modern day pirates -- 4/9/24

09 Apr 2024

modern day pirates -- 4/9/24

0 COMMENTS

Today's selection -- from Pirates by Peter Lehr. The modern-day pirates of Nigeria and Somalia:

“The Nigerian pirates' penchant for lethal violence (including firefights with security guards and Nigerian navy vessels) in contrast with the Somali pirates' typical avoidance of such encounters points to the variety of tactics used by modern-day pirates. As in the previous periods, whether lethal and gratuitous violence is inflicted or not depends to a large, degree on what the pirates are after: mainly the ship's cargo and the crew and passengers' valuables, as for example were the Victual Brothers or the Golden Age pirates, or mainly passengers and crew, either to ransomed or sold into slavery, as were the Mediterranean corsairs or Malay pirates.

“There are different ways to classify the variants of piracy used by modern pirates, but, in general, they can be broken down into the following categories (in ascending order of violence): simple robbery of vessel at anchor; armed/violent robbery of vessels at anchor; armed/ violent robbery of vessels underway; hijack of vessels underway in order to take hostages for ransom; and, finally, hijack of vessels to turn them into 'phantom ships' ( that is, vessels 'without legal registry plying the seas for illegal purposes'). The cases of thefts at anchor described above belong to the category of armed/violent robberies. The Seamaster incident that resulted in the death of Sir Peter Blake shows that armed robberies can turn lethal — although, if everything goes as planned, the crew may not even realise that pirates have sneaked on board, stolen whatever they can lay their hands on, and then disappeared. Armed/violent robberies of vessels underway, also known as hit-and-run attacks, currently form the most frequent assault type in modern piracy. In most cases, such attacks only last between thirty minutes and an hour. The attacks carried out in the Straits of Malacca are typical of this particular modus operandi. A small boat, hiding in plain sight by mimicking the behaviour of fishing vessels, sneaks up by night in the stern wash of a merchant vessel — a notorious blind spot for the ship's radar — to draw alongside. Some of the pirates climb up to the merchant vessel's deck on ropes fastened to grapnels — for the pirates, usually the most dangerous part of the raid because the risks of slipping and either getting crushed between the hull of the merchant vessel and their own boat, or getting sucked underwater and into the ship's propeller, are considerable. Modern pirates thus have to be quick and nimble, and the majority are in their late teens or early twenties— an old salt like John Ward who started his piracy career on the wrong side of fifty would have had to struggle to get aboard a modern freighter in this way. The pirates are usually equipped with machetes and assault rifles, an arsenal which is more than enough to subdue the startled crew before they can even think of offering resistance. The crew are then locked up, usually in a room in the deckhouse, while the captain is frog-marched to the ship's safe to open it and hand over the cash. On average, ships on international voyages have between $30,000 and $50,000 (£23,000-£38,000) in their safes to pay for port fees or expenses for the crew. The crew's possessions also get ransacked, and everything else that is both portable and of value is taken as well. With the looting complete, the pirates quickly return to their boat, and vanish into the night. Time is of the essence: if the bridge crew of the merchant vessel manage to make a distress call before being subdued, a coastguard vessel may already be on its way. For the crew under attack, the only good news is that such incidents usually do not involve killing.

“Armed/violent robberies of vessels underway may well account for the majority of modern piracy, but seafarers face more serious attacks in certain regions of the world. These are deliberate vessel hijackings — types of attack in which pirates board the targeted vessel either to take the crew hostage for ransom or to take over the vessel to steal its cargo and turn it into a 'phantom ship'. This latter variant is the most dangerous for the crew of an attacked merchant vessel: if pirates are only interested in the vessel and its cargo, then the crew are redundant. If they're, lucky, they just get thrown overboard, maybe even with a life raft or two. If they are not, they are killed in cold blood — as in the MV Cheung Son incident. The next stage is that easily recognisable parts of the captured vessel, for example the funnel, are hastily repainted, while the vessel's name is overpainted or altered — sometimes including spelling mistakes. Then, the vessel is re-registered with false papers. Its cargo is sold at some small port with a 'no questions asked' policy, before the pirates sail it to another port, take on legitimate cargo under the guise of the ship's new fraudulent identity, and sell it on to someone suitably incurious — to the detriment of the rightful purchaser of the cargo, of course, who having already paid for it waits in vain at the previously scheduled port. Eventually the ship might be scuttled in an attempt to fraudulently claim insurance, or simply to get rid of the evidence if the pirates suspect their illegal activities have attracted the attention of law enforcement agencies.

