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Rise in Murders, Kidnappings at Sea Makes Piracy a Top Naval Priority Worldwide
Page 2
Sea
Power
October 2004
Another ship -- this one a tanker -- was attacked in October 1999 after leaving Kuala Tanjung in Sumatra, Indonesia, en route to Japan. Indian authorities later spotted the boat and apprehended the pirates after a two-day chase. In February 2003, members of the pirate gang were tried under the International Penal Code provided by the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea and convicted in Mumbai, India, after a complex legal battle regarding jurisdiction over internationally committed crimes. The pirates were sentenced to imprisonment ranging from six months to seven years.
Bruyneel stated on his website that the arrest was a “breakthrough” against acts of piracy. But he noted that “it may be too soon to start cheering. … The [Indian] defense counselor will most probably appeal the verdict in the High Court since he feels there were major discrepancies in the prosecutor’s case.”
The defense counselor has argued that the crewmembers found on the hijacked boat may have boarded the boat after it was hijacked and therefore were innocent of piracy.
Under the Radar
A weekly IMB report in late August covered recent piracy attempts near Indonesia, Bangladesh and Nigeria. These incidents ranged from petty thievery to an attack at Makassar, Indonesia, by five individuals armed with axes and long knives who boarded a container ship, held the commander at knifepoint, stole cash from the ship’s safe and sped away in a speedboat.
Charles N. Dragonette, author of the weekly “Worldwide Threat to Shipping Mariner Warning Information” and a senior analyst for the Civil Maritime Analysis Department at the Office of Naval Intelligence, said areas of high risk for piracy are ports and estuarial waters of the Strait of Malacca, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Somalia.
The IMB said those areas show an alarming rise in the number of attacks at sea, while violence against crewmembers continues to grow. The organization adds South and Central America and Caribbean waters to that list.
“Only Northern Europe and North America are reliably free of piracy,” Dragonette told Sea Power. Pirates flourish where they find general political instability, compromised law enforcement and a high volume of unprotected shipping. The Strait of Malacca ranks particularly high in piracy surveys released by the IMB and other anti-piracy organizations due to a combination of these factors. Malaysian and Indonesian forces are spread thin, and Indonesia is contending with separatist violence in Aceh, which diminishes its ability to focus on anti-piracy efforts.
However, the two nations recently formed a cooperative effort with Singapore to interdict and prosecute pirates -- operating principally in the Strait of Malacca -- who easily elude capture and prosecution by crossing national boundaries. That is a key step forward because 50,000 ships per year -- nearly a quarter of world shipping -- pass through the Strait, and almost all oil entering Singapore and Japan makes that perilous journey.
Fargo told the House Armed Services Committee this year that numerous “creative initiatives” are needed to address the transnational concerns posed by piracy, trafficking in humans and terrorism in the littoral regions of Southeast Asia. Among them is the Regional Maritime Security Initiative (RMSI), the U.S. Pacific Command’s effort to bolster cooperation by working with other navies in the region.
Adm. Walter F. Doran, Pacific Fleet commander, emphasizing the infancy of RMSI added, “Each nation would decide on its own how they participate” in RMSI. “This is not an alliance, it is not a treaty [and] it doesn’t set anything else up.” It is a protocol to foster the sharing of information among nations.
In addition, the U.S. Fifth Fleet plays a role in Combined Task Force (CTF) 150, a multinational task force comprising Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Pakistan, New Zealand, Spain, United Kingdom and the United States. Operating in the North Arabia Sea, members of the task force patrol coastal areas, search suspect vessels and build an intelligence picture of the area.
Cmdr. James Graybeal, public affairs officer for the commander of the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command and U.S. Fifth Fleet, said a recent example of CTF 150’s work was the interdiction of two dhows found in the North Arabia Sea. The search teams seized substantial amounts of pure heroin and methamphetamines.
“While the link between these drug smuggling networks and international terrorist organizations is still being investigated, the U.S. intelligence community believes these networks have facilitated [international terrorist organization] activities in the past,” he said.
In Dragonette’s view, the difference between piracy and terrorism is largely an informal distinction. “If the motive is financial gain then it is piracy, and if it is political gain then it is terrorism,” he said.
There are no statistics to cover annual losses to piracy. More than 400 acts of piracy are reported per year, but many are minor incidents involving the loss of mooring lines, spare parts or a life raft, so the actual costs are difficult to estimate.
Compiling accurate figures is made more difficult because, “Pirates tend to work under the radar of international attention -- and reaction,” Dragonette said.
Small Victory
The recent coordination of patrols by Indonesia, Malaysiaand Singapore “is the first successful effort to address these problems on a multinational level in perhaps the most highly active and dangerous area fostering piracy,” Dragonette said. “However, this sort of military approach ignores the necessary political coordination and information sharing the RMSI seeks to address.”
Despite the gaps in the system, some pirates eventually get caught. The undoing of an especially vicious pirate gang began in November 1998, according to ABC News, when fishermen in Shantou, China, found a corpse in their net bound to a metal weight, its mouth taped shut. Fishermen in the area would bring up several more corpses over the next several days. All were crewmembers of the cargo ship Cheung Son, which had been reported missing weeks before while on course from Shanghai to Malaysia.
The ship and its cargo have never been found, and the pirates might have gotten away with their crime, but for one slip up. While questioning a suspect, Chinese authorities discovered some photographs of the pirates partying among the dead aboard the Cheung Son, ABC News reported. Thirteen of the pirates were executed in late 2003.
