No farewell to arms

The spate of pirate attacks on small tankers and other vessels in South East Asia over the last three months has followed a predictable pattern, and so has the industry response. The boarding of vessels by armed men who take control of the ship, destroy communications equipment, siphon off the liquid cargo to another small tanker or barge and disembark after stealing the crew’s valuables is followed, usually, by warnings broadcast to Captains of the increased threat and statements from countries around the kill zone (usually Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia) promising to do more. The number of attacks has doubled in the last three years.

A third of global trade passes through these waters, but, as usual, we in shipping are reacting to threats rather than taking early and proven decisive action. Which is this- ships should be sailing with armed guards at the first sign of trouble.

In a rare success, coordination between Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore did manage to foil an attack last month, the pirates fleeing the hijacked ship when they saw a patrol boat approach. But sailors like me, who have spent years on short runs in the South China Sea, the Singapore and Malacca Straits and in the rivers of Indonesia- and have been boarded by pirates once or twice- will tell you how quick and easy it is for a couple of boats to appear out of nowhere in those restricted waters dotted with hundreds of islands, and to disappear equally quickly after an attack. 

Piracy in these waters has been around forever, although thankfully in a more benign form than, for example, Somali piracy; I used to be more concerned about a collision or grounding with pirates aboard than being killed by them. But that is because ships cannot be hijacked for long here; there is no failed State around. 

The simple fact is that criminals around the world know for sure, thanks to the ease with which South East Asian, Somali and Nigerian piracy has flourished, how unprotected merchant ships really are. Terrorists know how vulnerable these ships are, especially when sailing in restricted waters like the Suez, in narrow straits, or close to the coast. Most of all, they know that the industry is impotent; it cannot- or will not- take quick action. 

This must change. The default setting must be that ships must be able to arm themselves. That the ability to fire a couple of warning shots in the air has deterred pirate attacks around the world is beyond dispute. No ship with armed guards has been taken so far. Even off Somalia. Patrols by the navies of the world are an inferior deterrent. Arming ships should be our first response, not our last; it works.

The UN, along with the IMO and the rest of the maritime industry, has no real option except to prepare the groundwork- and quickly, please- to make the option of armed guards a real (and real time) possibility. To enact legislation  and then persuade countries around the world that a few guns aboard a merchant vessel calling their ports do not constitute either gunrunning, a national security threat or anything else that is sinister. To put mechanisms in place that will give ship owners the option of arming their ships whenever the threat of piracy- or terrorism- is foreseen. 

Else we- and our crews- will forever remain hostage to anybody who can put a fast skiff in the water with a bunch of men armed with guns. Or worse, explosives. 

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Thick skins and thicker red lines

I am convinced that one big reason that the maritime industry remains remarkably sanguine about attacks on ships and their crews is that managers and shipowners live and work far away and are never at risk themselves. Of course, another big reason is that ships are insured. Sometimes I feel that the only way of putting the security of our crews on a high agenda is to make it mandatory for a senior manager, owner or IMO official to sail on every ship passing through every piracy, terrorist or high-threat zone.

That the recent terrorist RPG attack on Cosco Asia in the Suez Canal was downplayed by the Egyptian army came as no surprise; that country would be economically crippled if the Suez were to shut down. The industry’s reaction was par for the course too- alarm at the economic repercussions and the possibility of thousands of miles of extra steaming; zero concern about safety of crews or the potential environmental catastrophe of such an attack.

Around another maritime chokepoint- the Bab El Mandab Straits at the entrance to the Red Sea- lies Yemen. The UK Government issued the highest possible security alert last month for shipping operating off the Yemeni coast last month (security was raised to the exceptional ISPS level 3, indicating a ‘probably or imminent’ attack). Despite the uselessness of the ISPS Code and the history in that region- the USS Cole and the tanker Lindberg suicide attacks both took place in and around Yemen- the rest of the industry did not seem to care about the enhanced threat. Just as it never cared that pirates and Al Qaeda lined terrorist groups in Somalia were hand in glove, and still are. 

