by Ross Kemp
I watched as a group of Marines embarked and then sped off in their RIB, and then it was my turn. To get onto the RIB from the deck of Northumberland involves climbing down a rope ladder. It looks easy, but it’s not: as the hull of the ship curves inwards towards the bottom, you’re not only going down, you’re also at a precarious angle. Nothing too dramatic, but enough to make it tricky if, like me, you’re unused to the process – and enough to make you look like a prize prick if you lose your footing and end up in the drink. More to the point, there are plenty of sharp, jagged bits of kit in the RIB below that you really don’t want to fall on top of. (During our stay on Northumberland, one of our party came a cropper doing this and got such severe rope burn that it cut right through the skin of his hand.) As I struggled down the ladder from the moving deck of the Northumberland onto the wobbling RIB, I felt I was having a brief taster of how difficult it must be for pirates to board the ships they target.
Once the RIB was loaded, I grabbed hold of something to keep my balance in the gently billowing water, and then we were off.
We headed towards the suspect vessels at speed and the plan was this. We would approach the first dhow and one of the boats would hold off at a slight distance and offer fire support from the GPMG. The other guys would approach the sailors and ask if they could board their vessel. Nothing like the direct approach. The white foam on either side of the speeding RIB splashed and sprayed as the sun beat down from the clear blue sky. Under other circumstances, it could almost have been idyllic. Almost, but not quite – most people don’t take GPMGs and MP5s on holiday with them.
The RIBs started to slow down, the spray decreased and I caught my first sight of the potential pirates. There were nine or ten of them, sitting quietly on a skiff and staring at us with unknowable, almost blank expressions on their faces. Their skin was dark and they wore an odd assortment of clothes: some had traditional headdresses and ethnic garb; others wore old sweatshirts with Western logos. A lot of them were very young, but their skiff was rickety and old. Parts of it were brightly painted, but in general it had a functional, utilitarian feel. The occupants looked poor. They looked wary. What they didn’t look like was pirates. Even I could tell that without any knowledge of what pirates looked like.
Andy tried to speak to them, using basic Arabic, but they didn’t respond. One of the guys opened up a little box and held up a small plastic bag filled with a handful of tiny fish. ‘We’re fisherman,’ he appeared to be trying to say. Well, perhaps, but it was a minuscule catch for a lot of guys. It seemed obvious to me, and to everyone else, that the fish we were being shown were food, even though the Somalis in general are not big fish-eaters. (They prefer a slice of camel meat, washed down with camel milk. I think I’ll stick to cod and chips myself.) But whatever these people’s foodie preferences were, we started to suspect that the boat we had encountered was run not by fishermen, nor even pirates, but by purveyors of another kind of illegality that plagues the Gulf of Aden, another community of seafarers. You’d be hard pressed to find a more desperate, treacherous bunch anywhere in the world.
I’d already learned that Somalia was a war-torn, dangerous place. What I didn’t know was the lengths to which the Somali poor would go in order to get the hell out of there. Where there’s a will, there’s a way; and where there’s a need, there’s money to be made. The plight of these citizens has given rise to a booming trade in people smuggling, and the human tragedy involved in this sorry business is almost immeasurable.
Hundreds of people a week make the dangerous voyage across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen. They are not always Somalis, but also come from Ethiopia, Sudan or even further afield. Driven from their homes by drought, economic hardship, the threat of violence or – most probably – all three, these men, women and children are willing to risk everything in search of a better life in Yemen and the Middle East. Yemen, though, is hardly a refugee’s paradise. On the contrary. It’s one of the five remaining countries in the world where the execution of juvenile offenders is still permitted; arbitrary arrests – especially in the south – are commonplace and there is widespread judicial corruption. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion are all highly restricted. In short, Yemen is a brutal, difficult place to live. But it’s still better than Somalia.
A substantial proportion of the refugees, however, don’t even make it as far as the Yemeni coast. The people smugglers charge a fee of around £20 per person – doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s an almost impossible sum for a Somali refugee – and pack them tightly into their tiny boats. The smugglers, however, are not exactly full of the milk of human kindness. They frequently overload their boats – the more money they can earn from a crossing, the better – before setting sail. If, as often happens, they get out into the open water and the boat is too heavy on account of their greed, these enterprising businessmen simply dump part of their load. There have been reports of pregnant women and children being unceremoniously chucked into the water, and of course they have no hope of surviving.
Yemen has more than 80,000 Somali refugees. It mounts constant coastguard patrols throughout its waters in an attempt to locate the smugglers. This only has a limited effect. If the smugglers see the coastguard – or a vessel that they think might be a coastguard – they do what any professional criminal would do: get rid of the evidence. If that means throwing a whole boatload of refugees overboard, so be it.
You’d think that the dangers involved, along with the smugglers’ sense of customer service, would dissuade refugees from paying their £20 and risking everything to get to Yemen. Not a bit of it. They’re queuing up to get out of Somalia. They risk it in their thousands. I’m told that if you walk along the northern coast of Somalia, it won’t be long until you come across a shoe. Or a belt. Or a jacket. The non-human remains of humans long gone, drowned somewhere between the Somali and Yemeni coasts, their bodies rotted away or eaten by fish.