“Capturing ships and their crews for ransom is the variant of hijacking of ships — also known as 'shipjacking' — which brought the Somali pirates to international attention between 2008-12. Somali pirates usually refrained from using lethal violence against crew members as long as they did not resist. This did not mean that the captured crew had an easy ride: some masters who refused to cooperate were shot dead in cold blood, while many more were beaten. In several incidents, as masters frantically called their companies or relatives to transmit the pirates' demands, shots were fired over their heads in order to underline the calls' urgency and to speed up negotiations that might otherwise last several months. In general, however, the captives stood a good chance of eventually being freed to tell their stories: in their Somali captors' eyes they were essentially 'money on legs' and thus had to be kept alive and reasonably well. The hijacked vessels, which even included super tankers of more than 300 metres in length, were steered towards the Somali coast and anchored in plain sight, for example in the port of Eyl in Puntland and or Harardhere in southern Somalia. Most of the crew were then brought to safe locations in the interior, while a number of pirates or militiamen guarded the vessels against attempts to recapture them; some original crew members were usually kept aboard as human shields. This very brazen modus operandi, unique in modern times and reminiscent of the corsairs of yesteryear, was possible only because of the collusion of port authorities, in conjunction with the absence of central state authorities that could have intervened. In a sense, the enabling environment that greatly benefited the activities of the Somali pirates could be compared with that of the port cities of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli discussed in Part II.

Map showing the extent of Somali pirate attacks on shipping vessels between 2005 and 2010

“The best-known cases of Somali piracy in its 2008-12 heyday make for a long list, and include the French luxury yacht MY Le Ponant (hijacked on 4 April 2008, rescued on 12 April 2008, ransom paid: $2 million [£1 .5 million]), the MV Faina, a 152-metre roll-on/ roll-off cargo vessel (hijacked on 25 September 2008, released on 6 February 2009, ransom paid: $3.2 million [£2.45 million]), the South Korean super tanker MV Samho Dream (hijacked on 4 April 2010, released on 6 November 2010, ransom paid: $9.5 million [£7.3 million]), the Greek tanker MV Irene SL (hijacked on 9 February 2010, released on 21 December 2010, ransom paid: $13.5 million [£10.36 million]), and the Singaporean tanker MT Gemini (hijacked on 30 April 2011, released on 3 December 2011, ransom paid: $10 million [£7.67 million]). Although this list is far from complete, it shows how lucrative the Somali pirates' business model was — the corsairs of old would have doffed their caps to them. This also explains why the second-wave Somali pirates active from 2008 onwards were much more motivated by greed than by grievance than the earlier, first-wave Somali pirates of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and why the composition of Somali pirate groups also changed from mainly fishermen to a mixture of fishermen and militiamen. Indeed, when the news broke in Somalia about the hijack of the French luxury yacht Le Ponant and its thirty crew members in August 2008, which netted a ransom in the millions of dollars, not the hundreds of thousands as between 2004 and 2008, many enterprising young militiamen in their twenties and thirties flocked to the shores to join the equally young fishermen to get a piece of the action and of the ransom. Also of note is that Somali pirates never attempted to offload a hijacked vessel's cargo — in the case of the, MV Faina, that turned out to be thirty-three Ukrainian-made T-72 main battle tanks, a number of anti-aircraft guns and rocket-propelled grenades, officially destined for Kenya but probably meant to strengthen the forces of South Sudan. The pirates who attacked the MV Faina seemed to be as surprised as everybody else and did not touch this special cargo, notwithstanding the fact that some participants in Somalia's civil war would have been quite interested in laying their hands on such heavy weapons.

“Since the Somali pirates brazenly hijacked whole ships instead of 'just’ kidnapping individual crew members, they dominated international news stories for about a decade until, around 2012, they were finally chased out of the water by a multinational anti-piracy alliance — or at least that is how it looks for the time being. Nowadays, the most notorious pirates are Nigerian, on account of their use of violence, followed by the various Southeast Asian pirate gangs operating in the South China Sea and Straits of Malacca. But, as the case of British kayaker Emma Kelty demonstrates, there are other manifestations of piracy that are virtually invisible so long as their victims remain as local as the pirates themselves. And these piratical activities do not even happen on the high seas or in coastal waters, as is the case in all other hot spots. Rather, they occur in the estuaries of big river systems and even along the rivers themselves."