Chokepoint attacks on ships are nothing new. Terrorist attacks planned in the Straits of Gibraltar have been foiled at the last minute. Decades old piracy attacks off Singapore and Indonesia have counted on the fact that the crews of mammoth ships passing through severely restricted waters in the Malacca and Singapore Straits are sitting ducks; ship Captains have close to zero room to manoeuvre. Anybody who has transitted the Suez Canal- or the Bosporus Strait or Panama Canal for that matter- knows how ridiculously easy it would be for a couple of guys to attack a ship there, whether sailing or at anchor. Few ashore appreciate the fact that parts of the Suez, for example, are only 300 metres wide, just a little wider than the lengths of the bigger ships that transit it. Hell, like those involved in the Cosco Asia attack, terrorists even have time to film the attack and post it on YouTube.

And let’s not forget the 8 year long Iran-Iraq war here. In and around another chokepoint- the Straits of Hormuz- the ‘tanker war’ of attrition during that conflict targeted merchant ships for years, raining French cruise and air to surface missiles on defenceless merchantmen and their crews. These were not terrorist attacks; these were calculated military attacks on innocent- usually foreign- cargo ships and crews made by two sovereign nations at war with each other.  Hundreds of seamen died, including a couple of my friends. Nothing happened. 

The globalisation of terrorism today and the spreading of anarchy tomorrow as humans fight for limited planetary resources are both inevitable. The sea-blindness amongst the general population, the callous thick-skinned disregard for crew security and the fact that ships are soft targets will not change either. I don’t know if attacks on ships and crews will increase in future, but I do know that nothing is set to stop these attacks from happening or to reduce the risk that they will occur, so the chances are high that attacks will increase. 

Shipping remains sanguine, uncaring or timid, and so our seamen are at the mercy of the whims of the nutters, whether in governments or outside them. We have not done anything to stop this; we probably never will. We are not even thinking about stopping it.

There will never be a red line drawn in the sand to stop atrocities committed against seamen. 

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UN-Facebook Face-Off

At the end of last month, the United Nations rediscovered, when it asked Facebook for details of accounts run by Somali pirates, that it is not the United States of America. That country’s National Security Agency could get major US tech companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple to provide them information and data sent and shared by the likes of you and me; in fact, if Edward Snowden is to be believed, these setups were joined at the hip with the NSA, giving the now six-year old PRISM programme direct access to massive information-data mining on a gigantic scale. 

On the other hand, the UN’s Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea was ignored by Facebook last month when it requested a discussion on “information on Facebook accounts belonging to individuals involved in hijackings and hostage-taking." Facebook said that the UN had no jurisdiction.

I do not know what the UN hoped to accomplish with this attempt at information gathering from a social networking site. Did some lazy bureaucrat think he was going to sit behind a laptop and track down pirates and their backers in real life halfway across the world? Did the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab’s Twitter account shutdown in January (when they used it to threaten to kill Kenyan hostages) give somebody at the UN a gleam in the eye? Does anybody seriously expect pirates to make it easy to be tracked through social networking sites? 

All in all, it seems like a pretty useless thing to spend the international community’s money on, but then the UN is known for spending large amounts of money on useless things.

Closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, too. Somali piracy has declined, thanks to armed guards on ships (and little thanks to the UN or the IMO.) On the other hand, piracy on the other coast of Africa is doing quite well, thank you. Maybe the UN should focus its attention where the problem exists. Judging by the numbers of emails telling me of lotteries I have won, the Nigerians seem to use the internet copiously; I am sure they must be on Facebook too. 

I expect legitimate law enforcement agencies, including from those Asian countries whose seamen are badly affected by piracy, will probably be obstructed by Facebook and the like too, should they ask for information. It is a sign of the times that criminals can use sites like YouTube and others quite effectively to get their message across- pirates putting up short films of pathetic looking seamen hostages, threatening violence and demanding money, for example, and the ‘good guys’ cannot use that information- or what is behind that information- to track the criminals. Facebook, Microsoft, Google and the like can give direct access to my account to the US government, but giving indirect information to the UN on pirates is a no-no. 