Were these Yemeni people smugglers that we had encountered? It was impossible to say for sure but it certainly seemed likely. From the RIB, Andy continued trying to talk to them. Without an interpreter it was difficult – none of them spoke English and his Arabic was basic – but gradually he managed to tease out some information. He pointed at a small hatch that led into the hull of the boat and indicated that he wanted a member of the skiff’s crew to open it up. One of them did so, removing a piece of rush matting before he could raise the hatch.
There were people sleeping underneath. ‘How many?’ Andy asked.
A shuffling kind of pause. One of the passengers held up five fingers, but without boarding the skiff you couldn’t say if he was telling the truth or not.
Andy radioed through to Northumberland and reported what we had found. ‘Sixteen people on board, one child that we can see. They’ve got a fair amount of fuel on board and they say they’re from Yemen.’
Back on the bridge of the Northumberland, Lieutenant Commander Martin Simpson listened carefully, all the while speaking into a Dictaphone so that he had a legal record of the encounter. Everything had to be done very strictly by the book. ‘Do not board,’ he instructed, ‘until I give a direct order.’
‘Roger,’ Andy replied, and slowly the RIBs started to withdraw from the vicinity of the Yemeni boats.
As the RIBs filled with Marines and guns bobbed around the boats, Andy gave me the low-down. ‘That’s a lot of people,’ he told me, ‘for that size dhow with one skiff.’
So could they be running people?
He nodded curtly. ‘Yeah,’ he stated. ‘That’s exactly what they could be doing. This is prime space, in between Somalia and Yemen. What I’d like to do is get on board and see if they’ve got any ID. We’ve had reports in the past they’ve seen the coastguard coming out, they obviously don’t want to be caught with people so they’re fairly ruthless and just chuck them overboard.’
The Marines might have had the upper hand in terms of the force they could exert, but even with their firepo
wer the intricacies of international diplomacy on the high seas meant they couldn’t just board this tiny ‘fishing’ vessel at will. Royal Marines boarding a ship from another nation could cause a stink and they had to follow certain protocols. Andy and the Fleet Protection Group first needed permission from the commander of Northumberland; he, in turn, needed to get the go-ahead from HQ back in the UK.
While we waited for permission to board, we approached another skiff which had so much old clothing draped over its beams that it looked like a floating laundry. ‘Fishermen are normally pretty proud of their catch,’ Andy explained as we drifted towards them. ‘Normally when we come alongside them, they’ll get the fish out and show us straightaway.’ But we were getting no impromptu fish counters to look at; just a wary greeting from the many desperate-looking individuals on this second boat.
‘Salam,’ they called.
‘Salam,’ we replied, in our pidgin Arabic.
They waved at us as we drew alongside them. Andy asked what they were doing. In response, one of them handed over a beaten-up old block of polystyrene with a length of knotted twine wrapped around it and, at the end, the rustiest hook I’d ever seen in my life. These people could have been fishermen, but you’d have more luck tickling trout than trying your luck with that kind of tackle. They weren’t fooling anyone, not that it seemed to bother them. Perhaps they were emboldened by the fact that we hadn’t boarded the previous skiff. I don’t know. What I do know is that at one end of the skiff was a group of ten or eleven young men – children, really – looking exhausted in the brutal heat of the day. I later found out that the younger Somali refugees are, the more chance they have of finding work in Yemen. They are stronger and have more stamina. They can be worked into the ground for a slave’s wage and are less likely to get ill or die. It seemed probable that this was the fate that awaited these youngsters when and if they finally made it across Pirate Alley.
Permission to board the skiffs never arrived, so we were unable to investigate any further. There was no sign that they were transporting drugs or arms and we couldn’t prove that they were people smugglers. Even if we could, what would we do with them? Where would we take them? Dump them back on the coastline? That wouldn’t be a great idea: if refugees find themselves in an area controlled by a rival clan they’ll probably be killed; if not, they’ll immediately be out on the water again, trying to get to Yemen. I had the impression that the crews of these boats knew that they would be dealt with softly by the British navy. Had we been the Yemeni or Omani coastguard, on the other hand, I suspect the smugglers’ attitude would have been somewhat different – and possibly terminal for the refugees. I’d heard that in parts of Yemen convicted pirates could still be crucified. I don’t know what the punishment is for people smuggling, but I somehow doubt it’s just a fine and an ASBO, and all the evidence suggests that Yemeni people smugglers will go to any lengths to avoid being caught by the wrong authorities.
That didn’t include us, however. The Marines were RTB’d – returned to boat – and as we sped back to HMS Northumberland I had the distinct feeling that we had just witnessed one of the more unsavoury consequences of the chaos and hardship occurring in Somalia. Whatever the truth, everyone was pretty sure they weren’t fishermen.
And I was also starting to realize something else, something that was to become increasingly clear to me as my global search for pirates progressed. The Somali refugees I had just encountered, if indeed that is what they were, were only on the water because of what was happening in Somalia itself. If I was going to understand why piracy is so widespread, maybe I would have to look at what was happening not only out at sea, but also on land.
