility for protecting ships in the pirate-infested Malacca Strait still rested with Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, the three nations with sovereignty over the waterway.
However, after years of resistance to other nations becoming heavily involved in Malacca Strait security, Najib said Malaysia was becoming increasingly willing to accept greater international help.
"Given the huge resources in terms of assets, capabilities and manpower required to secure the strait, we should call upon the wider international community... to step forward and make concrete contributions to support ongoing efforts by the littoral states," Najib said.
Although non-littoral states will still not be allowed to send their own forces to patrol the strait, Najib said nations with a big commercial stake in the waterway such as the United States and Japan will be asked to help in "capacity building".
Najib said Malaysia would welcome the support of mobile training teams from the US Pacific Command and nations such as Japan could help in information sharing and building a high-tech radar-to-satellite tracking system.
"Within that concept of capacity building, I think the scope is very large... I think a whole gamut of possibilities are there," he said.
The Malacca Strait is one of the world's most important stretches of water, with 50,000 ships carrying about one third of the globe's trade passing through it each year.
However the strait, 960 kilometres (600 miles) long and 1.2 kilometres wide at its narrowest point, is notoriously vulnerable to pirate attacks and many governments in the region also believe extremely tempting for terrorists.
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