Actually, the problem is not Facebook but the international community that the UN claims to represent. Assume, for a moment, that something tangible was to be gained by the UN getting access to pirate profiles from Facebook-that, by giving the UN the information it wanted, Facebook could have helped in striking a blow against piracy. It chose not to. It chose to hide behind some legalese, and the international community, represented by the UN, seems to have accepted that. It appears that criminals have a right to privacy but hostage crews do not.

No surprise then, that people like me wonder. When wars, occupation and loot of countries like Iraq can be sanctioned based on confessed lies at the UN, as in Colin Powell’s case, why it is that the truth cannot be used to protect seamen and the ninety per cent of world trade figure that I am so sick of hearing about?

If the US wanted, it could slap a subpoena on Facebook’s ass before breakfast tomorrow morning, and Facebook would have to cough up whatever the UN wanted it to.

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Guns N’ Poses

(I wrote this piece more than two weeks ago and gave shipping time to prove me wrong before sending it in for publication. I needn’t have bothered.)

The saga of the Albedo- sunk off Somalia on July 6 after more than two and a half years in pirate hands, condition of survivors not really known- has more or less gone unnoticed except in the usual sections of the maritime press, and even that seems to be fatigued with seamen hostage stories. 

It appears, also, that the rest of the shipping community has become weary of striking its usual pose of concern and simulated outrage: there has been no clamour to pressurise governments to negotiate for the Albedo survivors release- or, for that matter, those of the Asphalt Venture who remain hostage since 2010- and after ransom was paid in mid-2011. Even the heart breaking letter written by the families of the Albedo crew begging Somali’s worldwide to pressurise their clan leaders to act has failed to generate any real interest. 

Maybe the poseurs in the industry are finally tired of the act. Or maybe, like Oscar Wilde, they are finding being natural a very difficult pose to keep up. 

Meanwhile, the EUNAVFOR folk seem to be running around like a bunch of sleazy paparazzi chasing Megan Fox on a beach, sighting an Albedo lifeboat here or there, but clueless about what actually happened on the Albedo, exactly how many crew survived and how many are still alive. Or maybe they know and are not talking. If so, why?

The mainstream media has concentrated more on the ‘last ship in Somali hands sinks’ story, ignoring the fifty or so seamen still held hostage by pirates in that failed State. A prominent section of the press in India reported, instead, that the MV Cotton was hijacked by Somali pirates when she was actually taken off West Africa! Such is the calibre of news reporting these days, or maybe it is just a reflection of the lazy interest shown by most of the general population when it comes to anything maritime.

An interesting thing is happening as West African piracy escalates in violence and spreads in area, with mother ships now being used and seamen being taken hostage in large numbers. What is noticeable is that there seems to be a subtle conspiracy afoot that downplays this menace. Media reports are nowhere as widespread or as strident as they are with Somali piracy and shipping organisations are not out there with their patronising advice for crews or their self-congratulatory press releases. If I were paranoid, I would think that shipping and its insurers have decided that higher reporting translates to higher ransoms, and acted as they usually do. To do this they are posing again- a different pose this time, but a pose nevertheless. They are pretending, even as everything is hitting the fan, that the problem is not so big. The other pose of concern for crew has been abandoned. 

Unfortunately, this development has also meant that there nothing being done to address the particular problems of West African piracy, including issues with corrupt officials in governments linked to either the hijackers or to the anti-piracy gravy train. The fact that Somalia is a failed State has some advantages for shipping and navies, who could do as they wished off the Somali coast. Countries around the West African rim will not appreciate their waters being treated in a similar cavalier fashion by EUNAVFOR or some such ‘international’ force. Hell, even carrying arms aboard merchant ships there can be a big issue. 

What all this means, sadly, is that Masters and crews are more on their own than ever before. One would have wanted the Somali piracy problem to have ended with a more generic solution, which could be rapidly and effectively applied everywhere else after adjustments for local conditions. But that was not meant to be, because shipping and its administrators- whether in governments, national and international administrations or in commerce- failed. They failed for many reasons, but the biggest reason they failed is that they did not care enough about ships’ crews. 

Instead of finding long term solutions to the men with guns that threaten seamen’s lives, they choose, instead, to strike a pose. 

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