I didn’t have much time to think about this, however, because just then a call came through. Some more suspicious boats had been reported to HMS Northumberland, but this time they were out of range of the RIBs. The Merlin helicopter was being prepped for flight, and if we wanted to find out what was going down, we needed to be on it.
5. Distress Call
The rotary blades of the Merlin were already spinning as I gingerly climbed out of the RIB, up the rope ladder and back onto the deck of Northumberland. It’s only when you get up close to a helicopter on a flight deck that you realize how skilled these pilots must be. There’s not a lot of room, even on a frigate of this size. Not much margin for error when you’re coming in to land. I waited, a bit apprehensively, only metres away from this impressive piece of machinery while it was readied for take-off and then, when everything was prepped, Will the cameraman and I were given the thumbs up. We loaded ourselves in, and within seconds we were rising into the air.
The Gulf of Aden opened out before us, and HMS Northumberland disappeared from view. With the advantage of height I started to get some sense of the geographical problem facing the pirate hunters. Water as far as the eye could see and beyond the horizon, more water. Ships were dotted around below us, but even though there were many of them, they were insignificant compared to the vastness of ocean.
We sped through the skies. From up here, you can never rely on the naked eye to see what is happening on the water, but as the Merlin is primarily designed for anti-surface ship and anti-submarine warfare, tracking, surveillance and search-and-rescue missions, it’s essential that the crew have good location and imaging capabilities. For this reason, the Merlin is equipped with both an over-the-horizon targeting radar and an extremely sensitive high-quality camera.
The radar is a bowl on the underside of the Merlin and is operated by a member of the crew. As soon as he picks up a vessel he assigns a track to it, and the camera operator can then target the vessel with his imaging machinery. This brings up clear images on the six high-definition colour displays in the cockpit of what is happening miles away. It needs to be powerful, of course, in order to pick up the periscope of a submarine’s conning tower – little more than a dot in the ocean – and as we flew in the vicinity of a huge merchant ship, the camera operator, Tiny, showed me how he could pick out individual people on its deck using this high-tech equipment. He explained to me that this capability is particularly useful when you’re going up against little fishing dhows of the type normally used by pirates, because you can get a good idea of who they are and what they’re carrying, and on the basis of that information can decide whether to call for assistance from the ship, with a view to doing a boarding if necessary. Everything picked up by the camera was being recorded for the purpose of evidence.
We hadn’t been in the air long when a dot came up on the radar screen. ‘Left, 11 o’clock, four miles. We’ve got something in the water.’
‘Roger. I’ve got a very faint radar contact but not a lot. If you can close it and try and get visuals on it…’
The camera zoomed in. This ship might have been some distance away, but the image on the screen was impressively clear. It was a dhow, churning through the water with four skiffs trailing behind it. And as I had already learned, that was a classic pirate set-up. From our position up in the skies the camera continued to focus on the dhow. The image was crystal. We saw a canopy flapping in the wind and a sturdy metal fishing rod leaning out over the water. No ladders. No grappling hooks. No weapons. The guys on the dhow, even to my untutored eye, were pretty obviously fishermen, just out there trying to make an honest living. They were allowed to go on their way without any further interference from us. It wasn’t the first time that I’d been left to reflect that hunting pirates in the Gulf of Aden wasn’t the easiest way to spend your time…
We continued our patrol, high above the corridor where 60 merchant vessels travel through the Gulf every day. I could see them clearly from this vantage point – huge industrial chunks of metal ploughing on like enormous workhorses. The crew pointed one out to me. ‘They’re obviously a bit twitched about pirates in the area,’ Tiny told me. ‘He’s got his hoses out at the moment. That’s to deter them.’
From the top of the freeboard, huge streams of water were pumping out of the ship into
the surrounding sea. Tiny explained to me that generators are used to suck vast amounts of seawater in before spitting it out of the side as a deterrent. I could well understand that trying to come alongside a boat with those things thundering at you could put you off your shopping trip. At the same time, I’d come to the conclusion that the pirates in these waters were nothing if not ballsy. I wouldn’t put it past them to give it a go even under these circumstances.
But not today. We continued our patrol for a while longer, then returned to Northumberland, our pilot putting us down perfectly on the flight deck. I couldn’t help marvelling at his skill at touchdown even more than when we took off – the Merlin only just fits on the deck. At the same time I was a bit disappointed that our flight had come to nothing. It had been an eventful day, but by the end of it I was left frustrated that so far our search for pirates had been unsuccessful.
We woke early the following day, though to look at the activity on the ship you’d never have known the sun had only just risen: the corridors were bustling, just as I knew they would have been all night – the mini-city that is HMS Northumberland doesn’t go to bed just because it’s dark. So too were the decks. Groups of Royal Navy sailors kept their fitness up to scratch by jogging round the ship; the guys from the Fleet Protection Group dismantled and cleaned their weapons. They may not have had call to use them, but that didn’t mean their SA80s and MP5s didn’t have to be in perfect working order. Mechanics were at work before the heat of the day became too intense. A warship is constantly being fixed, tampered with, twiddled and twoddled (although I’m not sure if those are the precise technical terms). It’s a sensitive piece of kit that requires constant expert maintenance.
